The Evil Hours

by David J. Morris

  Post-traumatic hauntings require no such invitation from the senses, however. John Bumgardner, a Union soldier in the Civil War who survived a near miss from an exploding shell, is one such case. After the war, he took up farming with his new wife, Charlotte. Several weeks after they were married, however, she noticed that something was amiss. John would be sitting quietly and then suddenly blurt out, “Don’t speak to me; don’t you hear them bombarding?” On one occasion, he came running in from the fields, yelling, “They are coming, they are coming. See the bombshell.” Soon after, he ran to an upstairs room, where his wife found him shivering in fear and saying, “Be still. Don’t you hear them?”

  Michael Ferrara, a veteran wilderness first responder in Aspen, Colorado, describes being overtaken out of the blue by what he called the “slide show,” a procession of mental images he couldn’t control: eviscerated bodies, a father riding in the back of an ambulance with his dying skateboarder son, burned figures on a runway. In a 2011 article in Outside magazine that recounted Ferrara’s struggle, Hampton Sides wrote that “it was a horror show, crowded in his head like a Hieronymous Bosch scene, and the images wouldn’t stop. He reacted to them with a surge of adrenaline, a stab of fear, a complex of real and present emotions. His eyes would drop, he’d lose visual contact with his surroundings. His blood pressure would spike and he’d find himself hyperventilating. He wasn’t just remembering these traumas; he was reliving them.”

  “The pictures were burned into my mind,” Ferrara said. “They were happening right here, right now. My subconscious didn’t know it wasn’t actually real.”

  If the daytime is the occasional stalking ground of Freud’s daemons, then the nighttime is their lair, an underworld of mystery and metamorphosis where they have free rein. Unsurprisingly, many trauma survivors report that it is at night that they feel the most vulnerable, both to their memories and the outside world. The daemonic night and its chief product, the nightmare, have always been a special hell for survivors. As we saw in the previous chapter, Siegfried Sassoon noted this soon after beginning treatment for shell shock in 1917, observing that there were in essence two hospitals at Craiglockhart, the “elaborately cheerful” hospital by day and the “sepulchral and oppressive” hospital at night, where he found himself submerged in the “underworld of dreams” and “memories of warfare.” One Civil War veteran, after visiting the battlefield at Cold Harbor after the war, remarked that “skeletons and ghosts haunt us in our dreams.” An Indiana physician who treated Newell Gleason, a Civil War veteran who had recently been released from an asylum, observed that Gleason’s sleep was “laborious” and “filled with dreams that seemed to make sleep exhaustive rather than refreshing.”

  The dead seem most likely to visit us at night, as happened to Michael Herr, a reporter for Esquire in Vietnam. “During my first month back I woke up one night and knew that my living room was full of dead Marines. It actually happened three or four times, after a dream I was having those nights (the kind of dream one never had in Vietnam), and that first time it wasn’t just some holding dread left by the dream, I knew they were there, so that after I’d turned on the light by my bed and smoked a cigarette I lay there for a moment thinking that I’d have to go out soon and cover them.”

  In fact, it was the modern war nightmare that forced Freud to revise his theory of the unconscious in 1920. Unable to explain their painful and repetitive “daemonic” character, Freud struggled to fit these nightmares into his theory of dreams as unconscious wish fulfillments. In time, this observation caused him to posit an entirely new facet of psychoanalysis, a counterweight to Eros that he called the death drive or Todestriebe. Noting that traumatic nightmares seemed to repeat themselves for years, Abraham Kardiner in 1939 described the repetitive traumatic dream as “one of the most characteristic and at the same time one of the most enigmatic phenomena we encounter in the disease” of combat neurosis. More recent research has confirmed Kardiner’s thesis. Peretz Lavie, in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine a few months after 9/11, wrote that

  trauma-related anxiety dreams appear to be the most consistent problem reported by patients with PTSD. Studies involving veterans of combat, survivors of Japanese imprisonment during World War II, and Holocaust survivors indicate such dreams persist, sometimes for more than 40 years after traumatic events.

  One Vietnam veteran, “Mr. D.,” who was quoted in an early conceptual study of PTSD, continued to have dreams that repeated his wartime experiences. In the dream, he was on a hill being overrun by the Vietcong. The dream was dominated by images of death. Looking around and seeing his friends die, Mr. D. then kills a Vietcong fighter by smashing the man’s forehead with his rifle. Another Vietnam veteran, who served on a U.S. Navy “swift boat,” still dreamed about his experiences in the Mekong Delta some twenty years later. The lone survivor of a boat that was destroyed by enemy fire, at night he revisited various scenes from the Mekong, picking up the wounded bodies of his buddies and the Vietnamese that they tortured. “In my nightmares I can’t stand the screaming,” he said.

