A front-page New York Times news article (19 Mar 07) begins with a sleep dream that came in the midst of a waking-life nightmare. „Sharp Increase in Vanishings Haunts Iraqis. He comes to her in dreams, dressed in the blue police uniform he wore the day he disappeared. ‚I’m alive,‘ he tells Intisar Rashid, his wife and the mother of their five children. ‚I’m alive. And so she keeps searching. Ever since the Thursday two months ago when her husband failed to come home, Ms. Rashid has tried to find the man she loves."
The world which engendered this dream is the landscape of war. “The past year of dizzying violence here has produced thousands of Iraqis like Ms. Rashid – sad-eyed seekers caught in an endless loop of inquiry and disappointment. Burdened by grief without end or answers, they face a set of horrors as varied and factured as Iraq itself.“
In the unspeakable chaos that is shattering Iraq, where death and unimgineable atrocities are the stuff of Iraqi life, a sleep dream comes to a woman, offering her hope. The dream is an island of coherence in the maelstrom swirling around the dreamer. It is an emotional ground upon which she gains purchase, from which to then cope with the disappearance and undertake the thousands of beaurocratic steps needed to try to find her husband. Chances are slim that her husband will be found alive. The sleep dream reminds Ms. Rashid that he will always remain alive within her, a truth she can hold onto in the hurricane of violence churning up Iraq.