Last night I was forced into sleep by an extremely painful headache. Perhaps it was the weather change. We went from needed air conditioning to needing heat all in the same evening.
I had a very intriguing dream. Although I usually don’t tell my dreams, I have this feeling that this one is meant to be told.
Somehow I found myself in Palestine, the occupied territories. I had befriended an Arab family and was staying with them during my visit. Somehow, they apparently had connections in this Israeli town, and the managed to get me in for their “parliment” of sorts. It was somewhat of a townhall meeting, but apparently it was their local government. It was quite a shabby building with white dirty walls and lots of older men sitting around discussing mundane issues.
At lunch time, one of the Israelis and my Arab friend (I promise this is not a joke) wanted to go outside for lunch, or so I thought. They walked toward a hill, and I was trailing some distance behind. They disappeared behind the hill, and when I walked all the way around it, I did not see them. I expected them to walked to the top of it and setup a place to eat.
Then, I noticed a door in the side of the hill. Sure enough, they had gone inside. This was someone’s house. The Israeli man lived there with his wife and several children. It wasn’t much, but they were happy. The Arab man had also brought his wife and children to visit.
It was very uneasy at first with not a lot of talking. Finally, the silence was broken by one of the Jewish boys talking about prayer. His mother had asked him if he had performed his prayers. It sounded very similar to a Muslim mother asking her child the same thing, so the Arab boy interjected and asked how they prayed. The Jewish boy recited one of their prayers, which I cannot repeat. Somehow they spoke Hebrew in my dream, even though I do not speak Hebrew.
The Muslim boy then recited al-Fatiha, but he was the youngest, and I had to help him through some parts. The Israelis were very enthusiastic about hearing it, as if they had rarely heard, which I found strange. They wanted to learn it right then. As we were all engaged in this activity, we heard a car pull up. In no uncertain terms, the driver announced that somehow this house was in violation of something rather, and they began to open fire with machine guns.
We all hit the floor as quickly as possible as the gun men riddled the house with a barrage of bullets. I managed to crawl over to the opposite side of the wall inside the kitchen where no bullets were entering. After the shooting stopped, I seriously expected to come back around to the other side and find everyone dead. As I came back around, I found my Arab friend standing up. He had blood on him but did not appear to have been actually hit by a bullet directly.
Everyone else was lying there completely still. Then, slowly one by one, children started getting up checking themselves for bullet holes. Finally, the Jewish mother got up and looked at her husband as though he might be dead, but then he rose with a smile on his face. We then began festivities as if nothing had happened. No one even talked about the shooting.
We cooked all kinds of dishes and deserts, with children laughing and playing well into the night. Soon, we had forgotten our differences, and we all felt like one family.
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