There is a dream that has followed me for most of my life. Not every night. Not even every year. Every few years, without warning, it returns. The setting never changes. I'm back inside my childhood home. The walls, the rooms, the feeling of familiarity are exactly as I remember them. Then everything changes. My family is attacked and killed by Native Americans. The violence is graphic and I spend the entire dream desperately trying to save the people I love. I run. I scream. I fight. I try to intervene. I even find myself standing outside on the curb just watching the attack happen and listening to the screams. And every time, I fail. Then I wake up drenched in sweat. For years, I treated it like what most people would call it: a nightmare.

But as I've gotten older and especially as someone who has spent more than a decade working in the historical field, I’ve started thinking differently about the things we carry. History doesn't always announce itself through a textbook. Sometimes it arrives through a photograph. A family story, or by a missing name on a family tree. And sometimes, perhaps, through a question that refuses to leave you alone. 

What If the Dream Is Asking a Question? 

I don't believe that every dream contains a hidden historical message and I certainly don't believe that a recurring dream can prove that someone has inherited a memory from an ancestor. But I do believe dreams can reveal the questions we haven't figured out how to ask while we're awake. And lately, I've been asking myself:

What if this dream isn't about what happened to me? What if it's about my relationship to the history I haven't uncovered yet?

The Psychology of What Families Carry

Trauma can move through families in many ways: through parenting, family dynamics, silence, stories, behaviors, social conditions, cultural memory and many other ways such as dreams and nightmares. One of the people who helps me think about trauma differently is Jeanne Spurlock, a pioneering Black psychiatrist. Spurlock spent much of her career thinking about the psychological experiences of Black people within American society and the ways culture, family, identity, and social circumstances intersect with mental health. What interests me most isn't trying to make Spurlock say something she didn't specifically study. It's the larger question her career represents: What happens within us when our families are shaped by the world around them? 

Families experience many social, economic hardships and grief. Children grow up inside the consequences of things that happened before they were born. They may not know the entire story. They may not even know there is a story. But they are still growing up somewhere. They inherit a family culture. They inherit ways of communicating. They inherit the fears. They inherit ideas about safety or the lack of. 

They inherit what their parents know how to give and sometimes what their parents never learned how to give. That is where the conversation about historical and generational trauma becomes much more interesting to me. Not because I think trauma is a mystical substance passed from one generation to another. But because people are shaped by the environments in which their families survive and history creates environments.

The Body Remembers: But What Exactly Is It Remembering?

Books such as My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem have contributed to a broader cultural conversation about trauma and the body. This book has encouraged many people to think about trauma as something more complex than a story we consciously remember. But when I think about my own nightmare, I have to be careful. I don't know that my body is remembering something my ancestors experienced. I don't know that my dream is an ancestral memory. I don't know that it has anything to do with my genealogy at all. What I do know is that it has followed me since childhood, and now that I know more about history, I'm beginning to look at it differently.

The Photographs

Somewhere in my family line, I have Native American ancestry. I haven't done the research yet. I don't have a completed family tree proving exactly where that ancestry comes from, and I don't want to turn a family belief into historical fact simply because it makes for a compelling story. But I have heard stories of my great-great-great-grandmother and the descriptions of her hair, clothes and lineage have stayed with me. Photographs are strange things. They show us someone and conceal almost everything about them. I can see her face. I can see her clothing. I can see the way she is positioned for the camera. But I don't know what she was thinking. I don't know what she had already survived. I don't know what her parents experienced. I don't know which traditions were maintained in her family and which ones were lost. I don't know what she told her children, and I don't know what she never told them. That is the part of genealogy that fascinates me. The archive gives you evidence, but it can also give you silence.

What If the Dream Is History in Reverse?

This is where my imagination starts asking uncomfortable questions. What if the violence in my dream isn't an actual memory? What if it is symbolic? What if it is my mind creating a story about fear, family, violence, and survival? And then another thought comes:

What if my dream is not a memory at all, but a reflection of the violence that exists somewhere in my family’s history?

I have wondered whether it could have been my great-great-great-grandmother’s family who experienced an attack or some form of historical violence and whether my dream has placed my family in the opposite position. Again, I don't know that this happened. There is no historical evidence in my possession that allows me to make that claim. But the possibility has made me want to research. And perhaps that is the most valuable thing the dream has given me. Not an answer, but a question.

The Family Archive

I think about that little girl who kept having this nightmare. She didn't know anything about genealogy. She wasn't thinking about historical trauma. She wasn't reading books about the psychology of memory. She was just trying to save her family. Maybe that's what makes the dream so unsettling. The child in the dream always believes she can stop what is happening. She just never can, and perhaps there is something universal about that feeling. We inherit a world we didn't create. We inherit family circumstances we didn't choose. We inherit histories that began long before we arrived and sometimes, as adults, we finally realize that we cannot change what happened before us, but we can choose whether we will remain curious about it.

I can listen to the stories. I can acknowledge the silences. I can learn what I can and I can accept what I may never know. Perhaps the point isn't to prove that my nightmare came from my ancestors. Maybe the point is to understand why, after all these years, I am still trying to save them and understand them.

The People Who Came Before Us

One of the things I love about history is that it humbles certainty. The more you learn, the more you realize how much you don't know. Even a nightmare can become a question. Maybe that is why Jeanne Spurlock's legacy feels relevant here. Not because she can explain my dream, but because her work reminds us that psychological life doesn't happen in isolation. We exist inside families. Families exist inside communities. Communities exist inside societies. And societies exist inside history. You cannot always separate the individual from the world that shaped them.

Learning more about our ancestors can sometimes help us understand pieces of ourselves. So, I encourage you to begin with one person. Choose an ancestor you know very little about and search for them. Visit an archive. Look through old family photographs. Search census records, newspapers, birth and marriage records, or your local library's genealogy collection. Better yet, call an older relative and ask them a question you have never asked before. Ask about a person, a place, a family tradition, or a story from their childhood.

Write down what you discover, and remember the journey may not always be beautiful. Some discoveries may feel like dreams, while others may feel like nightmares, but each one can bring you closer to understanding the people who came before you and, perhaps, yourself.