When I was four years old, I used to have a recurring nightmare: I would be walking with one of my great-aunts near my mother’s childhood home in Northwest Bangladesh. As we passed an open field, she snatched me up in her arms and started running back to the house. I looked back only to see rows of soldiers marching, guns pointed straight at us.
The dream never went beyond that. I always woke up with the need to keep running, to escape.
And even though I didn’t live through it, I knew that the nightmare was inspired by one of my mother’s stories from the 1971 Bangladeshi War of Liberation: her first memory—from when she herself was four years old—of being carried away from burning buildings and gun-toting Pakistani soldiers by her aunt, the same woman from my dream.
How do you explain waking up terrified by memories that aren’t your own? How do you relive experiences that you’ve never had?
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