Last night's dream - the refugee camp

If it seems odd that I'm posting an article called "Last night's dream" as we come towards bedtime for me, then you're not wrong. I actually meant to post this first thing on waking but I forgot bout it due to various distractions until now.

It won't take long, but I wonder if anyone has any idea what this dream means.

Put simply, in the dream I was part of an aid relief organisation providing food for refugees in Africa somewhere. It was odd, because I could hear the news report voiceover while I moved around the canteen tent. Sometimes it wasn't a voiceover. Sometimes someone was explaining the situation to me; sometimes I was explaining it to someone else. Maybe I was explaining it to the news reporter? As dreams are, it all seemed fairly logical at the time that this voiceover should be there all the time, sometimes delivered by me and sometimes by a disembodied voice and sometimes by a colleague. Unusually for me, I don't recall it being a "lucid dream": I don't recall being aware it was a dream and I don't recall being in control of anything in it.

The voiceover and images went something like this: I saw starving women and children (not so many men; maybe they were refugees of a war in which the men were still fighting - this wasn't explained at any point). They had food, but it was not very suitable: spicy food, or cold baked beans. Even food that was more suitable, they did not eat much but left their plates with lots of food on them, and had to be encouraged to eat. The voiceover explained as these images developed:

They think they will be punished for eating it. They have been told by the Government forces that all food is for the Government, not for them. We have to keep telling them that they are safe here and can eat all they want.

The food is horribly inappropriate, but it is all that the people back home are willing to send. The stuff they don't want any more. And it is better than nothing, so we give it to them anyway.

The dream was, of course, by this point heartwrenching.

I continued working, encouraging people in the food tent to eat their food, serving them, making sure everyone got enough for the basic minimum daily requirements. I saw their fearful eyes, just like I've seen on so many news programmes from drought-stricken, war-stricken, flood-stricken areas. (God, it's sad that I have so many comparisons to make).

Then, there was a baby. In the dream, I knew that she had come into the refugee camp hopelessly malnourished, weak, barely able to move. And she was moving. She was sat on the bench cuddled against her mother's side. Mother may have been scared to eat the food (I had to encourage her, as with so many other refugees). But the baby wasn't scared to eat: she didn't understand about Government threats. But, instead, for the very first time she was reaching for the plastic spoon that mother and I had used to feed her (for some reason, I remember so clearly that the spoon was blue). And as I watched the baby, she managed to grab the spoon, and by her own efforts (unimaginable when she had come into the camp a few weeks earlier) managed to scoop up a baked bean and conveyed it to her own mouth, and she fed herself. It seemed like such a small thing, but in that moment there was such a sense of elation, of hope, of triumph even - that small success, that small developmental step by the little baby girl, meant so much. Just before the dream ended, I looked into the eyes of the mother and saw there exactly the same wonderful emotions as I had felt at witnessing that moment.

Then I woke up, with that elation fresh in my mind.

For all the tragic circumstances that I dreamed there, a friend told me that the emotions are the important part of understanding dreams. So, I have to see it as a positive dream, because of the way it ended. But what it means, what the hope and triumph are about, I have no idea. And why, oh why, a blue plastic spoon?