As I often do when I’m beginning a new essay, I seek out the etymology of the word I want to explore. This time, I’m disappointed that the word “nightmare” has nothing to do with horses. The idea of bad dreams as horses galloping through our night-time hours resonates with me. But mare comes from the old English maere, the word for a goblin who sits on a sleeper’s chest – a succubus. The Nightmare, the famous 1781 painting by Swiss painter Henry Fuseli, hedges its bets, depicting a squat gargoyle-like figure crouched on a swooning maiden, with a donkey-ish horse looking on from the shadows. Though called The Nightmare, the experience depicted is more akin to sleep paralysis, that strange phenomenon where we wake up unable to move. I’ve experienced this several times – waking with a shrill buzzing in my ears and panic rising as I realise I’m boxed in, a mind trapped in an unresponsive body.
But nightmares are a broader spectrum of experience. They can be full of stock horror-film tropes we’ve absorbed from the world around us, or troubling, uncanny images that spark terror in us as individuals, but are otherwise untranslatable. My earliest memory of a recurring nightmare was terrifying precisely because it was devoid of images, and seemed fuelled by a deeper knowing that had no access to the conscious level of thinking that translates sensation into meaning. For the purposes of writing about it, I have to translate the ideas in the dream into images, but they are only close approximations – weak symbols I’ve used to try to capture what I experienced.
In the dream I was in a desolate place. It was not a desert, but this is the nearest approximation I can think of. In it was a vast pyramid-like form. The pyramid was about to be turned upside down, on to its tip, and I had to prevent that from happening. In the dream I was both a floating geometric shape and a small child (I am often two things in dreams; I am the viewer, and the character in the dream). There was nothing that could prevent the pyramid from being turned on its tip, and I would have to hold it up. Then, the pyramid turns above me, blotting out the sky, and bears down on my body. The pressure in my head builds and builds until I wake, but even though I’m back in my bedroom, the pressure is still there and part of me is trapped in the desert under the pyramid’s tip. I scream and scream, and it isn’t until my mum comes into the room that I wake properly.
When I think about this dream the thing that strikes me is that I’ve spent so long trying to put language on it, that the version of it I tell myself has been infected with that language. But the real fear in this dream is about the fact of language’s irrelevance. There is a whole universe without language, and we are so reliant on it. Without it, what are we, and how are we to survive? When language fails, we have symbols. The inverted pyramid is the alchemical symbol for water. It’s the nabla or Phoenician harp. It’s an inversion in social order and hierarchy. It symbolises the kind of epochal shifts that often leave small, crushed bodies in their wake.
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What is the function of nightmares? Carl Jung suggests, of dreams in general, that the “language of dreams is a survival from an archaic mode of thought” – for Jung, the significance of our unconscious thought is just as great as those produced by our conscious minds. Dreams are subjective, filled with meaning constructed by the dreamer out of things we know on a conscious level, and things we don’t realise we know. The nightmares I remember throughout my life all seem to hint at some evil worming its way towards the surface of reality – a very simple fear. I know that there are not supernatural forces at work that shape my life and the lives of those around me. There are just selfish, petty, frightened, greedy individuals who manage to amplify their failures in a manner that causes mass destruction. We have all experienced these people, or manifested these failings at times in our lives.
While I’m writing this, and the war on Gaza rages, I have a nightmare. I am spending time at a writing residency on the outskirts of Berlin, in Wannsee, and across the lake is the villa in which the Nazis held the Wannsee conference, their meeting to agree their final solution. The building was built by a wealthy Jewish family and taken from them by the Nazis. In the Wannsee Conference Museum, I look at a cartoon from the London Evening Standard from the late 1930s. It depicts a line of Jewish families at a crossroads. The signs at the crossroads, variously struck out, point to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland ... There is nowhere for these displaced people to go. The museum shows pictures of happy Jewish families who were later starved or slaughtered under the Nazi regime. Their happiness breaks my heart. I can’t understand how we get from these beautiful family portraits to the concentrations camps. What knowledge have we synthesised from all this death? Jung tells us that if we don’t learn from our nightmares, they recur. While I walk back around the lake towards my residency, I read the local and European election campaign posters. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland posters read “ASYLCHAOS BEENDEN” – “end the asylum chaos”.
[ An Irishman’s Diary on Wannsee and the ‘Final Solution’Opens in new window ]
In Rafah, 1.5 million Palestinians have been told to move again to Khan Younis, where the IDF have obliterated all infrastructure. They cannot leave Gaza. While I’m in Berlin, I attend a Nakba Day commemoration and marvel at the number of police trucks and the police in riot gear hanging around the periphery of a sedate crowd, who are listening to speeches in German, Arabic and English. I meet artists at the Irish embassy who are sharing information about fundraisers and Zoom meet-ups with artists trapped in Gaza. After one such event, I and a few other Irish and German writers stay up chatting for a while. When I sleep that night, my dream is a warped continuation of the evening. We are all sitting around the table, but some authority is telling us we have to go somewhere, to do something; what that is is unclear. Outside the house, in the villa’s sweeping front garden, there is a long pile of autumn leaves, neatly gathered, ready for burning. But some of the pile has collapsed and blown away, and I can see protruding from the leaves the feet of a corpse – an old woman’s decaying feet. We are not supposed to know these bodies are here. We are all trying to communicate the situation to each other without speaking out loud.
The next morning I wake and scroll through Instagram at 5.30am. I watch a video on Al Jazeera of journalist Bisan Owda walking around Khan Younis, talking to families trying to clear piles of rubble from the concrete shells of apartments that list alarmingly around them. Everything has been burned away. The lines of the concrete skeletons of buildings against the dust-hazed sky seem utterly alien. Two young boys, Ismail and Hamdan, show Bisan the shell of their apartment. They tell her that their father came back to check on their home and was killed in a vehicle along with 16 others. They climb a collapsed wall to bring Bisan to the roof of their building to show her the view across an endless vista of broken concrete and twisted metal; now that the IDF have razed the city, they can see the sea.
Later, Bisan visits the Nasser Medical Complex, where she lived in a tent for 70 days before the IDF ordered its evacuation. She visits the mass graves behind the hospital where almost 400 bodies have been found, some without heads, some without organs. Shroud-wrapped corpses litter the ground, awaiting reclamation. A mother with a shovel comes every day and digs from 7.30am to 4pm. She still hasn’t found her son.
As she walks the obliterated streets, Bisan says: “This cannot be real. I must wake up.” A few days after I watch the video, Israel drops bombs on Rafah, burning 45 people alive in their tents. The world watches a video of a man holding up a decapitated infant against a burning sky. Nothing in the image makes sense, not the orange of the night sky, not the wall of flames, not the man’s face deranged by horror, and not the baby with its head burned away. And yet, these things are real, and not a dream.
What do nightmares teach us? That we haven’t yet understood what we need to understand. And that we’re right to be afraid.
Jessica Traynor is a poet and essayist whose most recent collection is Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe Books, 2022)
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