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Article by Renée Greusard - Rue89 L'OBS:  http://bit.ly/1PJoJEy

After the attacks in Paris last Friday, our nights, our sleep have also changed. To tell what?

On the night of Friday November 13 to Saturday November 14, I woke up twice with a start. In the first dream, my companion was a terrorist. I realized this suddenly and tried to neutralize it. In my sleep, I grabbed her forefinger, screaming. Then I squeezed really hard. He screamed.

Second dream: a box hangs from the ceiling of our bedroom. It flashes, it will explode. I screamed. Do I have a problem to solve?  

Not necessarily, answers Olivier Brosseau . A psychotherapist, he is part of Lact , a firm which participated in support cells after the attacks .

The problem is more often having difficulty sleeping. It's very scary, it feels like something horrible is going on but in reality it's pretty healthy. The brain regulates as it can.

A story, perhaps a myth, is often told about soldiers in the First World War. During interviews, they were asked if they had nightmares. Those who answered in the negative were sent home.  

The disturbing thing is not in the fact of dreaming, but in the place that dreams take: 

If you start to say to yourself “as I'm having these dreams, that means I really have a problem”, if the dreams change your daily life, then it becomes embarrassing.

So you have to think about getting help. The interpretation of dreams can be risky and Olivier Brosseau refuses to do so.

But many of us have seen our nights filled with attacks and terrorists. Testimonials.  

 In Paris, Sara (some first names have been changed) lives just above one of the shooting sites. Since the November 13 attacks, his nights have been restless. She remembers at least four nightmares.

 In the first, it is about a horse: “I am riding in an enclosed arena, I hear the bursts of fire in the distance, and I realize that my horse is wearing a belt. explosives. “Another time, she is at the Franprix downstairs from her home, opposite La Bonne Bière and Casa Nostra (10th arrondissement). “They come, I try to run but can't, so I hide in a frozen food freezer and freeze to death, waking up shivering. “She also relives the scene a lot, “from different angles”. She is at her kind baker, who has seen it all, and whose bakery has been riddled with bullets (there was no customer at that time, Friday evening). She dreams that she is his employee. They both hide as he hid himself. “His clock is still stopped at 9:33 p.m., it's horrible. She also sees herself being followed for hours.

 This week at 6 a.m., Lucie woke up with a start. She wrote this email to an ex in stride. “You sent me an SMS to tell me that you were in training in Dunkirk and that you heard shootings in the Thalys station. A group text. You were telling your friends to take cover. I was on the terrace in Paris, I felt a car park behind me. Evidence that it is happening. I didn't know whether to run or walk, enter the bar or run the other way. It was so real. I haven't been able to sleep since. ‎I'm a stress block. »  

 Julie, she turbined on the sound of sirens in her sleep. "They were ringing in my head all evening, I was focusing on them, I even had the impression of not being able to distinguish the real noises of the city from what my brain was making (I think it's directly linked to the anguish of these attacks and the fact of thinking about them almost all the time for the past few days). The next morning, I realized I had a conversation with a person who was part of my dream, in an imaginary place far from Paris. I would say something like, “Do the siren sounds bother you? Me, it's horrible, I have the impression that they resonate in my head. Immediately after this reminiscence, I realized that this event had pierced my unconscious. »

 

 Anne says she was devastated when she read that a 5-year-old boy, almost her son's age, was at the Bataclan and that he lost his mother and grandmother there. “It makes my stomach churn. Hence the nightmare, I think. I have the feeling that these attacks have made my son realize that I will not always be able to protect him. He has lost a certain form of recklessness. It's unbearable for me too. In her dream, she was in the street with her 4-year-old child, Theo. “Suddenly, we came across a cordon of police, and suddenly, it was night and I realized that we were next to the Bataclan. I heard shots and the time to watch what was happening, Theo was no longer there. I realize that he's on the other side of the police, on the side where there's shooting, but the police don't want to let me go to get him. I scream, I scream, and suddenly I don't see him at all, I look everywhere for his red jacket but I don't see him anymore, I woke up crying. »

 Nathalie dreamed "that it was raining dead men and women on Boulevard Haussmann." She also dreamed that "a man was walking around with a big jacket and wires sticking out in the subway during rush hour." “Titanized by fear, everyone saw it. No one dared say anything and with each step he took, the crowd opened the way for him. Until the moment when the cute little boy who went to the “Petit Journal” finds himself in front of him and hands him a flower... The terrorist pulls on a wire and he explodes. »

 Luckily some dreams are funnier...