Puppet on a String
The life they chose for me
Dreams don’t invent. They reveal what the mind has buried too deeply to face.
A car without a driver. A voice that never forms words. A truth that arrives too late.
For years, I believed a story that was never mine. That I was unwanted. But absence can be constructed. Silence can be chosen. And love—real love—does not disappear without trying to return.
In my dream, I could not reach the steering wheel. In life, I eventually did.
But some things don’t change with the truth. Time lost is still time lost. And love, once broken by silence, never returns in the same shape.
I am someone who dreams a lot. Some dreams stay with me for a while, but most of them fade quickly. Sometimes they are already slipping away the moment I wake up, leaving behind only fragments that never fully make sense.
This one was different.
It stayed clear. Not only the feeling, but every part of it. Even now, I can still recall it in detail, from beginning to end, as if it happened only yesterday. It felt like something, or someone, or maybe even the universe itself, was trying to show me something. Something I had not fully seen yet, or had not been able to understand before.
At the time, I could connect the dream to what was happening in my life. It matched things that had already taken place, things I thought I understood. But now, while writing it down, I begin to see something deeper. Even the smallest details seem to carry meaning. Things that once felt unimportant now feel placed there on purpose.
I believe my grandparents—especially my grandmother—and my mother were part of that dream for a reason. Through what I saw and what I experienced, I was finally being shown something I had never been able to see clearly, something that had been kept from me for a long time.
My dream began in a place that felt abandoned and broken. It looked like an old industrial ground where buildings had been left to decay. Walls were half torn down, windows were shattered, and empty spaces stretched between what was left standing. Everything looked worn and forgotten, as if it had been left behind long ago. The air felt heavy, and the sky above was dark and threatening, like something was about to happen.
I walked beside my mother without asking where we were going. In dreams you do not question what does not make sense. You simply follow.
A car was waiting for us, standing still as if it had been there for a long time. Two older people were sitting in the front. I did not need to see their faces to know who they were. My mother and I got into the backseat. I sat behind the driver, and she sat beside me. We did not speak to each other or to them. It did not feel like a choice. It felt expected. There was no hesitation, no question of whether we should be there.
Looking back on the dream now, I understand that feeling differently. I see something in it that I could not see before. It was something so normal to me at the time that I never questioned it. I now realize how much influence there had always been, how we moved along with what was expected of us without ever stopping to ask why. We followed because that was what we knew. We did not know anything else.
The car began to move, and the road stretched forward into darkness that seemed to swallow everything ahead of it. The silence inside the car felt heavy, like something had been held in place for years without ever being spoken about.
Then, without warning, the man driving the car slumped forward. It happened so suddenly that for a moment it felt unreal, like something that had already been decided long before it actually happened. One moment he was there, holding the wheel and controlling the direction, and the next moment he was gone.
At the time, this felt like panic. Now it carries a different meaning. I know that the man behind the wheel is my grandfather. He died a few months after I confronted him with the truth I had discovered. I learned what he had done, how he had kept my father out of my life and allowed that lie to continue. He never showed regret, and he never apologized. Seeing him fall behind the wheel like that now feels like something else entirely. The one who had been in control simply disappeared in an instant, leaving everything behind without explanation, without correction, and without ever answering for what he had set in motion long ago.
I shouted for the woman beside him to brake, expecting urgency, expecting fear, expecting some kind of reaction that matched what was happening.
She did not move.
Her hands rested in her lap, and she kept staring forward into the darkness, as if nothing had changed.
At the time, I thought she was frozen. I do not see it that way anymore. There was something in that stillness that had been there for a long time. It felt like a decision that had already been made long before that moment, long before the car, long before I understood what silence could do. She had gone along with it, and she had accepted it. There was no change in her, because in her mind there was never going to be one.
I leaned forward, trying to reach the steering wheel, stretching as far as I could, but I could not get close enough. I could see everything clearly. I knew what needed to happen. And still, I could not take control. Neither could my mother.
