When I was a kid in Uruguay during the civil war there in the 60s from 1966-72 when I was 8 years old until I was 14, a peace song by Johnny Cash from the anti-war movement in the USA got played there that was about an end to war everywhere.  I learned to play it on the guitar.  It went:

"Last night I had the strangest dream/I ever known before/I dreamed the world had all agreed/to put an end to war/I dreamed I saw a might room/the room was filled with men/the papers they were signing said/they'd never fight again."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o49qU8RJ8j

Last night I really did dream a dream like that about torture.  I survived torture the year after the war ended, and the dictatorship that won went after the civilian population with systematic torture and disappearances that have left 30,000 of us civilians missing still.  As a survivor now in 2020 I'm like one of those Holocaust concentration camp survivors, I guess.

Anyway,  because I also have PTSD from domestic abuse on me as a kid as two sexual assaults back then, the swapping of support here on DS PTSD usually touches on those traumas more often here in the USA than it touches on torture.  That's logical, since torture is less common here than it was as a widespread, organized practice of the dictatorships of Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina when I was there as a missionary kid in my teens in the 1970s.  When democracy returned in 1985 after 12 years of dictatorship, investigations found out that the dictator had made maps of every city requiring that a random citizen be tortured from every city block so that the fear of torture would be distributed city block by city block across the country.  That's how it happened to me 4 blocks from my suburban house one day just walking with friends.

On Sept. 8, the Fresh Air show from National Public Radio aired a podcast about a new book on torture that I listened to on my nightly walk.  It's by an ex-FBI agent whose job it was to interrogate terrorist prisoners from the Middle East.  As an interrogator he found that speaking the prisoner's language always worked better than torturing a prisoner during interrogation.  In fact, once torture begins, it taints the search for the truth because the subject in pain will now say whatever s/he thinks the interrogator wants to hear just to make their suffering stop.  As a foreign language and psychology teacher at a community college with my own background as a torture survivor, that message really hit home with me.

So in my dream last night, in a scene like that of the Johnny Cash song, I got to tell a public forum that torture doesn't get at the truth and that it's not only wrong, but it's useless.  Then we got to abolish it in my dream, just erase it forever.

I woke up happy.  This is a public forum, so I figured I'd make my dream come true here telling you about it.  It would be nice if it abolished torture forever, too.  Just dreaming about that must mean I'm making progress healing from it in my PTSD recovery, right?