The Shoah Dream Project: The Dreams, Page 2

THE SHOAH DREAM PROJECT

Dreams of the Shoah, Page 2



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Dream 20


I had this dream one time, 2 or 3 years ago. It frightens me:

A woman, angry, vicious (and so ugly), like a frightened animal and like a wounded animal, wants revenge and at the same time is just trying to survive --

She's wearing a uniform, she's staring straight into my eyes, she is definitely not nice to me, she doesn't care about being nice now, we're on an airplane --

She says to me telepathically: "look down -- this is why": I see a young girl, I'm confused. She is dying, she has long beautiful light-colored hair, but she is filthy, covered in mud, crawling because she is weak, nobody else is around -- I feel like I'm in three places at once--my bed, the airplane and "the place." I ask the woman questions, telepathically, WHY? I'm frantic. I know it's the Holocaust, the Shoah.

The woman says, "it's me --- they took us, they starved us, we froze, we died in the mud, we were so hungry ...."

I see, feel and taste the mud, I feel the cold, the hunger, the sickness, and I watch her leave her body .....

She was a young, strong woman, a girl who never had a baby.....

When I ask her, the woman tells me it's in the East, she was from a small town, her parents died immediately during the round-up, and she was taken away with her sister, her sister died of hunger first, she missed/misses her sister, then she died, and now she's fighting.

I look at the woman, she turns to the plane's controls.

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Dream 21


I am a 48 yo woman, and neither me nor my family has any connection to the Shoah that I know of, although my mother's best friend, now dead, was Polish, and fled the Nazis.

All my life I've been terrified and fascinated by the Holocaust. I have started having,not dreams, but memories, surface.. the name that comes to me is Rachel. I lived in a quiet street in Austria, and my family were not practicing Jews. I remember being outraged at having to sew that ugly star on my clothing, especially my favorite dress, which was plaid.

Then my father disappeared. My mother and I were rounded up with many people and taken to a ghetto. I do not know where we are, but I am cold, and hungry, and still angry. My mother packed a brass menorah, not a fancy one, or a pretty one, just a plain thing, and I felt she should have put food, or things we could exchange for food on the black market. Or something warm.

Then I'm in Bergen-Belsen.. I'm still always cold. I'm lying on the planks of the "bunk" shared with many others--and then I'm out of my body, looking down,thinking "that doesn't hurt at all. I thought dying would hurt."

My feelings are still intense. I went to a travelling memorial, and found out I was right about Bergen-Belsen, that there were no crematoria there. I see faces of people against a fence and I think I recognize them. I look at the suitcases in piles. I look at the hair, the eyeglasses, the baby's shoes. I cannot get the nightmare out of my mind, and I'm determined to make certain no one ever forgets. I still feel that way.

I will never forget, nor will allow revisionists to spread their lies and hatred without speaking out.

Six million Jews. Five million others--homosexuals, Poles, Gypsies, political prisoners, mentally ill and mental defectives, and all others deemed "life unworthy of life" by the killing machine. I won't let their memories be besmirched. I can't.

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Dream 22


My mother is a survivor of Auschwitz Birkenau, and I was born in 1952.

A reccurent dream I used to have around my twenties (and still re-discover now a days) figures THE SELECTION at the arrival in the camp.

Hundred and hundred times my mother related this very moment, I suppose as a model of Will and straight Action. (of course she pretends to be a specialist of both...) : she was standing by a Dutch girl who spoke german to the officer in charge of the selection, so he moved her out of the file. My mother stepped immediatly behind that girl, but was rejected back to the former file. So she looked intensively at the Dutch girl, who then said to the officer that this woman was her cousin ... he nodded, allowing my mother to join the small file.

I think it is important to add that this first survival action in the camp, followed by many others, permitted to my mother to be one of the 27 survivors of her convoy, originally composed of 1500 persons.

My dream of course is more confused that this specific event : we are around 50 people in a dark basement, gathered in a corner. In front of us, not so close (like 10 meters) are three men, in normal dark suits. I can't distinguish their features, they don't look agressive but rather competent, professionals.

The man in the middle is the only one active, he holds a paper, and pronounces a word. I understand immediatly that now it is a question of decision on my side: if I identify myself with this word, if I choose this word as being the one that "fits" me, I step ahead and join the other ones who have elected this word as "theirs".

