NationStates Jolt Archive

Ok, so I'm going to give some background first. I'm an American of German descent, and my family has been in the United States since well before the Civil War. I am currently 19, and have no sympathies with Nazis.

All the same, I have been plagued by a recurring dream. Over the past year this dream has happened 12-17 times.

In the dream I am always looking through a series of WWII era photographs relating to the holocaust, and in every dream I come upon a picture with a picture of the current me in a SS uniform at a concentration camp.

This troubles me. I know I have struggled with the fact that people so very like me could commit such horrible crimes, and I think that this is an extension of this struggle. But I'm not sure.

Has anyone around here ever had such an experience, or is dealing with such a mental dilemma? Not just the dream but the struggle to understand this? If so, have you resolved this, and if you have, do you have any advice on how to handle it?

I have never dealt with something like that and i'm no psychologist, but it seems to me you probably have a good grasp on what the dream most likely represents. Knowing that your family came from a country whose government committed such atrocities must be a strange thing to deal with sometimes, even though they had nothing to do with it. We all have moments where we wonder if we could ever be capable of such atrocities, or if we would have had we been alive then and in that same atmosphere. Those feelings would probably be more pronounced in a situation like yours. It's probably just your subconscious sorting out your feelings and issues about it. Though i can completely understand the uneasiness you must feel about the dream.