A nightmare is different than an anxiety dream, although the latter is bad enough. But whereas an anxiety dream makes a person feel uneasy, a nightmare transports the dreamer into a world of pure evil in which the sleeper feels a much deeper sense of dread and dislocation. It is a relief to wake up and realize it’s only a dream. But the nightmare reveals our deepest fears and the vulnerability that comes with being human.
Fairy tales are powerful because they often deal with nightmare scenarios that are then overcome. The hero meets the witch or ogre or troll or wild animal that wishes to kidnap or eat or kill, and the plucky little boy or girl has to call on cleverness, goodness, kindly spirit animals, fairy godmothers, or other benign forces that exist as well in the universe of the dream and manage to help the child counteract the evil.
The child knows, or senses, that vulnerability. Something might lurk under the bed or in the closet, something might come to get the child and snatch him or her away from the comfort and protection of home. But fortunately that happens very rarely.
And yet it happens. The Israeli children kidnapped on October 7 are examples of the horror of a nightmare come true. This also is true for any kidnapped child (or adult, actually), some of whom have become quite well-known. Elizabeth Smart, for example. Those three girls in Cleveland, Ohio – remember? – kept in captivity for about 10 years by the sadistic Ariel Castro. Steven Stayner. And many more.
All of those kidnap victims I just mentioned were sexually abused. You may or may not be familiar with the details, and yet that was a prominent part of what happened to them. Some managed to heal quite well after they were freed, and some did much less well.
Yet another kidnapped sexual abuse victim was Patty Hearst, whom I’ve written about previously in this post. Many people are unaware of that aspect of her kidnapping, perhaps because she was a bit older (19) when it happened and probably because she seemed to voluntarily join her kidnappers in their crimes later on. But she was tortured first: blindfolded, kept in a closet for weeks, and raped.
Now that almost all of the Israeli children Hamas kidnapped have come home, their stories are coming out. And it’s clear that they have experienced extremely serious trauma, on par with nightmare. Here is a discussion of some of what happened:
These children – and their families – were suddenly plunged into a truly nightmare world. I mean that in the literal sense, although of course they were awake and not asleep. Their real world because nightmarish. The protection and love on which children rely had disappeared, except for the slightly luckier ones who were with family or people they knew and loved. But they were all – including those adults – completely at the mercy of evil people. And as Patty Hearst herself said much later on (in a 2002 Larry King interview):
You know how when people have been held hostage, one of the first questions they get asked is, how were you treated? And the answer is almost always I was treated, you know, pretty well. And by that, they usually mean they weren’t killed.
I am very glad the children are back. I assume it will take most of them a long time to heal and attain a semblance of normalcy, but I also assume they never will be the same. But I hope they will – as Hemingway said – be strong at the broken places.