We were both there, trapped inside the same moving moment, and neither of us had ever been given the chance to steer. That meaning has become clearer over time. It was never about that moment alone. It reaches much further back, long before I was born, back to my mother and the life that had already been shaped around her. It was about who was allowed to have control, and who was expected to follow without question.
The car kept moving, slow and steady, as if it no longer needed anyone to guide it. It continued forward as if the path had already been decided long before we ever entered it. There was no impact, no violence, only a quiet ending to something that had been moving for a very long time.
That is the part that unsettles me the most now. It did not end with answers. It did not stop in a way that forced anyone to face what had happened. There was no explanation, no moment where responsibility had to be taken. It feels like something simply came to an end on its own, while I was still inside it, left with everything that had been carried for years. The ones who set it in motion were no longer there to answer for it. There were no consequences for them. All they left behind was silence.
I was the one who moved. I opened the door and stepped out into the darkness, pulling the man from the driver’s seat and laying him on the ground. My hands acted before my thoughts could catch up, as if something in me had already decided this long ago.
He began to choke, and I turned him on his side, trying to help him breathe.
This part of the dream stayed with me. I kept asking myself why I helped him, knowing who he was and what he had done. It did not feel like a choice. It felt like something I had learned without ever being taught, something that had settled into me over time without being named. The need to step in, the need to take over when no one else did, the need to carry what was falling apart even when it was already too far gone. It felt familiar, as if I had been in that place many times before, even outside of the dream. And somewhere underneath it, there was a quiet truth I had not yet fully seen—until now. I was trying to fix something that had never been mine to fix.
When I rolled him onto his back again, something shifted in a heavy way, as if the truth was rising to the surface. The man who had been lying there—my grandfather—was gone. In his place was my grandmother.
I was not shocked when I saw her. The moment felt strangely normal, as if I recognized something that had always been there. It felt like I was finally seeing something clearly that had been hidden in plain sight for a long time. The truth had always been close to me, carried by the person I trusted the most.
She looked at me with an intense, almost desperate gaze. Then her eyes filled with blood, running down her face like tears she could not stop.
Even in the dream, this did not frighten me. I felt something closer to sadness when I looked at her. It felt like everything she had carried inside for years was finally coming to the surface. All the silence, all the things she had never said, all the truth she had kept hidden. It felt like something that had been held in for too long and could no longer stay inside.
She tried to speak. Her mouth moved as if the words were there, but only broken, distorted sounds came out. Panic took over completely—she kept trying, again and again, forcing her lips into shapes that refused to become language. I leaned in closer, straining to understand, desperate to catch anything in those sounds that could explain everything.
But those words will never come. They were never spoken while she was still alive, and in the end she took them with her. That is why I cannot understand them now. They were never given a voice, and now they no longer can be.
While she lay there on the ground, with blood in her eyes and trying to speak, I reached for her hand.
Even now, I can still feel that moment. It felt real in a way that is hard to describe. I held her hand because I loved her. That had always been true, and that part of me did not change, even when everything else did. In that brief moment, everything existed together. There was love, because she had been such a big part of my life. There was grief, because something had been taken that could never be returned. And there was confusion, because nothing made sense anymore.
And beneath all of it, there was something else, something darker. I could not name it then. I can now.
It was the silent power they held over my life, the belief that they had the right to decide it for me, like I was a puppet on a string. They took my father away and allowed that absence to become my reality. It was a choice I was never part of.
Instead of holding on to my hand, she pulled hers away. The connection between us broke in that moment, and with it, she was gone.
Only now do I understand why she pulled her hand away. It was the truth she carried and never shared, and the choice she made to take it with her instead of giving it to me. She chose silence, even at the very end. She chose to leave me with it.
I did not let go. She did.
My mother Marie A. Rebelle already wrote about this some time ago - how we both had similar dreams on the same night.
Also read this powerful essay by Diana C.
Dreams never cease to amaze me - the way they try to order bits of info and put pictures to them for us. Your dream is so telling.
Stephen Fry has a podcast about the brain - I think you would enjoy it - he mentions dreams and neurodiversity etc - It think its called - Inside Your Mind