  In many cases, the fear of these nightmares prevents the sufferer from falling asleep, or even trying to fall asleep, which leads to chronic insomnia. Over time, this lack of sleep can develop into a kind of ghoulish survivor lifestyle. One Vietnam veteran I met, who worked as a security guard at an office building in downtown Los Angeles, told me he hadn’t slept more than two hours at a stretch since the 1970s. Numerous studies, dating back to the advent of the PTSD diagnosis, have confirmed what the spouses of veterans have known for millennia: survivors of trauma sleep differently than other people. They have trouble getting to sleep, they wake up constantly, and they are more easily disturbed by noises. (My experience certainly bears out this thesis. Any sharp or unexplained noise when I am in bed will send my heart racing.) Interestingly, Richard Ross of the University of Pennsylvania has even suggested that PTSD nightmares might represent a new phenomenon called “REM sleep without atonia” or REM sleep without the usual low muscle tone experienced by most people.

  The prevailing theory among researchers today is that traumatic nightmares are mostly “instant replays” of the original trauma, an idea that is surprisingly congruent with Freud’s original “repetition-compulsion” theory, which says that survivors tend to reenact old traumas. “The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over,” Tim O’Brien wrote in The Things They Carried. Proponents of this belief look at these nightmares as being essentially sleeping flashbacks and even less significant than normal dreams because of their repetitiveness. For this reason, and the fact that nightmares are difficult to produce in sleep labs, little research is currently being done on nightmares. The 2007 Handbook of PTSD, edited by a group of leading VA researchers, contains but a single reference to nightmares in its 592 pages. (This holds true for similar heavily cited scientific anthologies on PTSD published in 1996, 2000, and 2009 as well.)

  Why this seeming lack of interest in nightmares? The answer lies in the recent history of psychiatry. “Psychiatry,” says William Normand, a practicing psychoanalyst in New York, “has gone from being brainless to being mindless.” Clinicians who once neglected physiology in favor of emotionality now neglect the emotions in favor of brain chemistry. The study of dreams and nightmares, once the centerpieces of mainstream psychiatry when it was dominated by Freud and his many disciples, is now in decline. Today, researchers increasingly look to neuroscience to explain and manage PTSD symptoms. The most cited studies on traumatic nightmares today relate to the medications used to reduce them, principally Prazosin, a drug that blocks some of the effects of adrenaline, which the body releases during PTSD nightmares.

  Nevertheless, interviews with survivors and historical accounts of post-traumatic nightmares give us a richer picture of this nocturnal world and can reveal aspects of trauma that may not necessarily have a neurological correlate. Further, because nightmares tend to be less transient t
han flashbacks and often have a narrative quality to them, studying them within the larger context of a PTSD sufferer’s life can offer insights into the nature of the condition and how survivors really feel about what has happened to them.

  One common theme in traumatic nightmares is that the horrific event has never ended, that it lives on and evolves, melding with the present, or, conversely, that it has come to encompass one’s entire history: past, present, and future. Veterans of combat often describe dreams involving fallen comrades who have returned to judge them or to join seemingly non-war-related aspects of their past. In a study conducted by therapists at the West Los Angeles VA hospital, one Vietnam veteran, who claimed “his dreams were only about the war,” reported a dream in which he shot an attacking Vietcong soldier on a rooftop. When the Vietcong fell dead, the patient recognized the man as his brother.

  Richard Fox, a therapist who worked with over one hundred Vietnam veterans in the 1970s, observed that the loss of a friend frequently led to the most powerful traumatic nightmares and other stress syndromes. He felt that these sorts of visitations were especially likely to occur if the deceased had been a close companion with whom the survivor had a “mirror relationship,” and that there was something intolerable about this because it represents such a close encounter with one’s own extinction. This theory helps explain how Caleb Daniels, the Afghanistan veteran who lost his best friend in a 2005 helicopter crash, was so profoundly disturbed that he came to feel that he was being pursued by a buffalo-shaped “Destroyer” demon.

  One Iraq veteran I interviewed, who now runs a successful printing company in Virginia, described his war-related dreams as happening on a “circuit.” Mentioning how his nightmares seemed to correspond to his general stress level, he said, “Most of the time they involve being attacked, and my weapon misfires.” When I asked him if they were simply “instant replays” of traumas from Iraq, he responded, “[The] dynamics of the dream stay constant, the situation/environment changes. My takeaway is ‘You’re not ready,’ or ‘You’re not prepared.’” Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier to emerge from World War II, had similar dreams. A line of Germans advancing toward him, “men running and shooting and hollering and then my gun would fall apart when I tried to pull the trigger.”

  Some researchers look at nightmares as playing a potentially beneficial, integrative role, helping the survivor to make sense of what happened or to construct meaning out of the chaos of war and other traumatic events. Zahava Solomon, a pioneering Israeli researcher, describes one such case in her 1993 book, Combat Stress Reaction:

  Something of the working-through process can be seen in a repeated nightmare of Eli, who developed PTSD after participating in intense fighting in the Lebanon war. Among the many harrowing experiences that he underwent, one that cut very deeply was of being shot at by 10-year-old “RPG kids,” named after the [sic] automatic weapons they carried. What made this experience so terrible for Eli (and other Israeli soldiers who described it) was not only the inherent threat of injury and death but also the moral conflict it evoked in these soldiers, who were trained not to harm children. With the onset of his PTSD, Eli began to have repeated nightmares of RPG kids shooting at him; these were so frightening that he would jump out of bed with the image before his eyes. The nightmare appeared with all sorts of variations, quite frequently at first, then less and less so. Parallel to the decrease in frequency, a process of working through took place in which Eli found “practical solutions” to the problem. In the early versions of the nightmare, he generally stood by helplessly as he was shot at. In later versions, he took cover or cocked his weapon.