I have no problem to understand the meaning of the word, but it remains too much vague for me to be able to take any absolute decision about it: it sounds like the expression of a feeling, or maybe a color.

The ones who have opted for this first word are led out of the room by one of the two assistants.

I wait for the second word, but in the meantime I feel very confused: there won't be any word "for me".

I shouldn't have entered the game following the purposed rules: for instance I should have stepped at the first proposition, whatever it would have been. But now it's too late, and I will remain alone at the end.

Effectively the second word doesn't fit me neither, though many of my companions take a step ahead (those ones may have had the same reflexion that I, and decided to move quickly)

Generally I awake at that time.

The obvious about survivors' children, it is that actually they pass through the same problems as anyone (here for instance the incapacity of making a decision) but they will illustrate it in a specific way.

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Dream 23


This is one of my earliest memories - a nightmare which I suffered at the age of about five. I can still see it as clearly now (thirty years later!) as I did then...

I am standing in a field, near to a mountain. A railway track goes through this field, and I see a train travelling on it, towards the mountain. I am aware that the train will go through the mountain via a tunnel. However, in order to reach the tunnel in the mountain, the train must first go over a bridge which connects the field to the mountain (there is a deep but narrow crevice which separates them).

As I watch the train go past me, I see it crash into the side of a mountain, its carriages and passengers are smashed against the mountainside, and must all be dead.

As a five year old child, I was terrified by this dream. As far as I remember, I only had the dream once, but once was enough to imprint the image on my mind forever.

Over the years I have often thought of that dream. I always thought how illogical it would be to build a train track through a mountain, and to expect a train to cross a crevice all by itself to go into the tunnel! One day I realised that there should have been a bridge. The bridge must have been destroyed - that is why the train crashed into the mountainside. I was also unaware until recently that in Eastern Europe railway lines like this do exist - they have to in order to provide access to difficult to reach terrains. How could I have known all these things at the age of five?

I was not born Jewish, nobody in my family nor my parents' friends were Jewish - I had no contact with anyone or anything Jewish as I was growing up. Yet I have always felt a deep, strong urge to learn about Judaism; I am drawn towards anything Jewish, and when I see Orthodox Jews I feel a deep inner longing to be amongst their community.

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Dream 24


I am a 44-year-old woman and a convert to Judaism (nearly 16 years now.) I have had a number of dreams about the Shoah, but this one is the most emotionally meaningful and the most recurrent:

It is summer, a very hot bright day, and I am running along the train tracks trying to catch up to a train (a cattle car) in which my beloved rabbi and members of my community are trapped. They are in the final car. Instead of very tight, closed-off walls of the train car, as in real life, there are only a few slats. I can see my rabbi very well; our gazes are locked. I am running more and more desperately, trying to catch up. In this dream, I am a young man, wearing a kippah and tallit. I want to be with my rabbi more than I want to live. He is an old man, in traditional garb, with a long white beard. His dark eyes look at me very sternly, and I get this message from his gaze: Stop running. Say farewell. Live! Live with dignity.

At last, panting hard, I give up and stop running. The train pulls out of my view. I throw off my kippah and tallit in a rage, down into the yellowed dry grass by the side of the tracks.

The predominant feelings of this dream are frustration, an aching desire to be with my rabbi, no matter how impossible it may be, and rage.

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Dream 25

I had this dream one time, 2 or 3 years ago. It frightens me:

A woman, angry, vicious (and so ugly), like a frightened animal and like a wounded animal, wants revenge and at the same time is just trying to survive --

She's wearing a uniform, she's staring straight into my eyes, she is definitely not nice to me, she doesn't care about being nice now, we're on an airplane --

She says to me telepathically: "look down -- this is why": I see a young girl, I'm confused. She is dying, she has long beautiful light-colored hair, but she is filthy, covered in mud, crawling because she is weak, nobody else is around -- I feel like I'm in three places at once--my bed, the airplane and "the place." I ask the woman questions, telepathically, WHY? I'm frantic. I know it's the Holocaust, the Shoah. The woman says, "it's me --- they took us, they starved us, we froze, we died in the mud, we were so hungry ...."

