Dreaming of World War III — and Waking to Its Echoes

 

I woke from a dream both vivid and unsettling. In it, President Biden presided over a small seminar, calmly explaining that World War III was inevitable. A missile launched toward an island veered off course, striking not a modern warship but an eighteenth-century vessel with white sails. From its wooden hull spilled not splinters but millions of human corpses, sinking in slow motion into the depths.

The dream was grotesque, yet disturbingly logical. Our world is saturated with apocalyptic language, fed daily by global media and social networks that amplify hysteria and distortion. Silent majorities bow before the noise of organized minorities. Logic and reason are treated as crimes. Less than eighty years after the Holocaust, calls for the destruction of Israel and its people are uttered openly and applauded.

Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil haunts this vision. Evil today does not need grandiose gestures; it thrives in normalization — in bureaucratic excuses, in rhetorical justifications, in collective indifference. In my dream, the corpses sank while spectators looked away. In waking life, the same dynamic unfolds.

And yet, another fragment of the dream resisted despair: a colleague from long ago, struggling to shield her children from an invisible conspiracy. Against the vast machinery of violence, the duty to protect what is fragile, human, and immediate persists.

The danger is not only that a global war might erupt — but that we may already be living in a moral landscape where such nightmares seem plausible. Dreams, after all, only reflect what reality whispers. The question is whether we wake up in time.