“It Doesn’t Matter, I Have To Kill Her Because She Looks The Part”

I have a problem with reoccurring nightmares, especially when I’m under a lot of stress. These past few weeks it’s been a similar dream, all with having to be Middle Eastern. The dream Goes Something like this.

A good friend of mine and I are walking down the street and we happen upon a lady in a headscarf/hijab. She has two children with her, one around the age of nine and the other about four.

My friend, startled to see a lady in a headscarf turns to me and yells “wait!”

She grabs the lady and brings her into a conveniently placed warehouse. (Funny how in dreams everything is “conveniently placed.”

She ties the mother up to a chair and pulls out a gun.

I scream at my friend asking what she’s doing, and her response is, “She’s a Muslim, I have to kill her.”

The mother is in tears asking my friend not to kill her. She pleads that she’s a single mother and that no one will be able to take care of her children. She then goes on to plead that she’s not a practicing Muslim and that if it makes things better she will take the headscarf off. My friend doesn’t untie her though, instead, she puts the gun into the woman’s mouth and says, “it doesn’t matter if you’re practicing or not, you still look like a Muslim.”

To which I begin to plead saying that she has to kill me too because I can be perceived as a Muslim.

My friend keeps yelling “I Have to Kill Because She Looks The Part.”

I grab my friends arm, but she gut-punches me, making me collapse to the ground.

“We don’t need people like you in the world, reminding us of all the evil that’s around us.”

The mother keeps trying to get out of the chair, her children completely shocked by what’s happening, unable to help their mother.

And at that moment my friend pulls the trigger and the room is covered with blood.

That’s usually when I wake up. There hasn’t been more that goes on with that dream, but I always wake up with sleep paralysis after. I’ve had it about 4 or 5 times over the past two weeks, and I’m wondering if there’s an inner conflict I have with being a Middle Eastern person who doesn’t “look the part.” Like, am I feeling guilty because of it and if so, where is it coming from all of a sudden?