"I don't sleep until dawn": Nighttime trauma, sensory haunting, and the fragmented psyche after bombing

This study examines the psychological, sensory, and temporal dimensions of nighttime trauma among displaced Palestinian women following exposure to bombing during the ongoing mass violence in Gaza. It aims to reconceptualize sleep disturbance not as an isolated symptom but as an embodied manifestation of trauma under persistent threat.

A qualitative design was employed using semistructured interviews with 40 Palestinian refugee women aged 23-59 years residing in internally displaced persons' camps in Rafah. Interviews were conducted under conditions of ongoing insecurity. Data were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim in Arabic, and analyzed using thematic content analysis with a data-driven, bottom-up approach.

Six interconnected themes emerged: (a) collapse of rest following the first bombing; (b) embodied trauma-related nightmares, flashbacks, and sensory haunting; (c) erosion of the sleep-wake boundary; (d) nocturnal environments as sensory architectures of fear; (e) hypervigilance driven by auditory memory and bodily anticipation of violence; and (f) temporal distortion, prolonged nights, and a desire for release from unremitting psychological strain. Nighttime was experienced as an extension of the traumatic event itself, wherein darkness, silence, and sound reactivated embodied memories of entrapment, suffocation, and imminent death.

Findings indicate that postbombing insomnia and trauma-related nightmares and nocturnal terror experiences among displaced women in Gaza are not discrete sleep disorders but expressions of deeply embodied trauma shaped by displacement, structural violence, and ongoing threat. Trauma theory and practice must move beyond event-based and depoliticized models to address the sensory, temporal, and bodily dimensions of survival in contexts of continuous violence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).