Small World Ride

According to Cameron, his family's vacation to Disney World when he was five years old was the last time they were all truly happy. Although there are a bunch of reasons why it may feel like everything's gone downhill from there, the real problem for Cam is that his brush with death on the Small World ride was the moment that he lost his childish innocence. When Cameron experiences the ride for the first time he's a little kid, in prime years of wide-eyed gullibility:

I'm not going to lie to you; I loved it. Dude, I said to myself, this is the s***. Or something like that in five-year-old speak. I want to live in this new Utopia of singing children of all nations. With luck, the Mexican kids will let me wear their que festivo sombreros. And the smiling Swedes will welcome me into their happy Nordic hoedown. Välkommen, y'all. I will ride the pink fuzzy camel in some vaguely defined Middle Eastern country (but the one with pink fuzzy camels) and shake a leg with the can-can dancers in Gay Paree. Bonjour. Bienvenido. Guten Tag. Jambo. I was with the three people who were my world—Mom, Dad, my twin sister, Jenna—and for one crazy moment, we were all laughing and smiling and sharing the same experience, and it was good. (1.14)

But then Cameron got it into his fool head that the boat his family was on was carrying them toward the afterlife, and if he could just get through the maintenance door behind the Eskimo kid he could save them all. So he jumped in the water, almost drowned, and from then on his childish sense of wonder is caput:

"Oh, honey, you know it's not real, don't you? It's just a ride."

"Just a ride," I repeated, and felt it sink in deep. The thing is, before they pulled me out, everything had seemed made of magic. Like I really believed in this crazy dream. But the minute I came to on the hard, glittery, spray-painted, fake snow and saw that marionette boy pulling the same plastic fish out of the hole again and again, I realized it was all a big fake. The realest thing I'd ever experienced was that moment under the water when I almost died. And in a way, I've been dying ever since. (1.31-32)

For the rest of Cam's life, Disney is symbolic of this loss of innocence, so it's not surprising that his delusions center around getting back to Tomorrowland and the place where he can finally regain the innocence he lost at a young age. And later, when he has actually died, his idea of the entry into the afterlife takes the form of a cleaner, realized version of the Small World ride:

The light reaches me enough so that I can see I'm in a boat on a river. I hear singing. I know that song. The boat floats out of the darkness, and I start laughing. The Bollywood puppets are singing to me. It's a world of laughter, a world of tears. (52.5)

Finally the whole thing isn't a big fake anymore. And ironically, Cam isn't dying anymore either.