I used to dream about the Holocaust, the trains, the people, the crowded trains, the ramp, and wondered how I would cope with the brutality of it all. Quite frankly, I don’t think I would have. I would have been sent to the left and gassed. Why? Because I object to being pushed, bullied, and intimidated by uniformed thugs.
Some years ago I went to Auschwitz and Maidjanek KL camps. The dreams stopped. It was as if seeing the empty, now silent camps, the barren parade grounds. The rotting wood horse stable barracks. The sentry posts without sentries. I realized I was not going to end up there, so I slept.
The dreams stopped. All I am left with is the upsetting thought of those poor women, many just teenagers, who gave birth in the camps—and had their little babies killed, smothered, murdered, and starved to death. The nightmare will never stop. I owe it to these children not to forget their little cries for help.
Dream 44
I am so excited to have found this website, I am writing before I've even read the contents. I have been waiting for years to tell this to someone besides my friends, who are sympathetic, but as removed from the Holocaust as can be.
When I was 4 I started to have nightmares that were so intense they color all of my following childhood. They were as much my real life as life when I was "awake." In them I would be in a city not familiar to me in my waking state, but my own in the dream. I was being hounded by someone searching me out, whom I gave the name "Billy," and whose voice I could hear reciting "Suffering and pain, suffering and pain" over and over. But no matter where I went other people were already hiding there. Behind half walls, in attics, in the blown out shells of buildings, underpiles of refuse. "No room, no room, find your own place" they would hiss at me, and my endless run continued.
As I grew older the dreams became more sophisticated. "Billy" transformed into an army of soldiers, I had stays in attics, I've seen streams of people marched over an open trestle, naked, and when I walked beneath them I saw on the ground the pools of their watery feces, they were skinny and starved, and then a soldier stops me in the street and demands my wedding ring, my papers. Everyone around me walks with their heads down, seeing nothing. I've been chased and had my throat slashed, and literally felt/"saw" my sould slip through the gash in my throat and away and I'm thinking "No, no I don't want to go yet, I want to live, to see what happens next, to see the story of my life."
I've laid on an operating table and heard a third voice narrative desribing what was being done to me as my leg is sliced open and it is so infected that all that comes out is yellowish pus. And always always the soldiers in the streets, the hiding.
I also throughout my life suffered a debilitating depression, tried to kill myself 3 times, the first at an age unthinkable for a suicide, and felt that I was the world's dumping ground for an inexplicable pain that ran so deep I should never be rid of it, and it was the main ingredient of my soul. I was in and out of counciling and drug therapy for years.
At age 26 I began university. At age 28 I took a course in Holocaust literature and the scales fell from my eyes, so to speak, and when I learned what happened then (I dropped out of school when I was 12, and knew nothing of the Holocaust except that it happened in WWII and horrendous things took place) I felt like jumping up and down and screaming YES YES I WAS THERE. Since then I've read every survivor's book or story that I can get my hands on. And the nightmares have stopped. So has the depression.
I believe I was there. I believe I took the phrase "we shall never forget" to heart, and carried those memories with me into my next life. But I've never met or talked to or even heard of any one else with a past like mine. And now I shall thankfully and eagerly return to your website, with the final message that I by no means feel "done." I am a writer, and feel that I must in some way help, that those dreams were mine for a reason.
Dream 45
I am a 55-year-old man. I was born in 1947. I am from a Christian family. When I was around 4 years old, I remember asking my mother if I would be a boy or a girl in my next life. She must have understood the reincarnation implication. She told me that my next life would be in Heaven. She ignored the gender question. I was looking out the window by the back door. I feel if I could go back to that time that I could see parts of my last lifetime through that window.
I first began having a recurring dream when I was around 4 or 5. It is not as specific as the dreams that I have read about so far on your page. It was more as seen through the eyes of a child. I didn't connect it to the Shoah until I reached my teens. Even then... even now with some skepticism.
n my dream the children of the neighborhood were being collected. They were not being collected by men but by bears. These bears walked upright. They were tall and their heads were shaped like helmets. I ran to my parents’ bed. I woke them and begged them to hide me. They hid me in a space I presume to been in the attic. The shape of the hiding space was a triangle. The shape of a stairway... or the way a dormer attaches to the main roof.
We lived in the house where I first had the dream until I was 7. My favorite place in the house was the attic. I would watch the lazy street and neighborhood from the front dormer window. I would eat my afternoon snack from the top of the stairs. I still have a scar from on my left hand from a cereal bowl full of spaghetti that broke when I fell down the stairs.
I stopped dreaming about the bears within several years. I dreamt about the hiding spot into my 20s.
Throughout my life, I have felt that I was somehow Jewish. I felt that my family was hiding something.
I find it very comforting to know that others have had similar dreams.
