I wouldn’t normally write about this here … but the dream I had last night was so unusual and so special that I wanted to share it.
I was part of a team of commandos preparing an ambush for some unknown enemy. There was a little room where we expected to box them in and shoot them. But then, all of a sudden, we were setting up our own positions in the very room where we expected to ambush the others. There was a brief gap in my awareness, and I saw a dark haired woman lying asleep on a couch in the room with a number of small children snuggled up to her, and the commando team asleep around them. And somehow I knew that the war was over, that this woman had come in and had told us to cherish the children of our enemies, and by so doing to show them that we mean them no harm.
(The dream then segued to a battle between two robots, who didn’t yet realize that the war was over, and were in a death grip, in the process of bursting each other’s hydraulics. But somehow I knew that even they would come to peace.)
On awakening, I’m sure that the dream was inspired by a radio program on NPR last night, about Polish pediatrician Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage for Jewish children, and accompanied them to their deaths in the Nazi death camps. Offered a chance to abandon his charges, he apparently said, “You wouldn’t abandon your own children, would you?” and said that he didn’t want them to lose faith in the innate goodness of human beings.
The program was an interview with Sandra Joseph, the editor of a new book of Korczak’s writings, entitled Loving Every Child.
“Joseph was amazed at the simple wisdom and inspiration of Korczak’s message: Children have a right to be taken seriously. Joseph speaks with Debbie Elliott about Korczak’s writings, his place as one of the first advocates of children’s rights and how, in many ways, he was ahead of his time.”