Dream

I was watching a movie and also in the film, and the plot was this: an American family traveling in Syria lost stopped for lunch in a small town. When it was time to go, their son, 6, hid behind a door and could not be found. The family had to leave him behind and was not reunited with him until 8 years later. When the family finally recovered him, and only then, they realized how terribly he had suffered. He assailed them over and over again with the cry,"Why did you leave me here? Why didn't you come back for me?" And they had no answer.
I had then to re-live this dream in the role of the sister of the boy left behind. Like all dreams, the narrative began incongruously, with me lying in the office of a professor who had died of cancer, I was on a beg, exhausted, hung over, mostly just emotionally devastated because of my recent breakup. Other lecturers came and went. Finally I, not one of them, but of a higher rank yet not performing well, departed as well. The room was a shrine of sorts to old Vassar college dorm rooms.
In the dream we were three, sometimes more. But we had come into Syria stupidly--knowing full well that it was too dangerous for Americans, but the driver of the car, a man, insisted on going. The young boy, in the backseat, was also a daredevil and wanted to do what the man did. So we raced into Syria and I tried to duck down in the backseat because I, with my blond hair, looked too obviously American. We were supposed to turn around and go back to Egypt, where we would be safer. I pleaded with the man to return across the border, to leave this dangerous place, which was not only Syria but also Pakistan. But he would not listen to me. I knew that, if we stopped, the boy would hide and we would not be able to find him, and we would leave and he would suffer. But our fate seemed to be governed from some other source, the narrative of the film, and there was no changing it. I wanted to stop watching this film, to get out of that story, but could not. So we stopped, and now there were two children and I was one of them, the sister. But i was also the mother, who gripped the boy's body fiercely. He, a daredevil, reckless, twisted and pulled away from her, but she would not let him go. "Over my dead body," she said. And so the dream continued and I awakened, as it were, in the mind of the sister. The family had stopped in the town, even though the mother, I, when I was she, had sworn to prevent it. I was now the sister looking at the boy in the car, and the mother was gone. The boy got out of the car. There was no stopping him. He disappeared in the warren of streets, which were filled with Arabs and Jews going about their business and chanting and praying and laughing and playing even though the air was full of war and death and danger. The boy disappeared and I searched for him, looking behind every door. The family had to leave because another man, an innpatient man, dark-haired like everyone in the family except for me, insisted upon it. The father promised to stay behind and search while the family traveled to safety. But I knew that he would not find the child, that the child would suffer, and reproach us all for leaving him behind. Yet it was also his fault, the child's fault, that he had stubbornly hidden and refused to answer when his family called for him. The dream did not conclude. It was extremely painful to be reliving this narrative, to be watching it and experiencing it. But even in the dream I consoled myself with the knowledge that the boy would be found again, that all would, in a way, be well, even though he and his family would never again be the same. Everyone had been terribly hurt.