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"I'm on a beach covered in soot. There's smoke everywhere. Giant dead fish lie on the shore. As I get closer, I see they're made of metal, with graffiti on their backs. The stench in the air is unbearable. I try to leave, but I can't. The sea is gray and foul. I'm completely alone."
“If a fisherman loves fish, a psychoanalyst loves dreams,” says Dr. Hilit Arel-Brodsky, a psychoanalyst. Even fish dreams. And those, she says, were surprisingly common after October 7. Fish swimming in murky waters. Fish out of water. One doesn’t need psychoanalytic training to link the mute fish with the helplessness felt by Israelis since the attack. “Maybe it's an expression of the part within us that feels voiceless and powerless,” Arel-Brodsky suggests.
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A dream can tell what the dreamer can’t yet articulate
(Drawing: Roman Samborskyi, Shutterstock, Neta Lee)
But it wasn’t just fish that filled our dreams after the massacre—animal cubs and babies also featured heavily. Creatures without a voice. Defenseless. “I’m in the rubble,” someone recalled, “trying to rescue baby animals. But I don’t have enough space or arms to gather them all—a kitten, a chick, puppies. I try stuffing them into my pockets and I’m afraid they’ll fall.” Perhaps it's a reflection of the paralyzing fear for the next generation—those who depend on us to survive. “The events triggered deeply rooted existential anxieties in everyone—especially about children,” Arel-Brodsky says.
Even before we could speak about the trauma—before the social media posts, the books, the documentaries, and the soul-searching—our dreams were the first to respond. “The dream tells what the dreamer can’t yet articulate,” says Arel-Brodsky, who heads the psychoanalytic psychotherapy program at Bar-Ilan University. “Freud called dreams ‘the royal road to the unconscious.’ He believed our desires and inner conflicts surface in dreams, which help us process and digest them.”
Freud’s premise is what led Arel-Brodsky and her colleague, Prof. Orit Taubman-Ben-Ari, to ask the public to share their dreams following October 7. “Dreams are usually a deeply private phenomenon, but because we’re all living through a collective trauma, we knew they would be heavily influenced by what happened,” she says.
Within a short time, 203 people—men and women, single and married, some directly affected by the October 7 terror attack, others not—filled out detailed questionnaires. Their dreams are being analyzed for a forthcoming academic paper. “The response was overwhelming, as if people were truly seeking someone to listen.”
And perhaps the very act of writing down and sharing the dream was, in itself, therapeutic. The dreams that poured in were dense with meaning, filled with detail—crying, fear, but also love and tenderness. Stories of love and darkness, of loneliness and unspoken connection. “My daughter calls to say goodbye with words of love,” recalled one woman who wasn’t directly affected by the war. “In the background, we hear her crying and the sound of bombs. I try to calm her down, but she’s very distressed. The call cuts off, and I wake up in panic.”
The dreams, says Arel-Brodsky, give insight into the national emotional state in the weeks following the massacre. “If I may be poetic, maybe it was a kind of group dreaming—a collective attempt to process what happened. Reading them one after another is breathtaking—sometimes suffocating. The dreams were so intense. It took me a long time to get through them.”
According to Freud, dreams are the psyche’s way of navigating trauma—while also trying not to be overwhelmed by it. “There’s always an element of disguise or softening in dreams,” she says. But the dreams piling up on the researchers’ desks weren’t softened. On the contrary, they were raw. “It’s as if the psyche of countless citizens overflowed.”
Did you sense a strong urge to share?
“In a way, we offered participants a listening ear, a place to bear witness. One of the hallmarks of trauma is the inability to tell the story. The event is so overwhelming that the mind can’t fully grasp it, and the story remains fragmented. This whole nation worked overtime to process the sights, the sounds, the images. The shattering of our sense of safety hit us hard.”
Dr. Hilit Arel-Brodsky“In my dream, a friend whose son was killed is now running an orphanage. My husband and I take shifts helping care for the orphans. It’s incredibly difficult to care for each child. The orphans are in constant danger. Our friend is so broken by her son’s death that she can’t function. These dreams are powerful—I wake up crying, gasping for air.”
The idea that dreams offer a window into the collective psyche during times of crisis is not new. In the 1930s, after the Nazis rose to power but before World War II began, Jewish journalist Charlotte Beradt documented dozens of dreams from German citizens. The dreams—published years later when Beradt was already living in the U.S.—reflected the psychological toll of totalitarian rule, the shrinking of thought, and the foreboding sense of terror—long before it fully materialized in real life.
Another study from the 1990s examined the dreams of Vietnam War veterans and found the war continued to haunt their nightmares. Even the COVID-19 pandemic—a different kind of collective trauma—gave rise to a surge of dream research. Arel-Brodsky and Taubman-Ben-Ari’s study is now part of a broader body of work documenting post-October 7 dreams, including research by Dr. Shani Pitcho of Ben-Gurion University’s Department of Social Work, who began collecting dreams just days after the war broke out.
What made you start researching so soon, while people were still in shock?
“People kept talking about horrific dreams—almost exact replicas of the horrors from October 7. And when I don’t understand something, I study it.”
Dr. Shani PitchoAbout 240 Israelis responded to her call. Participants weren’t specifically asked to report war-related dreams—but most of them were. “That’s rare,” says Pitcho. “Dreams are the most personal, subjective experience imaginable. But after the war, that subjectivity turned collective.” The dreams consistently centered on the war, and the similarities were striking. “I dreamed the world was going to end that night,” one woman shared. “I was with my father. Bulldozers came to kill us and destroy the world. We were trapped in a tiny attic room. I couldn’t think straight until I died. The awareness of death approaching—the helplessness—was unbearable.”