Dream 46
I am not the child or grandchild of holocaust survivors. I am not even Jewish. I am a thirty year old, white, Christian, American girl with no personal ties to the tragedy other than I did a year long research project on the devastating event for a research paper in high school. Since that time I have had recurring dreams about the holocaust and that I am one of the poor souls either on the way to a "camp" by train or already a prisoner of the camps. In my dreams I am always aware that it is unrealistic for me to be there because it took place decades before my birth, and I am not Jewish. I always feel as though I am there to help a multitude of people by telling them that no matter the consequences they must retaliate because of inevitable doom for those who play by Nazi rules, but no one believes me. When I am on the train and begging with people to find a way to get out no one will listen to me and usually end up turning on me for my ridiculous outbursts. I feel hopeless. When I wake up I feel despair! I usually cry and have trouble getting back to sleep for fear of dreaming again about the horror.
Dream 47
I've lived in Ohio most of my life, was born 1969 and am Female... to a non-religious family though I was baptized Lutheran. During WWII all my grandparents lived in the USA. None even fought overseas. Was was in an essential industry and the other grandfather was with the code talkers (get didn't speak Navaho so I don't know what he did) I am currently Unitarian Universalist and am not Christian. I don't now what Shoah is.
I haven't had the dreams in a long time. When I was about 3 or 4 and my Dad would go out of town I would have this dream. It was like his not being there is what would trigger it. In the dream I'm short and young... don't know age, name or gender. I'm frightened. Behind me is a train. There is the hiss of stream from the train. I believe I have just come out of it. It's crowded with people. It's twilight and I'm facing South. There are mountains and gondolas overhead. The gondolas are filled with scary dangerous men. I can see search lights going. There is fighting and explosions. In front of me is a man in a uniform with a gun. I usually woke up about that time... if not sooner.
An unsolicited "psychic" in a chat room on AOL about 7 years ago was curious about this dream I mentioned and worked with me on it... till she was too wigged out. She told me I was shot there next to my younger brother and that I was a boy. She said I'd had many lives and that I'm usually men.
I used to have this dream as a teenager. It is more terrifying to me than the first dream but there is less there. There is a feeling of claustrophobia and all I see is face after face... hundreds of faces. All close together. Most looking down at me.
Dream 48
I am 55 years old, a woman born into an English and mostly Irish-American, Catholic family. I did live in _______ County, NY when I was a young child, where there were Hasidic Jews and many other Jewish people of differing sects. I attended a Catholic College, though I had attended public school. When I was in my mid-twenties, the mother of two young sons (4 and 2 years old at the time) and I was living in __________, NY, and married to an Irish Catholic from ________, NY, I became enamored, so to speak, with being Jewish. I sought out Jewish friends and, to make a long story somewhat shorter, I converted to Reform Judaism.
While doing a great deal of reading at that time about Jewish history, I began to have very vivid dreams about concentration camps and Hasidic men singing songs (nigunim). That was so many years ago and I can still see some of those scenes in the dreams. A couple of years later, I had become friendly with people with whom I began going to the Orthodox Synagogue with, and eventually, I "converted" again and went to the Mikvah at Yeshiva University for this conversion with my husband and children. My husband went along with the "conversion" of the whole family because the rabbi had wanted it that way. I kept Kosher for a number of years and the difficulty of staying within the Jewish community while my entire family was not Jewish became too much for me. I still feel pretty bad about that.
Well, one son eventually went all the way to a wonderful Bar Mitvah in a very conservative synagogue in ____, NY and my marriage broke up a few years after (not due to the Jewish factor). Then, I went to a psychologist for past life regression therapy about 15 years ago. I had always been "haunted", for lack of a better term, by the holocaust, since the day I learned about it and the life of Anne Frank in the mid-fifties when I was about ten years old. This was not just a sense of being appalled by the horror of that era, but I felt that I had somehow been there and that when I converted to Judaism I was really "going home" to something I had lost. I am, by nature, a skeptical person; so I would never have stated that I absolutely believed in reincarnation. Even after having experience many sessions of "past lives", finding myself in places like the Middle East and India, I still am not firmly convinced. However, the very first experience of regression under hypnosis was so terrifying to me that the doctor insisted that I view the scene as though I was watching television. I did and experienced myself as a close-to five-year-old girl who came home to an apartment in a city to find that her family had been obviously taken away. She was alone and then a man came for her, taking her to a place like a police station in the city, and eventually she died in a camp in the mud of disease at the age of five. The apartment, the "police station" and the details of the street in this city were very clear to me. I, as this child, was taken to a garret over the station (or whatever it was) to be raped. I was able to return days or weeks later under hypnosis to this "story" and see the same details. My biggest fear as a child had been not "getting home" or going home to find my parents had disappeared. My mother was a stay-at-home mother. Though our family certainly had some serious problems as I grew up, I never thought that these fears were quite explained by my upbringing. I have tried to keep this concise, though it certainly is a more complex tale.
