Flies in a Dream.

In the middle of night, I woke up for no reason whatever. Vividly I remembered a scene from a fading dream. A photograph in plain black and white: it showed a dead soldier lying face down on the ground, his helmet covering his head towards which the camera was aimed. The abandoned look of his body suggested the soul had departed from it quite some time back.

I went to the toilet and returned to bed. But sleep would not come, and the image of the photograph persisted. Now I seemed to see flies hovering over the body. Out of nowhere, these words came to me, "The war is over for this soldier." And I heard the sound of the buzzing flies.

Yes, the war he had been engaged in, and other wars in other fields, would go on. For that fallen soldier however, so still in death with only the flies buzzing around as signs of life, it was all over and done with.

I tried to dismiss the image and still my thoughts, but my mind refused to be silenced. What had that man been thinking of before the fatal bullet felled him? Of his wife, his home, of what madness had brought him into strange and very dangerous places? Of the duty he was doing for his nation? Of might happen to him when the Grim Ruthless Reaper any moment claimed his life? Of Heaven, Hell, or whatever else, assuming there is a future after death? Had he suffered before the end came, and wondered how he had caused similar suffering to others designated as the enemy he was rightfully entitled to maim and kill? My mind meandered pointlessly over such questions before sleep caught up with me again. Only the sound of the flies buzzed as a lullaby.

Next morning the whole thing was gone, like a slate wiped clean.

But the writing showed again, when the morning after dawned. A friend rang me up to ask if I knew the sad news.

"What?"

"Sharan passed away suddenly. I thought you would have heard. He was alone in the house, and must have suffered a cardiac arrest. His wife was travelling afar, their only daughter is in the US. There was no one in the house."

"I am terribly sorry. I have no words."

"The worst of it is that with the doors locked, nobody suspected anything was amiss. They thought he had just gone on a trip. Until milk sachets and newspapers piled up unclaimed by the front door. And a smell began to pervade and spread. You know, then they had to break their way in. They found Sharan, with flies everywhere buzzing around the body."

Sharan had been a very good friend of ours. For him the war was over. I wondered if my dream in the middle of the night had been some kind of a message.

Have some of you had similar experiences to share?