A clear night in mid-June 2025 settles over southern Lebanon. We rest on unfinished concrete, family gathered after a long day replacing stones pried loose by occupation. Tobacco leaves breathe their sharp scent into the air. Then the sky ripples. One streak, then another, then a wild scatter of brilliance darts across the vault. Each arc flares, pauses, then fades. My niece and nephew, small as the olive saplings that sprouted during the most recent genocide in Gaza, gaze upward in astonishment. They shout, shooting stars, shooting stars, convinced that the heavens have delivered a private spectacle. They clasp hands, shut their eyes, and send lavish wishes upon those darts of fire. Adults hover behind them. We exchange restrained looks that carry whole histories. Some remain among the rows of tobacco, listening to cicadas, holding the scene intact for the children. Others drift indoors where a television blares. A crimson banner crawls across the screen while tiny windows replay the same streaking radiance from Amman, Damascus, Baghdad. The caption consumes half the image: “Iran launches new missile barrage at Israel.” The little ones burst in to announce their wishes. They see faces transfixed by the very stars they had just greeted outside, and their excitement swells. For a moment, innocence and war share the same broadcast.

What does it require to cultivate an environment in which children claim the right to dream even when militarization saturates their world? That custodial labor passes through generations. Bodies must survive guns, drones, embargoes, yet survival of flesh alone falls short. Dignity demands that dreams endure alongside bloodlines. My nephew and niece will grow tall among these hills. One day they will decipher the night more astutely than now. They will realize that the glimmers above them were rockets traveling away from their fields rather than toward them. Their discovery will never extinguish the habit of wishing; it will redirect it. They will place aspirations upon trajectories that escort colonial violence out of view, and their delight at that departure will shape a mature, anticolonial future. Dreaming, therefore, shifts from naïve wonder to deliberate practice, a cultivated capacity to read the sky for signs that empire can be unmade and worlds replanted.

Such maturation echoes through the long history of freedom movements. Historian Robin D. G. Kelley cautions that critique without vision soon exhausts itself, whereas a shared dream can propel whole communities toward action:“Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down…making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics but a process that can and must transform us.” (Kelley 2002, xii). Dreaming here is a disciplined speculation, a workshop in which communities sketch architectures of freedom before building them in stone and soil. Frantz Fanon observed the same dynamic in the psychic life of the colonized. “I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing,” he records; during sleep and throughout the period of colonization, the native “never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning” (Fanon 1963, 40). The body obeys colonial order while awake, yet the unconscious stages nightly rehearsals of emancipation. Fanon warns that melancholy will bloom unless such subterranean energies find daylight expression, but he applauds the dream as an incubation of revolt. 

Palestinian filmmaker Mohammad Malas’s The Dream (1987) offers one of the most compelling articulations of how the imagination persists and resists through the unconscious. Constructed from the night-dreams of Palestinian refugees in camps across Lebanon, the documentary captures the terrain of intimate visions, many of which return obsessively to memories of home, revenge, or liberation. These are assertions that even under conditions of displacement the imagination continues to ferment with sights of justice. The dream, in this context, emerges not as a retreat from history but as an act within it, one that preserves the capacity to desire a world structured otherwise. Ghassan Hage, reflecting on the exhaustion of political imaginaries in the present, describes “being bereft of new dreams and fantasies for a better future” as one of the defining conditions of our time. For Hage, what matters is not the presence of fantasy itself, but whether it possesses what he calls a “propelling power”: the ability to infuse life into those who carry it, to move them toward futures they feel are worth inhabiting. “Fantasies, visions, hopes and dreams of a better world are alive,” he writes, “when they inject life into those who believe in them. They propel those believers into the future” (Hage 2021).

In landscapes marked by invasion and erasure, such dreams of the future hold the work of place-making. They pass through borders without permission. They chart belonging where walls have fallen, where deeds have been lost, where homes exist only in memory. Dreaming demands that we shelter each other's capacity to envision. Under colonial violence, dreaming does not function as a retreat from material conditions but as a mode of cognition embedded in them. It stores strategies in figural form. It transmits knowledge in non-linear sequence. Its temporality is recursive, allowing the past to surface in future form, and the future to appear in the residues of the past. States that thrive on control cannot contain what dreaming makes possible. It generates coordinates of belonging that remain inaccessible to imperial surveillance but remain legible to those who dwell within them. What is often understood as a fragile or unconscious act instead reveals itself as a critical spatial technology, capable of both resisting and reconfiguring dominant systems of (dis)order. In militarized contexts, dreaming organizes itself around the preservation of possibility under conditions designed to extinguish it. It becomes a method, not for escape, but for inhabiting the impasse with intention.

Yet we must not romanticize dreaming as a stable or redemptive force on its own. Dreams can confuse as much as they clarify. They are not inherently virtuous, nor always liberatory. In times of crisis, they may flicker between horror and hope, haunted by fragments of what has been survived or suppressed. Dreams can offer comfort, but they can also become traps, circular interiors that recite harm without release. History is littered with disfigured futures that began as dreams. Under regimes of terror, dreaming without discernment may lull communities into nostalgia or paralyze them in abstraction. To dream, then, is not always to rise. It may also mean to stall, to fall, to suffocate inside one’s own imagined escape. For dreams to move us forward, they require not only the conditions to arise but also the vessels through which they can be carried.

A clear night in mid-June 2025 settles over southern Lebanon. We rest on unfinished concrete, family gathered after a long day replacing stones pried loose by occupation. Tobacco leaves breathe their sharp scent into the air. Then the sky ripples. One streak, then another, then a scatter of brilliance darts across the vault. My niece and nephew, small as the olive saplings that sprouted during the most recent genocide in Gaza, gaze upward in astonishment. For a moment, they prepare to make a wish. But before their hands can clasp, the entire family rushes out. There is no time for explanation. We lift the children from the ground and pull them indoors. No one shouts, but every movement is frantic. The arcs above fall too fast, too low, and too many. These are not the distant streaks of meteor showers, but Israeli bombs crossing the southern sky. Even the children register the shift. Their eyes search our faces for confirmation, but the truth is already written across the room. We draw the curtains, lower the lights, and guide them to bed. There are no dreams spoken aloud that night, only the quiet labor of tucking them in while the floor waits to tremble. When violence overwhelms the ground of action, the nightly dream ceases to serve the arc of collective liberation and instead becomes its substitute, suspending the future to secure the present. Settler colonialism spends billions to collapse this distinction, to trap us into mistaking endurance for emancipation, yet it is precisely in such moments that we must hold the line, safeguarding the capacity to dream beyond survival without confusing its shelter for its destination.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Malas, Mohammad. Al-Manam [The Dream]. Documentary film. Syria/Lebanon, 1987.

Hage, Ghassan. “Preface to the Japanese Edition of Alter-Politics.” September 28, 2021. https://hageba2a.blogspot.com/2021/09/preface-to-japanese-edition-of-alter.html.

Image caption:

“Shooting Stars?” South Lebanon, June 14, 2025. Photograph by the author.