Dream 49
I have dreamt, so far, of at least 5 past lives. This particular dream which was so vivid that I could feel, taste, touch, see, etc etc. I am a 30-year-old deaf woman who does not have any Jewish heritage or have connections to the Shoah. I don't even know if I was a Jewish boy in my dream. The dream is through the perspective of a little boy, around 8 to 10 years old. I wore gray
knickers with gray jacket (wool), and I had on clunky brown shoes, and I was really chubby and blond haired. Before I found myself in this boy's body, I was a part of this group (in dream still) that went to a Children's Museum somewhere in Europe. It has that German or East Europe feeling, the architecture. I don't even know where the town is, or whether this particular Children's
Museum actually exists, and we went into the building (it's like a big mansion with lots of gothic windows and gables, etc etc) then all of sudden I fell off the stairs over the banister, and I found myself in this boy's body, and it felt like it was 1940's and I was running down the road that went out of this village, and I had a friend with me. He was dark-haired boy, slender with cotton-like shorts and shirt. We wanted to greet the soldiers coming up the road. Some villager had sighted these soldiers coming up from the forest and relayed the message to the people. We heard about these soldiers so we thought it would be fun to catch a glimpse of them. We were naive, and apparently the war has not touched this particular village yet. I don't even know if it was at the beginning or toward the end, but what really freaked me out was when my friend and I ran up the road, and the soldiers saw us, they gunned us down. I was totally taken by surprise and I could feel the bullets biting into my chest and I saw my friend's expression, and it was a look of shocked surprise which I'm sure that my face mirrored. And then I floated away from this body and the soldiers just walked over our bodies, and I woke up. I was about 20 years old when I had this dream. What convinced me that it is one of my past lives is the details, the thoughts, the feelings, the conversations I had with my friend and the people we just left to run out onto the road, the environment. I am never that particularly fascinated with WWII literature or movies . . . I even know what my name was . . .it was like Wilhelm or something like that.
Dream 50
I am a 33 year old white woman, raised Lutheran. I am mostly French and German.
I am not church religious but am spiritual. I just recently had one dream that seemed like the Holocaust, which i know little about and don't think about. I was in my house I grew up in in suburban philadelphia. I could hear the sounds of war and thought that Iraq must have invaded somehow. Then after that died down, they were patroling the streets in open air vehicles. I was peeking out my bedroom window, waiting for a chance to escape, thinking it was probably too late and the neighborhood was surrounded. I was also occupied setting up bedding and securing baby food and bottles for my children in the small attic room i have behind my bedroom closet. I was frustrated with my father who was casually washing dishes. I was telling him we had to go now. He was in no hurry. I went outside and there was a bus with 4 people on it. I asked if I could go with them. They said yes and that they were going to Portland. If this is a past life dream i wonder if it was supposed to be Poland.
This dream definitely struck me as Holocaust oriented. When I started to think of some of my other dreams, they add up to support this a bit. I have one strong one where I thought i was in jail. I was outside though, behind barbed wire. I am looking through the wire past a dirt road to a small service building. I was thinking i would climb the fence and get across that road and i didn't care if i got cut by the wire. I have many others that are escape oriented where i am being chased by some authorities for a crime i did not commit. I am always frustrated by my family dragging their feet and not coming with me. I usually have a head start and then somehow get caught.
In my present life I am severly claustrophobic and obsessed with my families safety.
I also wanted to mention that when I watched the movie "The Great Escape" I was so stressed out I was half leaving the room, getting up and pacing. I was like "my god that movie stresses me out." I didn't think about it then. But i have never had such a reaction to a movie before.
Dream 51
I am not Jewish or anything....although my mother grew up in Germany during the last World War. I am 40 years old now. Anyway...I have a reocurring dream since I was very young...about 9 or 10.
Always in the dream I'm a man...running from the Nazi's and hiding on rooftops. I've had this dream over 10 times....and it's very strange to be a man in a dream...because I am really a woman...The dreams feel so real...I can recall so much detail.
I also have a deep feeling of kinship with Jewish stuff. I was born a Catholic and raised Catholic. I have no idea why.
Dream 52
I have no personal/family connection to the Holocaust, however, I wanted to let you know that I find your interest in dreams and the Shoah very interesting myself. I am a third grade teacher, and I'm taking a Master's level course on the Holocaust while working toward permanent teacher's certification in New York state. I was working on a paper for my Holocaust class, and I had planned to visit a student's mother who is in prison the next day. Well, having prison and concentration camps on my mind, needless to say, I had a very fitful, restless sleep. I dreamed that was a prisoner and had lost track of my mother. In doing research I have read testimonies of that very thing. I'm learning a lot in the course, despite the fact that it is emotionally exhausting
Dream 53
41 years old, Episcopalian, from the American South. Female. Always most attracted to Jewish teachers, friends, men. Studied German and Russian and lived in both countries for a year in the '80's. Have been fascinated by WWII and the Holocaust all my life.