Pitcho analyzed the dreams using “terror management theory,” which posits that, unlike animals, humans are aware of their mortality—and this awareness is terrifying. We build defenses to keep thoughts of death at bay. We tell ourselves we’re safe. That nothing will happen if we stay home. If we lock the door.
All of that collapsed on October 7.
“There were so many dreams about break-ins, about disaster hitting familiar streets. The basic belief that your home is a safe space was shattered.”
Did dreams vary depending on where people lived?
“Someone living in central Israel might tell themselves, ‘It’s happening over there, we’re still safe.’ But we saw these kinds of dreams regardless of people’s location.”
Dreams also showed breaches into what Pitcho calls “innocent mental spaces.” One participant, a children's content creator, dreamt that terrorists hacked her Instagram account and uploaded horror videos showing children being murdered and kidnapped. “It’s like they burst the bubble,” she said.
Another dreamed of being kidnapped and realizing her bag was stolen. “I called the police in tears and begged for help,” she said. “They told me I’d reached the wrong place. I kept insisting on telling my story.”
Arel-Brodsky and Taubman-Ben-Ari’s collection includes not only dreams filled with animals but also with guilt. “I went to bed in my own bed,” said one woman. “When I woke up, I saw metal cages filled with animals—wounded, starving, on the brink of death. I couldn’t believe I had abandoned them for days. How could I close my eyes while they were suffering beside me?”
Another dream featured no violence at all—just a stray cat in need of help. “I couldn’t help it,” the dreamer said. “I cried.”
The question of where the army or the state was continues to echo since the attack—and it shows up in our dreams as ambulances that don’t arrive, police who refuse to listen, and voices that go unheard. Above all: apathy, detachment, and the absence of someone to bear witness.
That absence, Arel-Brodsky explains, is not just an emotional gap—it’s a critical part of the trauma and what prevents recovery. It’s no coincidence that one of the most influential theories on the role of bearing witness in healing emerged from Holocaust research. Literary scholar Shoshana Felman called it “the struggle to liberate testimony.” Only by telling the story, Felman argued, can the trauma begin to be released.
Think of it as a triangle: the voice that tells the story, the ear that hears it, and the story itself—the testimony. “If one of those points is missing,” Arel-Brodsky says, “the trauma can’t be processed.”
This yearning for a witness—a person whose presence validates what happened—is prominent in the dreams. And it matters. “It’s one of the factors that determines whether someone is at higher risk of developing PTSD,” says Arel-Brodsky. For example, a child who is sexually abused and receives empathy and support from her parents has been witnessed. “That doesn’t take away the trauma, but it helps the child preserve a healthy worldview—one where parents protect their kids. But if her parents dismiss her experience as imaginary, her inner sense of reality collapses.”
And how does that show up in dreams?
“In dreams, the search for a witness is a search for someone to say: ‘I’m not alone. Someone sees me. I can be comforted.’”
But in many dreams, there’s no one listening. Worse—no one believes them. “I dreamed I left my dog in the car for a moment to hug my cousin, who’d returned from fighting in Gaza,” one person recalled. “When I came back, the car was gone. The dog was gone. I called the police. They said they had taken the dog and dismantled the car because it had been left with a dog inside. I argued: What do you mean? I was right there, it was just for a second. But there was no one to talk to.”
And then there are the dreams of help that never come. The reasons hardly need explanation. “My father had a heart attack during a family gathering,” someone dreamed. “We were panicking, trying to manage the situation but didn’t know what to do. We called 101 and were going crazy that the ambulance, just two minutes away, didn’t arrive.”
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In our dreams, we often say what we can’t say aloud sometimes because it’s too painful sometimes because there’s no one to say it to. “I’m in an open area and I see my soldier son,” a woman recalled. “Other soldiers are sitting. My son stands—he spots a terrorist and goes to shoot because he’s a sniper. The terrorist shoots him and I see him collapse on the road. I don’t understand why none of the soldiers did anything. I get up, screaming, hitting the other soldiers, and asking: Why?”
Old traumas, too, crept into the dreams. The Holocaust, for example, appeared again and again. “I’m a third-generation Auschwitz survivor,” one person wrote, then described the nightmare in a single word: “Shoah.”
“The Holocaust is a narrative we already know—it has a beginning, middle, and end,” Arel-Brodsky explains. “When the mind is overwhelmed by something so formless and terrifying, it clings to familiar images and past traumas—because we have words for those.”
So in some dreams, the horrors of October 7 intertwined with older ones. “I’m hiding from kidnappers in a small closet,” someone said—echoing the story of the Idan children who hid for hours in a wardrobe. “I’m in the Holocaust. The Germans are after me. But in the dream, they speak Arabic. They want to kidnap me. I know I’m dreaming, but I feel suffocated and terrified, even after I wake up. I can’t stop thinking about the hostages.”
Memories from past wars surfaced, too. “I went back to the places I’d been stationed as a soldier in Lebanon,” one person dreamed. “There were Arabic voices shouting.”
Another veteran of the Yom Kippur War said: “I’m firing wildly in all directions, overwhelmed by despair. I hear the radio operator yelling at me—‘Stop. Stop.’”