I see, feel and taste the mud, I feel the cold, the hunger, the sickness, and I watch her leave her body .....

She was a young, strong woman, a girl who never had a baby.....

When I ask her, the woman tells me it's in the East, she was from a small town, her parents died immediately during the round-up, and she was taken away with her sister, her sister died of hunger first, she missed/missesher sister, then she died, and now she's fighting.

I look at the woman, she turns to the plane's controls.

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Dream 26

I was a senior in high school when I dreamt that I was in a camp with a lot of concrete and barbed wire. I really don't remember specifics, but I know that I was at some sort of "roll call" and that I tried to escape.

While running thru the streets I was being shot at. I was very scared and the dream was very real. I am a Jew by choice and wanted to be a Jew since I was a young child. I must have been reincarnated...if it does in fact exist.

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Dream 27
When the American-made television "Holocaust" came out on t.v., my daughter was only three years old. My son was eight. His classroom was all abuzz about the series and so because he was a very mature child, my husband and I allowed him to watch it with us on several conditions, one of which was that he may not speak about it to his little three year old sister. He could be trusted to keep his side of the bargain.

When the program came on, our daughter had already been asleep for a few hours and so there was no possibility that she heard anything that was going on. This was her dream as reported to me on several occasions after the Holocaust series was over:

"I'm on a train I think. There's a rumble sound. And everybody is mooshed together. I don't know why. I don't know who everybody is. I want something to drink real bad and no one can get it for me. All of a sudden the train is stopped and someone pullled the side of the train away. These guys are all dressed up in black and they scare me, screaming, with dogs barking and I'm so scared.

"My name is Simon- Simon Jaecker. Someday I'm gonna fly an airplane. You can find me in a phone book."

My husband and I were afraid of what it might mean if we checked up on
this. Our daughter told us to look him up in a book. Finally we did. There was someone in the telephone book at an Air Base near us. How, at three years old could she know this? She said it was all in her dream.

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Dream 27

I am a male of 26 years of age . I am not of Jewish descent. About 3-4 years ago I had a dream that I remember vividly.

In my dream I was a frail boy of about 10-13 years of age and I was standing in a line with men and we all wore dirty clothes. There was a fence nearby with barbed wire on top with a gate nearby. I assume that we were waiting to go through the gate because we were facing it. Men in the line seemed to be tired or weak. The line didn't really move. We just stood there. I must have been feeling weak because my knees gave away and I fell down. The men near me quickly picked me up and helped me stand again and they were pleading with me to keep standing and not to fall again. I guess I had made a commotion because an armed guard came from the gate along the right side of the line to where I stood and started shouting at me. I looked at him but I was not afraid. I was not feeling brave either. I must have been feeling resigned. I was struggling to be in control of my body. I started falling again and this time I fell in the direction of the guard. As I was falling I must have tried to hold on to something because I reached out and tried to hold onto the guard. I fell anyway. As I lay on the ground I could sense the horror among the men. I heard the guard screaming and I looked up. I had the feeling that he was disgusted that he had been touched by me. He took his rifle and hit me on the head with the butt as I lay before him. Once, twice, perhaps three. I didn't feel pain. I felt more of a sense of shock as the butt impacted my head. I remember everything fading out.

Now this is where it gets weird. I woke up from the dream during the last blow to my head and I actually felt the pain. I couldn't explain this but the pain lingered on that spot for the next 2-3 days. At the time I was more perplexed by the rich detail of the dream and how real it seemed to wonder about the pain.

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Dreams 28 & 29

I am a person of Irish/Sephardic descent; I grew up in foster homes in the United States and did not have contact with any Jewish people besides school friends. My family (Sephardic side) came to the U.S. from Cuba in the early 1950s. I'm 43 years old now.

Dream 1: I am a Jewish man in Poland during World War II. I am in the back of a horse drawn cart, being driven by a gentile woman who is hiding me. I'm hiding under a bunch of junky stuff like ratty blankets and old buckets. There are German soldiers all around. The woman drives the cart through a boggy area, and we get stuck. She wants me to get out of the cart and help push but I don't want to. She starts yelling at me, saying, you've got to come to terms with the idea that you're really a Jew............


