Even in our sleep, we are not ok

Last night I managed 2 hrs of sleep from about 5-7am.

I dreamed I was driving some kind of motorbike bus, with hundreds of passengers behind me. I knew I had to cross over a wooden bridge that was going to break and that I was going to lose people. I put my foot down and charged across it and didn’t look back.

Then my vehicle plunged under water. I told myself if I could get above ground as quickly as possible I could minimize casualties, aware that I couldn’t save everyone.

As I came back to the surface I could see people I had lost, already sinking to the bottom as I tried in vain to catch them with my hands.

As soon as I had surfaced I was given another task which was to somehow find and rescue babies that I could give to families who had lost their children.

I was scrambling around closed down stores trying to find nappies, bottles and worrying about which baby formula would be the best for the babies, trying to read the backs of the labels but the letters kept moving.

We are not ok. This is not ok. And even in our sleep, we are not ok.

We see them when we close our eyes. Their beautiful faces. Their cries for help that went unanswered. Their bravery in the face of unimaginable horrors. We shake our heads silently, unable to process how this is our reality, our brains trying their hardest to keep the reality from crushing us.

We are paralyzed

We are broken

We are terrified

We are angry

We are tired

We are gutted

My heart bleeds and weeps and mourns for every single lost soul. Every bright light that was snuffed out. And for what?

I want this whole living nightmare to be a distant Facebook memory that I can look back on and say “at least it doesn’t hurt quite as much now when I think about it”. A scar where the gaping wound now sits and is reopened over and over.

I want to go back to worrying about how much time my son is spending on his screen, to making jokes about my laundry piles, to taking my recycling to the bottle banks, to cursing at Instagram glitches and to looking up recipes for new salads and desserts to make for shabbat.

But there’s no going back. The damage is done, continues to be done and is irreversible, beyond repair. There is only our lives before October 7th 2023 and our lives after.