Dream -
Sitting in the backseat of my dad's car, with maybe my estranged sister there? I can't see who's all with us but it's 100% my dad driving. It's nighttime and he's in a bad mood, maybe with a headache. We're driving up the highway towards Lake Arrowhead, just barely past Wildwood park.
It's not raining but the road does look wet. Because of his bad mood, he's driving too fast. There's a car driving in front of us and he's so impatient he nearly drives on the shoulder to get around them. I keep thinking of telling him to slow down, that he's going too fast, but I know he's in a bad mood so I bite my tongue. Two people in the car with us start to get loud, arguing, and my dad starts getting angrier but hasn't really said much yet. He starts raising his own voice in response to the two arguing.
"He's still driving so recklessly" I think to myself as he starts driving a little beyond the shoulder. He then mutters to the person in the front seat "I'm so nervous to see what's on the other side of this road" and the weather snaps into light snowy weather. We're also further into our drive up the mountain, maybe a few miles high by now.
There's a light snow falling and there's snow crusted onto the trees' trunks on the side of the highway. The snow that's falling is just barely sticking to the ground. This all happens in a split second.
Immediately after he says he's nervous and the weather changes, the car loses traction completely and starts free-floating towards the cliff on the side of the highway. There's no railing. We can all feel the car floating us to our death, a drop of at least 1000 ft., down into the black night, with nothing we could do but experience the terror of knowing you were about to die.
We're all screaming, terrified, I'm clinging to the person's arm next to me, pushing my toes against the seat in front of me for dear life as if that will balance out the car enough to save us. It felt like I was trying to slam on brakes but I was in the backseat so I couldn't have, it was beyond my control. The car slams head first into a massive pine tree but the car is still sliding down. The tree is about to give out any second.
I start seeing people trying to climb out of the car and back onto the road and so I start trying to scoot out backwards. The dream ends as I'm trying to escape the car, as one of the last people. I see a smaller person in the front seat, staring down into the abyss, whimpering. My younger brother?
I wake up and I'm whimpering like the person in my dream, pushing my toes against my cat's body like the car. I couldn't vocalize anything other than weak noises. It felt like I was trying to cry (tears) or cry (out) for help.
I was reminded of when I was 3-4, when I would sleep in bed sandwiched between my parents. Almost every night, I would wake up, sit up, and just scream my lungs out. Neither my dad or mom would wake up from their sleep. Because no sound would come out, just a very quiet, tiny wheeze. It was like my body would shut my vocal cords off. I was much too shy (read: traumatized) to shake either of them awake so I would just sit there between the two of them and scream, and scream, and scream. Until I was too exhausted to stay awake and I would fall back asleep. Why was that happening to me? Why couldn't I speak?
