The recurring nightmare that haunts British 9/11 survivor who escaped south tower

For the past 25 years, Janice Brooks has been reliving the same recurring nightmare. She is standing in a building in the middle of New York’s Hudson River looking across at the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. There are no buildings in the middle of the Hudson River – this is how she knows she’s dreaming.

Halfway up one of the towers she sees a man standing in the huge void left in the building by a plane. He has curly black hair and is wearing a blue shirt and a tie. The man cannot stop looking over his shoulder at a wall of flames inching towards him.

Ms Brooks can see the sweat forming on the man’s brow as he edges towards the drop. The man looks down, bends his knees as if about to jump, and then, “Boom,” Brooks claps, “I wake up.” She is one of the few people who walked away from the 11 September terror attack, making a miraculous escape from the 84th floor of the south tower. Sixty one of her colleagues weren’t so lucky.

Aged 41 at the time, she had moved to New York just three weeks earlier, accepting her dream job as an executive assistant at Euro Brokers at Two World Trade Center. She had already spent a decade in London working for the brokerage firm and had built up close relationships with many of her colleagues. On the previous Friday night, four days before the attack, Ms Brooks climbed to the top of her 110-storey office building – once the world’s tallest buildings – to take in the view of the city she now called home.

Wind ruffled through her short-cropped hair as she looked down onto the Brooklyn Bridge, turning to see the sunset glinting off the Empire State Building. Her new adventure was just getting underway and she smiled to herself. On 11 September at 8.46am, when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower, all passengers aboard were killed instantly.

The plane severed all three staircases in the skyscraper, trapping an estimated 1,400 people above the 91st floor. Ms Brooks had been at her desk in the adjacent tower when the first plane struck. Her 84th-floor office faced away from the north tower so she did not see the Boeing 767 aircraft but she heard the explosion.