In 2015, living alone in Amman, Jordan, Osama Alfitory began dreaming every night of the same person (EP 10).
A decomposed body in a military jacket, lying alone in a street. The image returned nightly in high-definition clarity — with tactile sensation. He could feel the warmth. He woke crying.
He had not consciously remembered photographing this person. The image had been taken during the 2011 revolution, filed away mechanically, and forgotten. Four years later his mind retrieved it.
One day Alfitory opened an old hard drive and found the photograph: the exact image from his dreams. A decomposed body in a military jacket, lying in a street, no one around. He had shot it, moved on, stored it, and never thought about it again.
His conscious mind had moved past it. His subconscious had not.
He sought therapy and continued sessions by Skype when he had to travel. His therapist told him: some World War II veterans experienced the same thing after 30 or 40 years. "The ones it comes to early are the lucky ones."
He explicitly challenged the Arab cultural reflex of attributing trauma to supernatural causes — jinn, sorcery, spiritual weakness — rather than treating it as a medical condition.
See: PTSD and Collective Trauma
This story is one of the clearest first-person descriptions of delayed-onset PTSD in conflict journalism. It demonstrates: