I dreamed last night that I watched bombs explode outside my house, missiles dropped from planes flying high in the sky.

As the bombs landed, pieces of debris flew toward me. It occurred to me that I knew who had attacked us: It was not a foreign enemy, but fellow Americans who had bombed our neighborhood.

"The bombs are from another state, a red state," I remember thinking, as if that made total sense, that a Republican state would attack us merely for being a Democratic one.

In the nightmare, I screamed for my husband to grab the kids and tried to rush upstairs to them. I could not find them. As my panic rose, suddenly I woke up, covered in sweat.

I realized, as my heart returned to its normal rhythm, that my dream was about the midterms.

What can I say about the midterm election other than that politics have become so vicious, so cruel that we have become inured to the very real signs of increasing political violence.

Paul Pelosi, husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, recently was attacked in his home, reportedly by a man who told police he was trying to find and hurt the speaker of the House. According to police, the man had built an extensive online presence full of right-wing conspiracy theories.

Afterward, instead of expressing horror at the attack and considering the role the GOP played in inspiring political violence, the conservative smear machine started a new conspiracy theory, that the attacker was Paul Pelosi's lover. People like Donald Trump Jr. mocked the incident on social media and other prominent conservatives suggested Pelosi or the Democrats were to blame.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, so-called election-monitoring groups only recently were prevented from showing up to ballot boxes openly armed, lying about election laws and recording voters dropping off ballots. In a hearing about the group's actions, one man told the judge that he and his wife were harassed, and their information publicly blasted out by GOP showman Steve Bannon, who called them ballot mules.

On the opposite side of the country, a video recently went viral of a Baptist pastor talking about how he'd seen a boy wearing fingernail polish. The pastor told his flock that he was shocked the kid "looked like a boy" otherwise.

"I'm just like, oh, I want to break his fingers," the pastor said, from the pulpit.

In Oklahoma, a man wearing what looked a lot like a MAGA hat threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of a donut shop after they hosted a drag show. He left an anti-LGBT letter on a neighboring business.

And those are just the happenings of the last week or so.

So, do I feel targeted by conservatives, merely for political differences? Do I know some Republicans think their beliefs should be enforced at the end of a gun? Even though my nightmare is clearly impossible, do I think it represents a metaphor for the very real anger surging through the GOP?

I suppose I do.

I suppose I don't feel like someone conservatives simply disagree with.

The GOP has called liberals like me murderers for supporting abortion rights, groomers for favoring LGBT rights, Nazis for believing in gun control and fascists for considering the 2020 election legal and fair.

My unconscious mind might be forgiven, therefore, for mistaking the midterms for a civil war.

I can wish it were otherwise, wish that the temperature might be lowered and the fires of passion dampened, but at the same time I can know that it doesn't seem very likely.

My only hope is that, after the midterms, the insanity will stop — for a little while, at least.

There is, after all, 2024 coming up.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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