About ten years ago I had a dream about a concentration camp. I can't remember any details, but the experience of the dream was intensely that of "being there then." Upon waking I felt sure that I had actually been there in the night. Only particular I recall is that I might have been a woman, but I'm not sure about this. I still have the emotional memory of the dream, though. Complete desperation. Most horrible experience of my life, which may be a strange thing to say about a dream.
In the summer of 2001, I traveled to the town of Dachau to visit a cousin who lives there. Visited the camp--a bleak excursion, of course, but strangely enough my reaction was not strong. A few days later I set out to take the commuter train into Munich, but at the last minute (of course) changed my mind and returned to the camp for a second visit. I was in one of the buildings--a work-room, or some reconstructed barracks--and happened to be alone in the place at the time. The sun was shining strongly through the windows. Suddenly a man emerged from a door to a room I hadn't yet visited. He was in his late 60's or early 70's. The next few seconds happened very slowly. I found myself compelled to stare at this man's face, because it seemed, by a trick of the glare from the window behind him, that he was missing his nose. He was looking back at me. Of course no words were exchanged, but I had some impression of mildness or gentleness from him. Also--and it seems so trivial that I'm almost embarassed to mention it--his shirt was an intense royal blue, an important "spiritual color" for me. Then the feeling of suspension ended, and I saw that his face was not disfigured after all. He exited the building, and I moved into the room he'd just left. A film crew was there, talking very quietly. A little later I saw them on the grounds, by the foundations of the original barracks, interviewing the same man. He had one arm folded across his waist and was holding his chin pensively with his other hand as he spoke into the camera in German. Again, they were very quiet about their work and the scene was a little tense. It was obvious that they wanted to be as discreet as possible. I guessed that this man must have been at Dachau during the Holocaust, though he would have been very young at the time. My impression was that he was a Gentile.
Then I remembered a detail from my trip to the Glyptothek museum in Munich a few days previously--the Roman and Greek busts. They're missing their noses. Throughout this trip I'd been associating Nazi Germany (das dritte Reich) with the hubris of the Roman Empire. The camp is located on the Alterroemerstrasse in Dachau. Those statues were relieved of their noses by early Christians. I suppose this is something of a melange of imagery, and that nothing coherent can be extracted from it. All I can say is that the event was most unusual and affecting, the more so since I am not given to fugue-experiences in waking life.
Three weeks later I was back in New York. Sept. 11 happened. Saw nothing of it, not
even on TV (don't have one). Lay immobile on my couch in Queens for the next three days, locked into the horror-reports on the radio, with the chemical stench of the WTC site 10 miles away coming through my windows.
This event and its consequences obviously have deep roots in the Holocaust experience and the foundation of the modern state of Israel. Not sure how to sort it all out, the right and the wrong of it. Just hoping for peace like everyone else.
I hope this account will be useful to someone. It has been a revelation to find this
site: when I found the dream-story of bathroom/shower-rooms I felt a shock of recognition, since I've had a recurring nightmare on the same theme for years.
Dream 54
When I was growing up, I had a number of holocaust dreams; now they have left me (knock on wood). In the earlier dreams, I was always in camps - the packed earth underfoot, the barbed wire and electricity ahead. I was thin, but not horridly so yet, in my grey sack dress, doing some pointless work detail, and I was alone in my world. I wanted to kill myself, to get it over with, to go to the wires, but I hadn't even the energy to do that. It had already been going on so long, I was so tired of the suffering, and I was alone - it is not that there weren't other guards and prisoners around, but I had no connection to them, I was alone and I wanted so to die, I wanted it to end. I never killed myself in this dream, just stood there in that endless moment, hopeless and grey and wanting to die.
Once in this dream, they were moving bodies, and there was a little girl who had been shot, but wasn't dead yet (I know this isn't factual) being carried in a cart(?) of some sort, in a pile of other bodies. She was in shock, and was saying 'please, sir, it hurts; please, sir, it hurts.'
And I hated her for her futile politeness, for not knowing she was dead yet (no matter that she was living), for not knowing we were all dead, for disturbing me. And hated myself for the way I felt; and wished she would just shut up, shut up and die.
That was a bitter dream.
The last dream I had, a few years ago, I was a young boy. I had quarreled with my family, and ran away in my brown coat across the fields, just the way children do, in spite and expecting to be found. I fell asleep near a road, my cap on, and it was cold. While I was sleeping, two day laborers came whistling down the road in the early morning, carrying shovels over their shoulders. They saw me, realized I was a little Jewboy, and casually one of them swung his shovel down onto me, the back of my sleeping head. The first blow hit off a bit, and slid across my skull; my scalp fell forward across my face. The second blow killed me. They went off again down the road; it was all very casual and almost joking. They thought it was a better end for me, really, and a bit of fun for them.
