I felt eyes burning from behind. I heard a growl so low it could have come from the depths of Hades. It was a big cat.
I'm running now. It may have been a tiger, a jaguar, perhaps a leopard but who cares when you're scared. Feline taxonomy becomes secondary to survival. I just knew it moved stealthily and with intelligence. Whichever way I ran it took a shortcut towards me. Hide? Forget it. Had to keep moving.
Then I caught a break. I opened the kitchen door and stood to the side. The beast's momentum carried it outside. I slammed the door shut then ran back upstairs to close the windows in my jungle house above. Quickly upwards, lungs bursting. Another floor, another floor to the top. I heard the growl again. The big cat had climbed a nearby tree and was waiting. It came in through the window. At this point I started to throw objects at the snarling animal - fruit, vegetables whatever came to hand. That's when I woke up!
One generally awakens quickly from a nightmare, though I noticed as I journeyed into consciousness that I'd made a mental note to source weapons of a more practical nature such as spears or knives, in case I were I to find myself in that position again. Then things became clearer.
It was stupid o'clock and under normal circumstances I would have rolled over and gone back to sleep. However my mind was still racing from being chased by the big predator so I knew nodding-off again was not an option. There was only one thing for it.. Twitter!
I grabbed my smartphone and lay there in the dark scrolling through the wall of micro-stories. Lots of marketing (note to self, why do I bother following all these sodding online marketers - OK they follow back but they post such crap, much of it automatically scheduled making sure my feed is polluted with pithy motivational messages even in the middle of the night).
There were lots of stories about the local UK elections. Basically the Labour party had gained more seats than the Tories, but because the Tories had anticipated a poor result and Labour a big one, the Tory Twitter brigade were claiming it as a huge victory. Another not to self: 'Truth' is the first casualty of a politicians opening their mouths!
Then a ballsack-grabbing headline caught my eye. "Knesset gives power to Netanyahu to declare war with single vote backing". That seemed important. It's not just that the power to start a war is sliding from a cabinet towards an individual i.e. the shift from democracy towards totalitarianism. It is that legislation such as this does not pop-out of thin air. Somebody has gone to the trouble of asking for this, of planning it. What is the motive? What is the intention? Worryingly Netanyahu had, a few hours before, given a presentation claiming Iran had lied about it's nuclear program. Are Israel about to declare war on Iran, who they're claiming are a nuclear power in hiding? This sounds bad.
Immediately the first thing to do is to fact-check. The original Tweet was on RT or RTNews as I recall and had a link to the Knesset. To further confirm the story I checked the Knesset website in English and found the relevant press release [https://knesset.gov.il/spokesman/eng/PR_eng.asp?PRID=13851]
This had been announced on Monday 1st May and I was only finding out on the following Saturday. That surprised me because I read a lot of news and have feeds and alerts pumping information to me all the time. So I thought I'd do a quick search in case I'd missed this important story. Well there was nothing in the Daily Mail, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The New York Times or the Washington post. Doing a general search of Google news, there were a few local/blog-type Jewish and Arab publications reporting the story but the only internationally known news source carrying it was Al Jazeera. [https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/991365553012002817]
I'd be a very rich man if I only had a microBitcoin for how many times I've had it said to me - 'Oh but you don't want to listen to RT or Al Jazeera, they're not credible news sources you know. Not trust-worthy like the BBC for example'. Well as an after-thought I just checked the BBC and there was no mention there either.
One has to ask why this piece of news was not more widely circulated. Do they not want to worry us? Well, the newspapers seem to spend most of their time keeping us in a state of fear. My guess is, there is something planned that they don't want us to know about just yet in case we start to rally against it. I think that Israel will attack Iran and/or Syria soon.
Perhaps there is a reason I was dreaming about being stalked by a fearsome big cat. I thought back to William Blake:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
The Tyger in this poem is more than a wild animal. The protagonist who sees the Tyger goes on to ask several questions of the beasts appearance in relation to the supreme deity which created it. Blake is challenging us to rise above the meekness of the lamb of God and to realize the suppressed spiritual power in our soul. Blake sent us the Tyger to wake us the fuck up. In my case, he succeeded.
[Disclaimer - I jotted this down after the nightmare a year ago and never got around to blogging it before. Since then there thankfully has been no large-scale invasion of Iran/Syria by Israel - yet!]