What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you see this picture?

Two young people lying on the floor inside their home, sleeping under a blanket. Anyone, anywhere in the world, would reach the same conclusion, right? Yet this photo caused a massive uproar across Iranian social media and led so many people astray.

Everyone thought these two young people were dead.

It went so far that the owner of the photo had to publicly deny the rumor of their deaths.

And all the while, the caption under the image simply read:

“The funniest photos of you are taken when you’re asleep!”

The story begins with the many bodies we saw wrapped in blankets. During the November uprising five years ago, countless families, terrified that the hospital morgue would never return their children’s bodies, refused to let the remains be taken there. They brought the bodies home and held the funerals from their own houses.

Even when the nine-year-old boy, Kian Pir Falak—the rainbow child—was killed by regime gunfire, his family carried his body home.

It is said they asked neighbors for ice to keep him, afraid the authorities would either refuse to hand him over or demand money and bribes in return.

Closer still was the deadly catastrophe of January, when more than forty thousand Iranians lost their lives.

The body of the 20-year-old protester, Faeze Mostaan, was kept at home until morning and buried in the morning.

Meanwhile many families searched desperately through hospitals for their loved ones. Later, a photo emerged from behind Al-Ghadir Hospital showing many people wrapped in blankets.

At the corner of this photo, you can clearly see a girl under a blanket. At first glance she seems to have fallen into a peaceful sleep—yet she has no life left in her body.

These were the corpses of young people killed by the regime, wrapped in blankets and left behind the hospital.

The beautiful face of the girl sleeping under the blanket… later we learned her name was Aida.

And so, we ask our dear fellow Iranians:

Until further notice, please do not post pictures of yourselves lying on the floor, sleeping under a blanket, or simply stretched out in any sleeping pose. We might misunderstand—and every old trauma will come rushing back to life.

Under that photo, countless people wrote comments like these:

“Only an Iranian can come close to having a heart attack from seeing this photo! Damn you, from the first to the last of you mullahs, for all the traumas you’ve given us!”

“God damn the mullahs!”

“I don’t know about you, but the second I saw that photo my anxiety shot through the roof and my heart climbed into my throat. I don’t think our generation will ever fully escape this trauma.”

“Even if this country somehow gets fixed, the traumas never will.”

“In a normal life I was never supposed to get heart palpitations from a photo like this. I was never supposed to dig through the comments in desperation, and then, once I realized it wasn’t what I feared, still sit there and cry.”

“I got badly traumatized!”

“All of Persian Twitter got traumatized by this photo!”

“Was I supposed to experience life only to look at such a cute picture and be reminded of massacres and corpses? What was my sin? What was our sin?”

“Seriously, my brain is fried! The first second I saw it, something completely different flashed through my mind!”

“You filthy bastard mullahs!”

“Being Iranian meant that the moment you saw the photo, pure terror hit you.”

“They just woke up our collective trauma all over again!”

“I didn’t breathe for several seconds!”

“I honestly can’t trust anyone who didn’t get traumatized by this picture.”