The Dream That Came to Visit – A True Recollection
Image Pixabay - Pezibear
In My Teens
Back in my teens, I started to have a series of recurring dreams, all similar in theme and substance, if not every detail. I continued to have these dreams for more than 10 years running. They were not nightmares, I wouldn’t even say they were ‘bad’ or disturbing dreams, just a little odd. And I wondered, ‘Why this dream? Why year after year?’
So, the dream went like this, a little hazy as many dreams are –
'…I’m in the desert, in an area of gravel plains, low hills and sand dunes. It is day time, hotter than hell, the air is full of dust. Bullets fly, grenades explode, chaos all around. I’m with a few of my comrades, my fellow soldiers. We are charging towards a small hill to take the high point. Enemy soldiers are retreating. We race to the top in victory. Just as I reach the top, I see an enemy soldier crouched on the low side…his gun is aimed at my chest. He fires.'
I wake up. Not perturbed in any way, just wondering.
Although there was no dream narrator filling in the details for me as this dream played out, there were things I knew about it implicitly. They were: This was the Sahara; it was the Second World War; I was an allied soldier; and I died there, in the sand, and was buried there.
Image - An old skeleton found in the Sahara - @mmo-mmo
All of which baffled me because I had never been to a desert, let alone the Sahara. I was born long after WWII, and had never been in the army. And, as I pinched myself after the dream, I was quite sure I was alive and well, I hoped anyway.
I didn’t count how many times I had this particular dream, I estimate maybe 50 – 60 times over the years. Eventually they became less frequent, maybe once or twice a year, and life carried on.
Looking for Something Different
A few years later, I decided to see if I could get a job on another continent. I had backpacked through Latin America, and really enjoyed aspects of the culture. So I applied to a few companies that operated internationally, specifying that my preferred work region would be Central or South America.
I struck out. There were no such positions available, at least in my work field. Disappointed, I went on to other things.
Then, one early morning a month later, I got a phone call. The voice on the other end asked, “Do you want to work in Libya?”
Libya?? My brain ran through everything I knew about Libya, in what seemed like a split second. North Africa…Arabs and Berbers…Colonel Muammar Gaddafi…terrorism…Sahara desert….
If you had asked me to choose a country that I wanted to work in, Libya would have been low on the list, in the North Korea section.
But, I wanted to work overseas for a time. So, with a little doubt still lingering in my mind, I said, “Yes.”
And a few weeks later, I found myself in the middle of the Libyan Sahara, staying in a ramshackle camp of tents and broken down trailers, with a rogue’s gallery of people from all over Africa and the rest of the world.
Image - A not so clear photo of @mmo-mmo
It wasn’t the Buenos Aires or the majestic Andes mountains of my hopes, but it was somewhere. I ended up staying for years.
Looking for Buried Treasure
I drove all over the desert. There were no roads, navigation skills were essential. Usually someone was with me, sometimes not. My particular job was geodetic surveying and cartography (mapping).
Image - Libyan Sahara - @mmo-mmo
On this particular day I was alone. I came upon an abandoned oil rig site. There were various pieces of debris all over. I guess when the camp was abandoned, environmental clean-up wasn’t a priority.
As was my habit when I found anything like this, I started to poke around to see if I could find anything of interest or value. Today, it was mostly just a few old bottles and cans, some scrap metal, a few pieces of sand-blasted wood. No long-forgotten chest full of gold it seemed.
And then I saw it. Sticking up out of the sand was the rolled-up end of an old newspaper. I had an interest in history and memorabilia. Finally, a find!
A Headline to Remember, at Least for Me
I gently tried to dislodge the paper. Pieces tore. It was firmly embedded, in time and wind-compacted sand. I began to dig it out carefully, but as I tried to unroll it, I damaged it more. But I noticed something with a shock.
I could see the header area of one of the pages. It read – “The Toronto Star - January .., 19..”
I experienced a strange feeling in that moment. A combination of a thrill and a chill, all over my body, especially my chest to my groin. Toronto was where I was born, and the date on the paper was my exact birthdate.
Both this newspaper and I were thousands of miles away from home, in the middle of the largest desert in the world. We had both arrived to the exact same spot, the newspaper earlier by almost 3 decades. The newspaper had obviously been taken there by a camp occupant to read, and abandoned with the camp decades earlier.
I sat there on the sand staring at the date over and over again. Then I would look away, and look back to see if I was reading it correctly. I tried to calculate the odds of something like this happening, but my statistical skills failed me.
I recalled the decade-plus series of repeated ‘dying in the desert’ dreams. I wondered. I looked at the landscape all around me, and the dunes in the distance. Have I been here before? Was it possible?
An Effort at Preservation
I was desperate to take a photo, but my camera had been confiscated at customs as being a ‘security threat’. The customs officer assured me that I could retrieve it upon departure, but as he smirked at me, we both knew I would never see that camera again.
This kind of thing was common in Libya at the time, frequent random security crackdowns at customs and immigration. I cursed that officer in my mind.
I sat there a little longer, figuring out what to do. I considered taking it with me. But I knew with all my travels, it would likely get lost, or more damaged.
Finally I made a decision. I gently placed the paper back in the hole, and filled in the sand around it, and then piled more on top to cover it completely. Not as a burial, but as a protection. I wanted to preserve this paper. Who knows? Maybe someone else will find it one day...
The Skeleton
A few days later, no more than a mile from the abandoned campsite, one of my crew members and I stumbled across the skeleton pictured earlier in this post. We came back the next day with more people and searched the area for more bones.
Image - Reburial of discovered remains - @mmo-mmo
After collecting all the bones we could find together, the remains were given a re-burial with basic religious rites. I borrowed a camera for the occasion.
The Answer is Out There Somewhere...
I’m not given too much over to mysticism, or dream interpretation, or things like that. But I wonder, is there some unseen connection between my dreams, that newspaper, the human remains, and me ending up in the Sahara finding them? I don’t know. Maybe it's all just a coincidence in a universe of almost infinite possibilities.
Image - Pixabay - Genty
In any case, I chalked it up to a series of random events with no significance, other than what I gave to it.
I last departed Libya in 2008, before it was ‘liberated’ by allied NATO forces, and Western-backed ‘democratic militants’. I have no plans to ever go back.
And, I have never had that dream again. The past was put to rest.