I am 40 years old, with no family ties to the Holocaust. I am not Jewish, or German. After a fair amount of Holocaust research, the camp dreams stopped. They were the worst, so terribly bleak and hopeless.
Dream 55
I found your site, I was wondering if I was the only one who had these "Nazi Dreams". I am not a Jew, My grandparents came to the States from Europe in 1910 or so (Bohemia)
Ever since I was a small child I have been having the dreams that the Nazis are chasing me. I am always terrified and completly desparate to hide. I feel so afraid that it is almost like I begin thinking with basic animal instinct. Total fear and running, looking for anywhere to hide. Now an adult, My husband wakes me up often and says I am running and moaning and crying. I awake in a sweat and my heart is booming. I can almost understand the terror of these poor ones who died.
Dream 56
Only this week have I come to know about this site. A family member saw a show on TV and called the next day to tell me about it. She knows that ever since I was a child I have been having very detailed dreams about The German Occupation and the effects it had on the people in Europe. And me.
I first remember the dreams coming when I was about 8 years old. They frightened me so much that when I slept at night I faced the wall, tucked my blankets under the mattress so that no part of me extended over the edge of the bed, and even practiced shallow breathing and sleeping without making a sound, not moving.
I see colors. I smell things. I can read things. And I can feel things.
The last dream I had...
There were about 200 of us. I am alone, about 14. It was evening and very cold. Our clothing was wearing out but not rags and we had shoes, hats and coats on. As a group we had left the place where we lived and were traveling through the countryside. Quietly. Even the small children and babies were quiet. I could smell the air thick with the damp. As we entered a wooded area I could feel the tree branches brush against me and was aware of everyone else moving along with me. We knew it was necessary to keep moving and helped those who were getting tired. Some people helped parents carry the small children when the parents were to tired to hold them any more. Our cloths were getting wet and so were our shoes. I can still see the colors of the woods and the people that night. It was getting darker.
We came out of the woods at the top of an embankment at a rivers edge. It was about 4 feet high and below it was a narrow space next to the river. The river was quite wide and the other side was the place we needed to reach for safety. As everyone came out of the woods and stood looking at the river we started to hear something in the woods behind us. Without anyone saying a word we all knew who was coming. Panic started to overcome me and the others were feeling it too. I could feel the panic everywhere around me. Still, no one made a sound.
I knew that I would have to swim the cold river and I was afraid. As I stood there thinking about this and looking at everyone else spread along the embankment THEY CAME OUT OF THE WOODS. I knew by the dark long fitted coats and the hats they were wearing who they were. They had leashes in their hands with large tracking dogs pulling them along. The dogs were in a hurry to catch up with us. Guns were holstered on the men's hips and some had guns over their shoulders.
I did what I had to do. Without speaking about it ever, I knew that every person had to think of themselves at this point. It was better to save a few then loose everyone. So I jumped down the embankment and ran to the water and ran out as far as I could. Then I began to swim. I could hear gun fire and moaning, no screams. And I could hear the dogs getting more excited. The men with the guns never made a sound.
Bullets were coming past me so I dove under the water. I used the rocks on the bottom to hold myself down. It hurt my fingers doing that and I could feel them against my stomach as I moved along. I could see the shapes and colors of the rocks. They covered the entire bottom of the river. In the dusk I could see the tracks of the bullets coming through the water and hear the sounds they made around me.
I don't know how long I was in the water. When I reached the other shore I knew that I still needed to inch along on my stomach to the grasses growing there. I was still not sure that I would be safe on this side of the river. Maybe we had made a mistake. I knew that I needed to be careful and be sure before I gave my self away.
I lost track of everyone else behind me.
It took some time to move through the grasses before I came to a building. It was 2 stories, stone blocks and I could see only one window on its side with no glass in it. It was hard to stand up. When I was able to I looked just over the window sill and listened to the people talking inside. I could see that this was an inn at an L curve in the road and the river was behind the building. I could read the road sign and the name of the inn.
My dream ended.
It takes me hours and some times days to loose the feeling that what I have just dreamt isn't real. The feeling that it was real hangs on to me. Some times I am tired for hours or days after one of these dreams. I know I was there even though I know it was only a dream. I remember everything about it. And I know sometime I'll have another dream . They come like installments. Always different but always about the Germans and my somehow surviving.
Dream 57
Between the ages of two and three I was plagued with recurring
nightmares (I'm 54 now). I remember them and my parents confirmed that
I'd wake up screaming two or three times a week.
I'd be in a place with low buildings like barracks and mud on the
ground. There were nasty men with German shepherd dogs. The place had
an incredibly oppressive quality, and a horrible sweet smelling smoke hung
in the air. Multiple layers of wire fences surrounded the place.
I also had a strange dream, then, that I felt was connected with the
nightmares: A young girl softly singing in an unfamiliar language. This
was indoors, in a dark cold place.
I don't know whether these were shoah dreams, but they sort of seem
like it...