  Sometimes, in the darkness of dreams, traumatic events can fuse with the present, creating a kind of permanent midnight; past and present become one, and it is the life itself that is enshadowed. One comments on, ridicules, ironizes the other. “Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever,” wrote Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried, perhaps the best novel to emerge from the war that produced PTSD, a novel that, as many critics have pointed out, repeatedly embodies and enacts the disorder in its 224 pages.

  In the winter of 2007, while writing a series of stories on the surge in Iraq, I began to have dreams involving my old rifle platoon. In the dreams, my Marines are on patrol with me, asking me why I was doing this or that while we walked the streets of Ramadi. Sometimes they are with me in a Sea Stallion getting lit up over Fallujah, the air outside the crew chief’s window bright with tracers. Sometimes my radioman, a thin reed of a man named Dougherty, is behind me in the Humvee in Saydia. I’m driving. He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me. His eyes are more than enough.

  Perhaps no one has inhabited this shadowland of dream and reality more completely, or imbued it with greater meaning, than Siegfried Sassoon. For decades after World War I, Sassoon continued to dream that the war was still going on and that he would be called back to active service. After leaving the army, he moved back to the English countryside, published several books, joined the Labour Party, became the literary editor of the Daily Herald, began a close friendship with E. M. Forster, fell in love with a man, finally marrying a woman named Hester. But it was the war that stayed with him, it was the war that populated his dreams. Indeed, Sassoon spent the rest of his life writing about the war and the youth that led up to it, a period from 1895 to 1920. In a trilogy of autobiographical novels, culminating in Sherston’s Progress, whose pages provide the title of this book, he revisited the earlier stages of his life, with the war and Craiglockhart serving as the turning point. As a writer, Sassoon turned this backward-looking impulse to good use, though the perversity of what he called “my queer craving to revisit the past and give the modern world the slip” was not lost on him.

  These types of obsessions and revisitations all highlight the degree to which many survivors remain in a liminal state, alternating between now and then, between here and there. The veteran, the rape victim, the repatriated political prisoner all carry aspects of the trauma with them forward into the present. This is another way in which the literary habits of describing a traumatized person as being “haunted,” or “unstuck in time” (to use Vonnegut’s phrase from Slaughterhouse-Five), are consistent with how post-traumatic stress is physically experienced by the survivor. When I speak of liminality, I mean it not as the fancy of a poetic imagination but as a state of being with a clear biological correlate: in the instance of the rape victim, whose nervous system reverts back to the traumatic state—mobilized to confront an attacker, the adrenaline flowing, the heart rate elevated, the pupils dilated—there is an observable physiological manifestation of this liminality. Herein lies the problem: the liminal person who returns to society (physically at least), with what one anthropologist described as “more alert faculties” and an “enhanced knowledge of how things work,” possesses a knowledge that is of little use in the everyday world.

  These facts alone may explain some of the pain that survivors feel upon return. They aren’t merely seeing things that others don’t, they are, at varying times and to varying degrees, living in different times and in different places. Like Billy Pilgrim, the main character in Slaughterhouse-Five, who survived the bombing of Dresden only to lose his footing in the universe, they have become “spastic in time.” Dizzied by these spasms in time (and space), they lose the normal narrative compass that most people rely on to guide them through their lives, the compass that tells them where they are and what they need to attend to.

  Eric Leed, a historian at Florida International University writing about World War I, spoke of veterans as being trapped in a kind of “No Man’s Land,” applying the military term for the terrain between friendly and enemy lines. Having been unmade and remade by the war, paradoxically disgusted and defined by the slaughter of 1914–1919, the veteran was, in Leed’s view, “a man fixed in passage who had acquired a
peculiar ‘homelessness,’” belonging neither to the war nor to the society he fought for. As Leed points out, many veterans remained transfixed by the image of this shadowland for the rest of their lives. In 1965, one such veteran wrote that “in fifty years I have never been able to rid myself of this obsession with no-man’s land and the unknown world beyond it. On this side of our wire everything is familiar and every man is a friend, over there, beyond the wire, is the unknown, the uncanny.”

  To Leed, this betweenness wasn’t simply an obsession, it was a complete reshaping of the survivor’s identity. “The figure of the veteran is a subcategory of what might be called ‘the liminal type.’ He derives all of his features from the fact that he has crossed the boundaries of disjunctive social worlds, from peace to war, and back. He has been reshaped by his voyage along the margins of civilization, a voyage in which he has been presented with wonders, curiosities, and monsters—things that can only be guessed at by those who remained at home.” While Leed’s focus in No Man’s Land is on the World War I veteran, it is not hard to imagine how this state of liminality, this feeling of apartness, pertains to survivors today. As one female Iraq veteran explained to me, “I feel like a Martian.”