Murderers Among Us -or- Neo-Nazis in Oslo

Mary, 26

I have had lucid dreams and nightmares I've been able to recall. I've had hypnopompic and hypnogogic experiences. Sometimes I can fly, and I most often feel as though I have visited somewhere upon waking.  I am typically exhausted after a night of dreaming, talking, yelling, kicking, etc. I have never had the same dream twice. Two themes in my dreams that are consistent are those involving water and my fear of drowning, and the holocaust. This latter subject matter is what I find most disturbing to me. One dream involved what I can only assume were the crematoria. I was young, not a child but not a woman. I was standing in a line with many women, who one by one, climbed a ladder up to a large metal, cylindrical pool filled with acid. A female German SS stood guard as she directed the people, one by one, to jump into the vat of acid. 

My dream simply shows this scene, all of us standing there, helpless. The overwhelming emotion is absolute terror that I cannot get away, that I am doomed to this experience. I am horrified -as I am watching myself in this dream - at the manner in which these people are being killed. In the dream, we are all quiet, expressionless, as we are led to what is to be our eventual death. It is very dark, and quiet. I know of no history of Jewish lineage in my family, but I have to wonder about a past life for I cannot understand from where these visions and this knowledge is derived - how can something like this come from inside of me?

Thank you for any insight you might be able to provide.

Mr Hagen's Reply; Neo-Nazis in Oslo -or- Murderers Among Us

As a child of a Holocaust survivor, the dream above strongly resonates with the dreams I had at about the same age. The sense of helplessness, horror and dysphoria, the Jews were like cattle being led to the slaughter. This dream is a reminder of those horrors, lest we forget.

Simon Wiesenthal wrote a book Murderers Among Us...those murderers are still among us as we speak. Neo-Nazi terrorists are alive and well, as witnessed in the recent handiwork of Anders Behring Breivik. From the perspective of the victims, the dreams of Holocaust survivors is given voice by Primo Levi The Drowned and the Saved who tells us; "Almost all the survivors, verbally or in their memoirs, remember a dream which frequently recurred during the nights of imprisonment, varied in its detail but uniform in its substance: they had returned home and with a passion and a relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed not even listened to. In the most typical (and most cruel) form, the interlocutor turned and left in silence." Interestingly you report about your dreams thematic connection between the fear of drowning and the Holocaust. Carl Jung would call this phenomena synchronicity. The voices of the Holocaust still circulate especially in the minds and dreams of Children of Holocaust Survivors, of which I count myself as one.

As to how you could have a dream come from inside you like this, Jung's synchronicity concept is one answer. Another is that the dream allows us to plug into the all the life stories, both light and dark, comic and tragic, circulating on the planet. From a popular culture perspective, there are many films produced about the Holocaust perhaps you have seen some of them. We are all part of this small world of comic and tragic stories, circulating on the planet. Said another way, if we develop empathy for others and humanity, then we are all responsible for the well being of all those living on the planet.

Plugging into the dark side of humanities nightly mentations, psychopathic dreams on the planet are revealed that include crimes, hatreds, prejudices and violence which are all alive and well, as your dream points out. The social psychological diffusion of the responsibility becomes a social organizational vicious cycle that has gone on for countless generations breeding further future tragedies of the commons such as the one recently seen in Olso.

I have posted a dream interpretation Children's Theatre of Cruelty and Literature of Hate of the voice of a small child's sense of helplessness in the face of psychopathic monsters, which exemplifies the theatre of cruelty that Primo Levi speaks of. It begs the question of whether dreams of our children's children will be dominated by darkness, or will humanity finally learn to see the light?

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