Over time, the dreams changed to dreams of escaping from prison, then
they stopped entirely.
Dream 58
I want to preface everything I am writing by making it clear upfront that I am not Jewish, I was raised in a very devout Catholic home, though from childhood I wanted to convert to Judaism (long story).
I checked with an organization that has says my last name is a strong indicator, though not a guarantee, of Jewish ancestry. Some Jewish friends say the name has a "Hebrew root." I don't know what to make of it all...
I don't have a clue as what, if any, relevance this would have to my dreams, but it's interesting in itself. Anyway, back to the dreams.
Since childhood, I have had a fear of being kidnapped, and a particularly vivid dream of sleeping in my bed as a child, getting up to look out of the front window and seeing a silver 1930-40ish car, scared to death that someone was coming to take me away. The dream remains as vivid today as the night I had it.
I am 43-years-old and all of my life I have also had a recurring dream of being chased and running into a synagogue to hid. In the dream, the outside of the synagogue is just a beat-up looking storefront, nothing to indicate that it is a house of worship in the least. No stained glass, nothing.
Inside the dream synagogue, there are rows of chairs of people praying. It is very dark and dingy inside, and I think, "why are they praying in the dark?" People are sitting on wooden folding chairs with some sort of separation between men and women. It looks like a temporary synagogue, something set up in a hurry.
There is a podium in the front of the room and a dark blue cloth with a Star of David on it, and a rabbi. I had never seen a rabbi before, but somehow I recognized him as a rabbi.
I had the dream so often that some close relatives call it my "Rabbi Dream." In the dream, the rabbi tells me to sit on the opposite side of the room. I tell him I can't stay, I don't speak Hebrew. The rabbi says, "you will when you get to the other side" and that I can stay with them. That's how the dream ends.
I usually have this dream during times of stress, and it increased and intensified for a while after I saw an old movie newsreel of the liberation of the death camps in high school history class back in the 1970's. Until that class, I knew nothing about the death camps, Hitler or anything.
I remember taking the history teacher to task for not preparing the class for what we were going to see. Somehow, I feel the recurring dream of the synagogue and Holocaust film are related, but I don't know how or why.
My mother's reaction to my dream was always “why Jewish? Why not a church and a priest?" To be perfectly honest, I was raised in a very devout Catholic home and has been a mystery to me.
Dream 59
I am not Jewish, but two generations of my family has fought in Germany, (WWI, WWII) I lost an Uncle in WW II. I am a typical American mutt, mixture of Irish, French, English and I have found family that came from Syria. But on the documents I have obtain on records on them they crossed out their names, and native language.
I would call what is occurring to me a type of haunting, a strong emotional under current within me, which comes in dreams and when reading, times and places, I am not sure how to explain it. It so hard, but with me it came about during my first tour with the US Army in the former West Germany, my second tour in West Germany, even stronger feelings & dreams came about.
During fighting in Desert Storm in 1991, there was such an upheaval, within me as I experienced the hate the Arabs Soldiers I met, and their hate for Israel they expressed.
All I know is, I don’t understand it myself, why the Jewish people have been and are treated as such, none of it makes sense to me. Such issues pain me deeply – That’s all I can share with you.
Dream 60
I have no connection to the Shoah, I am a 34 year old English women, a wife and a mother, my parents are both Irish and I was born Here in England, I was raised as a Roman Catholic but opted for a religion free adulthood, I have no Jewish friends and no reason to experience the Dream that I dreamt just over three months ago.
Now that I have described myself I will attempt to describe the dream. This is not an experience of a Victim but an experience of an Abuser, "A Nazi" and it is disturbing and graphic.
In the dream, I am one of two male German Officers, with us are twelve Jewish Baby boys, their ages range between two years and five years, they are naked from the waist down as though they had sodden their clothing and discarded they garments to avoid the uncomfortableness of their situation, they are well nourished and well cared for, they have thick hair and two at the back have lighter colored hair with beautiful huge brown eyes, they look related. I am aware that the state of these children is due to the fact that they have traveled without sanitation and fluids to drink, they smell of their own body waste and I can visibly see a couple of the boys skin rashes around they genitals from where they have developed a urine irritation, the boys are stood in two rows of six, I am stood in front of them, the other officer is stood behind them, they are utterly terrified, crying and pleading for their parents and water, I am full of ego and I despise the other officer almost as much as I despise the screaming boys in front of me, I feel hatred for the whole situation, I know I am going to murder them and I want it over with so that I can go and have some alcohol, we are within the camp grounds, the floor is muddy, there is a building but not too near us, the other officer is taking great pleasure in upsetting the boys as much as he can, he shouts abuse and tells them that their parents don't want them any more, the poor boys I hate them for making me feel their pain, I don't want to pity them but I do, I want to get it over with but the other officer is taking too long, we begin to quarrel, then the other officer takes a glass bottle of clear liquid and pours it over the boys heads, the boys gag and their crying stops as they struggle to breath, the fumes of the liquid make one of the smaller ones collapse, I know what I am to do, I feel that I have done it before to prove something to the other guard, I understand it's not how we usually kill them, I feel as though I am showing off, I light the match and I throw it upon the children, they all go up in flames, no screams just flaying arms and collapsing knees.
