Journal
In northern Ghana, a dream can cost a woman her home. Everywhere else, it costs us the truth about ourselves.
A nephew had a dream.
In it, he saw his aunt. When he woke, he told people what he had seen — and what he had seen was enough. Amnesty International documents what followed. She was beaten for two days. Then she ran, to the Gambaga camp in northern Ghana, one of four informal settlements where women accused of witchcraft go when there is nowhere else to go. She tried to return home three times. Three times, her accusers made sure she could not stay.
Sit with that. A camp for cast-out women was safer than her own house. And the case against her — the entire case — was somebody else's sleep.
She is not an outlier. Another woman, Wuni, was accused after a relative said she had seen her as a witch in a dream. The claim went to community authorities. She was beaten in her own home, says the police were reluctant to help, and ended up in Gambaga too.
Amnesty's April 2025 report, Branded for Life, counted more than 500 people living in four such camps, most of them women between fifty and ninety. Researchers found inadequate food, unsafe housing, unclean water, thin healthcare, and almost nothing in the way of mental-health support. Amnesty's senior researcher on the report, Michèle Eken, has said these accusations — triggered by a death, an illness, or a dream — are rooted in misogyny and harmful stereotypes.
Notice who gets accused. Not the young man with land. Not the uncle with money. The widow. The old woman. The poor one, the sick one, the one who never remarried, the one who talks back. A dream is not lightning. It falls where a community has already decided somebody is expendable.
These are not dream interpretations. They are lives dismantled by what people decided a dream proved.
I am telling you this first because I want you to understand the stakes of a habit most of us treat as harmless.
The violence in Gambaga is the extreme end of a spectrum. But the engine driving it — our refusal to look inward when we are afraid — starts in much smaller, quieter ways, in our own bedrooms.
I will call her Nana. She called me about a dream.
In it, she was not herself — not the self she recognises in daylight. She was hard, masculine, almost tomboyish. Her teachers had hurt her mother, and she was fighting them. Not arguing with them. Fighting them. She had become someone with enough force to strike at authority and win.
Nana did not call anyone a witch. She did not say a relative had sent the dream, or that an enemy was working against her. That is exactly why her story is worth telling: it shows what the other road looks like.
We had spoken a few days before. Life felt heavy, she said. She wanted to be more determined. She wanted control.
So when she described becoming a fierce defender in her sleep, I did not hear an intruder in her room. I heard a sentence: I am tired of feeling powerless.
Carl Jung's basic insight still holds. The unconscious does not send memos. It sends scenes. It does not say you feel crushed by authority and you want your agency back. It hands you a classroom, a mother, a fight, and a body strong enough to finish it.
The teachers may be every rule she has been living under. The mother may be the part of herself she is trying to protect. The tomboy may be the courage she had been asking for, worn like a costume because her mind had nowhere else to put it.
Too many adults have handed young people fear and called it wisdom.
That sentence will make some people angry. Good.
Because look at what we do. A child dreams of being chased, and an aunt is summoned to explain herself. A young person wakes up shaking, and the first question is not what has been weighing on you? It is who is after you? We turn nightmares into family investigations, and then act surprised when families come out of them suspicious, fractured, and cruel.
Age is not automatically insight. Tradition is not automatically truth. And a belief does not become harmless just because it is old.
When a dream turns frightening, many of us reach straight for the name of Jesus. I understand why. Prayer can steady a shaking hand. But comfort is not the same thing as understanding, and it was never meant to be a reason to stop asking.
Sometimes a dream is stirring grief we postponed. Anger we cannot say out loud. Pressure we have normalised. Fear nobody ever gave us permission to name. Before we decide what it means spiritually, we can still ask what it means emotionally.
I am not asking anyone to abandon faith. I am arguing against one inherited lens being the only lens — because a household that cannot ask questions is one bad dream away from needing a villain.
And some fear is a signal rather than an accusation waiting for a target. Recurring nightmares, dread that follows you into the daylight — these can mean a person needs rest, safety, support, or a conversation with a qualified mental-health professional. Fear deserves care. It does not deserve a scapegoat.
In Ghana, a bill to criminalise witchcraft accusations has been drafted, rejected, and reintroduced. Six years after ninety-year-old Akua Denteh was beaten to death at Kafaba over an accusation, it is still not law. If you want the fear to stop costing women their homes, that is the thing to push on — and Amnesty is collecting signatures for it now.
But the smaller work is ours, and it starts in a bedroom at 3 a.m.
The next time you wake with your heart going, pause before you name an enemy. Ask three things.
What was I feeling in there?
What in my life feels heavy, controlled, or unresolved?
What part of me was trying to survive?
The dream may not be accusing your grandmother.
It may be introducing you to a part of yourself you have not yet learned how to hear.
Source: Amnesty International, "Branded for Life: How Witchcraft Accusations Lead to Human Rights Violations of Hundreds of Women in North Ghana," 14 April 2025. "Nana" is a pseudonym, shared with permission.