Dream 2: This dream occurred when i was in a hypnogogic state, not quite sleeping, but not really awake either. I am ascending through the heavens, layer by layer, sort of like going up through several floors in an elevator. At each stop, an item of clothing is removed. As I go higher I become more and more naked. Finally, I am very high, and almost completely naked. I think to myself: "I am having my clothing removed so that I can stand naked before God." I get ready for the next and final stop, and as I rise up and then stop rising, I suddenly begin to fall, very very fast, and when I hit the bottom of my fall I am in a large room in Auschwitz, having just gotten off the train. It is freezing cold and a guard is screaming in German at me to strip off my clothes.........

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Dream 30

I have no personal connection to the holocaust, meaning I am not of Jewish descent. ( Although my great grandmother was raised by a German Jewish family in Indiana)

I have a friend whose family lives over an Orthodox Jewish funeral home...One night he and I went inside (it was empty, of course). That night I had a dream...

I dreamed I was running, I could not see my face all I could see, were my hands and I knew instinctively that they were not "My" hands. ( It was as if I was inside someone else).

It was a very dark, stormy night and I was in a rail yard. I peeked from behid a rail car and a flash of ligtenning struck I saw my arm and I had on a black and white striped prison garmet. I saw a soldier and a dog in the distance and I recall my hand grew white as I clung to the rail car, in fear. (These were the hands of a white male)

Another flash of lightening and I saw the soldier ordering people, dressed like me, past. ( I was so afraid I was going to be caught).

Then suddenly I was in the country. It was a bright day and the grass was sooo green. I could see a large house in the distance and I knew I was running from this house.

I leaped into a deep ditch, and I could smell the wet earth. I heard the barking of dogs and a man was calling my name. ( I knew this was my name, but I can't remember what that name was). I was terrified of this man and I remember crouching close to the ditch wall. I could feel the roots that protruded in this wall and the sound of the wet earth as I pressed against it.

Then, as in the first part of the dream, I looked at my hands and I saw the brown sleeve and the hands of a white male. The man I was hiding from drew closer and I recall peeking cautiously above the ditch. The man was dark haired and walking with what looked like a riding crop in his hand. Two small dogs were walking and barking beside him.

I crouched back down and I could feel my heart pounding loudly...before I awoke I recall thinking " That was Hitler".

Like I said before, I am neither Jewish, nor male and the odd thing is after I had this dream, I told my mother and she said, " I didn't know you were so interested in Hitler".

I replied, "I'm not, it was a dream"...then my mother said, " It's odd...not many people know about his little dogs."

That freaked me out! I didn't know about his dogs.

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Dream 31


My family doesn't have any connection to the Shoah, and I was raised Christian. But when I was between 2 and 5 years old, I had visions (I thought they were daydreams, but I couldn't stop or control them) of being a grown woman tortured to death. I also would see angry faces coming at me. I didn't see Nazi uniforms, and I didn't know anything about the Shoah then, so I had no idea what these visions were about. I just thought there was something terribly wrong with me.

The visions eventually stopped coming, and I didn't think about them again until I was 32 and my daughter was born. I started having vivid nightmares of my car going off a bridge into deep water, and trying to figure out how to rescue both my children from their car seats without leaving one of them behind in the car; it was really terrifying. I would lie awake for hours trying to figure out a way to save them.

Finally I had a dream about some train tracks. The train tracks were very dangerous, but I knew that on the other side of the tracks was a hill, and on the other side of the hill was a mass grave of Holocaust victims. I knew that if I could manage to cross the train tracks and look in the grave, I would find my own body in the grave.

It was clear to me after I had this dream that I had died in the Holocaust. I did a past life regression the next day, and found myself as a wealthy Jewish woman living in Vienna, with two children and a husband I loved very much. I don't think he was Jewish, and I was not a practicing Jew either, though I think maybe my parents were. I think maybe we had been able to hide the fact that I was Jewish. We were helping people in the ghetto, though, by giving them money and papers to get out of the country.

One day I was caught on my way to the ghetto with money and forged papers. I was taken to the SS headquarters for questioning, but my husband arrived and convinced them that I knew nothing and he was the one who sent me on the mission. I was sent home, but told to report the next day to the train station, and an armed guard was put on my house so I wouldn't escape. I packed what I thought we would need, but I felt doomed, and I didn't see any way to save my children, who were ages 2 and 4.