I only had this dream once, I hope never to have it again, it has had a very deep effect upon my self, I have never had a dream feel so real, I find it hard to change my 10 month old nieces nappy as the smell of her urine gives me flash backs of this horrid dream. The wet muddy earth the smell of the burning flesh, the cries, the boys were speaking a foreign accent as was I but I understood, I am not educated with any other language other than my native English so that's amazing to here myself having a conversation in another language, I was tall, slightly overweight, light haired and I loved myself to an extent where I not only hated Jews but thought I was above even my own kind, I was evil and revengeful, for many weeks after this dream I was in a state of heart break, it hurt me every time I looked at my three year old son.
I don't know if this is a case of me being reincarnated, in fact I truly hope it's not because what I witnessed in that dream no one should have to, I don't want to believe that any human being could do that to another let alone me in a past life, it's just too painful and too horrific.
The last thing that I want to write is this, I want you to know that somehow this dream feels more like a memory than my actual memories, it feels more real than some of my childhood memories that have become less clearer with time but this dream doesn’t, it feels as real and as clear as though I were stood in that mud torturing those poor boys just yesterday.
I don't know much about the laws of reincarnation but perhaps my own childhood abuse was the result of my own past life doings, you see I was severely abused, sexually, violently and mentally as a child, maybe what goes around comes around, just a thought.
Dream 61
I have come to your web site by chance. I have been searching the Internet for solutions to deal with the recurring nightmares and fears of my 4 year old son.
I have, from the time I was 10, awakened at 3am with the knowledge that my baby is being taken from me by someone. I have been forced to watch as he is tortured. I carry this guilt and it has haunted me in waking hours and many restless nights. I have traveled all over the world and these dreams have followed me. When I read your web site, I felt a quickening. I felt an epiphany, I guess.
Now my son, is having recurrent wakenings with voices and dogs coming to take him away. He is very scared and I don't know how to comfort him.
Dream 62
I am a 21 year old Conservative Jew. I grew up with semi-traditional Jewish values, and ever since I was 5 years old ive been have a recurring dream. I'm always in school, depending on how old I am at the time of me having the dream affects which school I am in. I'm sitting in a classroom and all of a sudden an announcement is made- "Here is the list of all the students that need to report to the office" The man rounds up all the Jews in my school into a huge room and we are taken to some sort of huge building.. I see all the jews from my hometown.. and from college.. my parents.. my grandparents.. and i realize that it's all happening again... only its in the US. I'm petrified.. I'm trying to run... men are yelling.. shooting people.. I don't know where to go, what to do. I am utterly trapped. Images of gray and rain and death appear through out the dream.. I can't breath- the room is spinning and life seems to be ending.. I wake up like I've just fallen. I'm always shaking uncontrollably and feel the sudden urge to look outside my window to see if anything has changed.. It was frightening as a child, and even more so now.. It's confusing why I am unconsciously fearing this happening in the United States....
Dream 63
I am 48 yrs old, raised Catholic, have always felt on the surface of things "religious", although my entire life's motivation has been my spiritual search and longing. I have never been able to say, "I am a Christian."
Ten years ago I went through treatment for cancer. At that time I began having intensely emotional dreams about my Grandfather. He came to me asking for forgiveness and said I deserved the best. He wanted to give me a gift of a "brand new car."
I began feeling a pull towards anything Jewish. I had dreams where I could read Hebrew. I dreamed that my family was under attack and soldiers broke into our home. I was terrified because my sister and I were separated from our parents. We ran to hide. The sky was gray and raining ash.
I dreamed I was in the garage of the house I grew up in. The garage was full of letters. I was standing waist deep in letters. They were in Hebrew and said, We are your ancestors and we are praying for you.
I often dream of "The Train That Would Not Stop." If I even visualize train tracks that dead-end I am moved to tears. The family story is that my great-grandfather "died on a train. " This would have been before the Shoah. Probably the Russian pogrom in the late 19th century.
At the time these dreams began. I began to research my father's family history. What I found was unbelievable. My anti-semitic family had a Jewish surname. My Grandfather's name was changed (Americanized) at Ellis Island and my father's mother raised the children Russian Orthodox. My Grandfather, however, had always told us our name meant "Little Bird" in Russian. I worked with a woman who told me she couldn't help me unless our name was listed as Jewish. She found our name and told me "It means Sparrow." I then found out my Great Grandmother was a German Jew. Growing up the story was that my family came from the Ukraine. It turns out I was the one to tell my father his grandmother's name! The erasure of a part of our heritage in one generation!
