The Russian tanks roll up to the house of 4-year-old Taras and open fire, burying his mother in debris. Taras tries, as hard as he can, to pull her from the rubble, but she is too heavy, and so he just pulls uselessly on her arm.
Then he awakes — sobbing uncontrollably.
Taras’s mother, Anastasia Haidukevych, 41, described her son’s nightmare in an interview. “I tried to hide the war from him,” she said, “but the war is everywhere around us.”
For many, even dreams offer no haven.
A year into the Russian attack, the war is touching Ukrainians in the small hours of night, even those who live far from the front line and have not personally witnessed the violence, like the Haidukevych family, which lives in Kyiv.
In a recent online survey, 70 per cent of Ukrainians reported having had a nightmare about war, and 30 per cent said they had seen death in their dreams.
Psychologists say that vivid dreams are a common response to major life change and that Ukrainians will probably still have war dreams long after the fighting is over.
Ukrainians who have seen combat or destruction often live through the trauma again in their sleep. “Some people see the disturbing events repeated in their dreams,” DreamApp said in a report on its survey, in which more than 700 people took part.
But psyches adapt to big life changes in different ways. And so some who took the survey recounted dreams not of distress but of safety and comfort, of life before the war, sometimes set during childhood.
These show “that what you are missing in life at the moment can come in dreams, and it helps them feel better,” said Victoria Semko, a psychologist who helped found a group of therapists that helps people who lived through the brutal Russian occupation of Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv.
But even nightmares can be helpful.
“When people dream of traumatising events, it helps to relive them again, but in a calmer environment,” Semko said. “It helps to heal.” But experiencing trauma with the understanding that it is in a dream traumatises others all over again, she said.
In interviews, more than a dozen Ukrainian civilians and soldiers who did not take part in the DreamApp survey all described vivid, anxiety-ridden dreams of a sort they said they did not experience before the war began, in February 2022,
Early in the war, Olena Bond, a 44-year-old Kyiv resident, struggled to sleep, she said. A doctor prescribed antidepressants — and then the dreams began. “Many dreams were about me killing people, killing enemies,” Bond said.
They became more frequent in the fall, after Russia began launching long-range missile strikes on critical infrastructure in cities far from the front.
“I had a dream recently that a very powerful explosion lifted me into the air, and then I fell down in a long, slow fall,” Bond said. “As I fell, I was thinking, I am alive, I am still alive.”
Ivan Chuiko, a soldier fighting in eastern Ukraine, recalled his dreams from before the war as being generally light and happy.
No more. “Once I woke in the trench in the middle of the night and couldn’t understand if I am still sleeping or it is reality,” Chuiko, 37, said. “I was talking with my friends, but we could not find a common language. It was as if some devil or evil force was standing between us. I couldn’t properly see the devil, but I knew it was there.”
Usually, the visions that haunt his sleep are less abstract.
“Mainly I dream of tank battles,” Chuiko said.
But another soldier, Svyatoslav, 45, said his dreams on the front line were for the most part extremely pleasant. “I often dream of what there will be in the future, after the war,” he said.
— New York Times
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