The next day we were sent to Auschwitz. The time on the train was a nightmare, but the worst memory of all was when my children were taken away from me at the gate; some old women were trying to be helpful and said they would take care of the children, but I think I knew what was really going to happen to them and I wanted to go with them. I went into hysterics and ended up being beaten by the guards.

Sometime after that I was selected to be sent to Buchenwald, and was tortured to death there (I was glad to die by then). Buchenwald was a men's work camp, but in a book about Buchenwald I found a reference to a trainload of Austrian Jewish women who were sent there from Auschwitz in the winter of 1943, which is the year I believe I died. They were not alive at the end of the war, and there was no explanation of what happened to them.

I didn't see this all in the first regression, but saw it over the course of 2 or 3 regressions, and also in another dream that filled in a lot of details. I've also had several vivid flashbacks to that life, some of them flashbacks to the happy times.

I believe the first dream, where I am trying to save my children, was symbolic of trying to save my children from the Shoah. Once I remembered that past life, the nightmares stopped. It is interesting that the nightmares started when my children in this life were the same age as my children in that life. I think that triggered the memories.

Also, I recognized my daughter in that life as being my daughter in this life. It was after she was born that I started to remember. Her name was R--- in that life. I almost named her R--- this time too, (before I knew about the past life connection), but changed my mind at the last minute because that name felt too sad somehow. When she was a baby she wouldn't let anyone else hold her or babysit her; she would just scream. She is 7 now and still has a lot of seperation anxiety.

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Dream 32

My family is jewish, through the maternal line, but my great grandmother intermarried and was kicked out of the family. My grandmother existed on the fringes of the Jewish side of the family, being rejected by both sides of her family. She deeply wished to be Jewish, but was not allowed to participate in anything Jewish, including holidays. However, when i was 13, she made a special trip to see me and to explain her Jewish family to me. I had been raised in a fundamentalist Christian home. As a 13 year old i was overjoyed to hear about being Jewish. Ifelt that i finally knew why i was so "different." I immediately sought out a rabbi.. several in fact, who all told me that I was "not very Jewish" and to come back when I was a little older if I was still interested. I went to temple several times, brought my mother with me, but no one spoke to us other than to treat us like strangers. I was devastated. I was in my 30's before I tried again.

The year I was 14 the dreams began. Idreamed repeatedly of being in a bombed out city. The houses were burnt out and when I stood up I was taller than the walls. I was trying to hide. I was responsible for lives. I had one series of dreams that were in a landscape I have yet to see, a mountain trail that ran along a river and wound up on a high field. I was always concerned that we were visible, that the people in my care were moving too slow, talking to much, out in the open. There were wooden houses of some type at the final destination, in a heavily wooded area. people were packed like sardines into rooms that overflowed with things, clothing, food, bundles unnamed stuff.

The dreams had a real quality that stayed with me for days each time. I pondered them and tried to understand what application the dreams had to my life. As you can see, I was not an ordinary teenager. By the time I was 18 I was obsessed with reading about WWII and the Holocaust. I interacted with other Jews very cautiously because I hated rejection. I married a gentile two times and had 4 children.

I am a registered nurse and I was doing home care in a neighborhood I was unfamiliar with. I had entered the neighborhood the week before by different route. This week, I came up the industrial side of town, crossed the railroad tracks and presto.. the images came so fast and scared me so much I was palpitating and unable to drive. The neighborhood was normal to my eyes, but there were superimposed shelled out houses and I became lost, driving around and around the same few blocks with my heart pounding like I don't even know what. there were audio effects which I don't remember exactly now, except that I felt like cowering and was even in my car. I was completely disoriented. by the time I found the patient's house and composed myself it was several hours past the appointment time.

That night i had the dream about the shelled out houses again. It was the same neighborhood, completely destroyed, in the dark. I can still see it in my mind's eye.

I have begun to practice Judaism in the last 3 years. While doing my geneological studies I found many members of my family who died in the Holocaust in Mariample, Lithuania. More were in Russia that we never heard of again and I cannot find trace of their birth or death. I pray for peace for the souls who died in the Holocaust.

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