After ten years of these dreams and tentative exploration and involvement with the Temple here, I have an appointment with the Rabbi tomorrow. I am not sure consciously why I have to talk about conversion. I guess I'm ready to follow something deeper in my heart.
Dream 64
I am a 43-year-old college student, wife, and mother. I was not born into a Jewish family and in fact was raised by my great aunt and uncle who were anti-Semitic. In my thirties I felt obsessively drawn into Judaism but have not formally converted. I am a singer (non-professional) and try to learn as much Jewish music as I can. When given some old Jewish music, upon trying it out, it unfolded before me and I was able to sing it, much to my surprise, with fluent phrasing and ease and an emotional longing. It felt like a part of my soul. Could this be an indication of a past Jewish life?
I just had a disturbing dream early this morning and recognize that it was about the ShoahThe dream was enormously clear in visual detail, however I could not see myself or know the names of the woman or the man in the white coat. I was abruptly awoken out of, otherwise, I might not have remembered it.
In the dream I was inside a building and I was looking for something, thinking about its whereabouts, more than actually looking, but going between rooms glancing over the details of the room without making any extra gestures. Finally I saw what I was looking for and there was no one in the room, so I quickly took one ladies ankle boot and a fur coat. I draped the fur coat over my left arm as though it were mine and hid the boot under it close to my body in the lining. I felt an urgency to get it to some woman. I don’t know who. There were men in uniforms in the building. They didn’t seem to notice me so much. I heard a series of loud noises like firecrackers and I ran to a window in a room off the hallway in which I stood. I realized I was on the second floor of the building. I looked out onto a vast yard of dirt. I saw a woman in the middle of the yard sitting on the dirt. She was wearing a white summer dress with a full skirt, but I knew it was very cold outside. I sensed that she was afraid to move. She was not the woman that I was trying to get to. More noises, and men yelling something, and screams…and then silence.
I did not see any shooting, but I knew the sounds were gunshots and I knew that people were being killed. I knew I had to move quickly even with only one shoe. As I walked quickly down the hall I it opened up into a common area in which there were more men in uniform laughing and drinking coffee. Upon seeing me, one came over to me with a handful of bracelets, some of them gold. He said that they should have a proper owner as he laid them in my hands – there was talk of how they were surely not gold, that the owners could not really own gold – it must be only brass, because it like the owners is only an illusion of something worth having. I made an attempt to laugh at their ugly jokes in order to get past them, which I did and in a room I saw a man with his back turned to me. He had a white lab coat on over his clothes, like doctors would wear. He was of medium height, and a slightly stocky build. He had black hair, which was slicked back, and olive skin. He had a mustache. His trousers were subtly striped black wool. And his shoes were very shiny. I knew that he was a friend and quietly called to him. He turned around to accept the boot that I was pushing to him. I knew he would get it to the woman. I felt the gold bracelets in my hand and the fur coat on my arm and I felt sick. I woke up.
Dream 65
I am a 52 year old woman born into a Christian family. The only ties that I have to Judaism are through friendships. My paternal grandparents were both from Romania. My grandmother was a Romanian gypsy from what I have been told and from what I read on these other websites, I see that the gypsies were persecuted by the Nazis as well as the Jews.
I had a very disturbing dream about 6 months ago. I was waiting in line with other people and we were told by somebody in a uniform to take off our clothes because we were going to take a shower. I was a young dark haired girl, maybe 20 years old at the most. I like the others had my clothes folded and put them on the bench outside of the shower room. When I entered the shower there were no separate shower stalls which I found to be strange because there were men and women alike with me. Looking up, there were what appeared to be nozzles for water on the ceiling. Someone closed the doors and the man standing next to me yelled, "It's gas, don't breathe". I had already taken a breath and my lungs felt like they were on fire. I must have died because the next thing I knew was that I walked through the door without opening it and wandered outside.
Dream 66
This dream was so real to me ever since I have been studying judaism and have been overwhelmed with how home I feel. The more I dig the more interesting it gets, apparently my mother's grandmother was Jewish.
In my dream I was at a dark restaurant and was approached to sign a huge long thick book with names on a list which thought was a petition.
I began to write my name remembering only that as I got to my last name and began spelling "Newman" as I know it; I got to Ne and then I wrote "u" instaead of "w".
At this point I stopped.
I looked hard at the paper I was writing on, I could see something unsettling in it's background.
The background of the pages looked charcoal like, like pencil smudged but the smudge made images and as I looked closely the images were charred bodies.
Suddenly I saw a red swastika.
I stopped writing my name at the "u".
A horrible sense of fear swept over me.
It was a list of names, a sort of jewish census death list.
The men who had brought the book over then became quite hostile at seeing my desertion of the article, one then grabbed at my arm and began to chase my friend Sandra and I out of the building.
THE SHOAH DREAM PROJECT
