Lately, the same dream keeps returning to me, over and over. I wouldn’t call myself a person who trusts dreams. I don’t believe in prophecies or mystic signs, and I’ve never thought of sleep as anything more than rest. This blog was never meant for things like this. It’s a place for argument, for clarity, for the hard light of day, not visions. And yet, the dream comes back with such eerie detail, such deliberate structure, that it’s begun to feel like something more than just my mind wandering. I don’t know what it is. But I feel I have to write it down like I did the previous one. Not because I think it will come true, but because it won’t leave me alone.

Each time, I find myself alone on a high ridge, somewhere that doesn’t exist on any map I know. The land is parched and raw, stripped down to its bones. The wind there isn’t a breeze. It’s a constant scraping, like time itself has worn the place hollow. The ground seems older than language, and though nothing grows, I can feel a presence beneath my feet. Not life exactly, more like memory. Like the dust remembers what it used to be. As if the very earth is holding its breath, full of the remains of those who never got to speak their final words.

Far off, there’s a noise, a sound that doesn’t belong to the earth at all. A deep grinding, something mechanical and ancient. Not thunder, not wind. It sounds like war. Like history pulling its armor on again. And then I see it. This strange machine, cutting across the sky. It’s not a plane, not a bird. It’s something unnatural, something that doesn’t fit into the world. Its wings are wrong. Its movement is wrong. It climbs like a lie pretending to be a miracle. We were never meant to fly, I think. We stole the sky, and we’ve never paid it back.

Inside that sky-machine, there’s a man. I can’t name him. But I feel that I know who he is. He radiates power, not from robes or medals, but from the way the wind moves around him, like even the elements have been taught to make way. I can’t see his face clearly. There’s a fog, not a cloud, but something internal. It’s like my soul refuses to look directly at him. I try, every time. And every time, it slips from view.

Still, I know who he is to me.

We are tied. Not by love. Not even by shared history. Something deeper. Something older. The kind of blood tie that doesn’t come from family, but from surviving the same beast. I’ve never admired him. I’ve never wanted to be him. But I know the same ancient fear wrote itself into both our stories. I carry that mark too.

And then he begins to rise.

The machine he rides groans under him. The wind quiets. Not out of peace, but out of anticipation. The whole world seems to tense. And then, without fail, it all falls apart. A shudder in the sky. A tearing noise that isn’t sound but sorrow. The kind of silence that isn’t calm, it’s stunned. The vessel doesn’t crash so much as collapse, like truth finally catching up to myth. There’s no explosion, no fireball. Just a slow, terrible descent. And I don’t need to see the wreckage to know: he’s gone.

Then, something changes.

All around me, people begin to appear, not from buildings or roads, but from the land itself. As though the soil is giving them back. They rise without fanfare. Quiet. Solid. Present. Their clothes are worn. Their eyes are bright. They don’t speak my language, but I understand them. I recognize their pain. Their skin carries histories I was never taught in school. Their presence feels like justice, not revenge. They have no weapons. They don’t need any.

They look toward the sky, not with fear, but with recognition.

They know what has fallen.

These are the ones who were swallowed. The ones who vanished by twos and threes and tens. Whole families, entire hamlets, old men with tobacco-stained fingers, girls who used to sing before sunrise. I see them in clusters, in waves, in long silent lines that seem to stretch past the edge of the dream. A teacher here. A grandmother there. A boy with a ball made of rags and plastics (“chikweshe”) under his arm. A mother still holding the wrist of her daughter. I do not count them. I wouldn’t dare. But they keep coming.

At one point, I pass four gleaming black cars, parked in a row on scorched earth. They are pristine, untouched by the dust around them, each with a price scrawled on the windscreen—5G’s, it says. I wonder how a car could cost so much in a place where no roads remain. I wonder who rode in them last. I keep walking.

The people keep coming. More than a town. More than a thousand. So many that the dust begins to look like skin. So many that the ground seems to breathe them. In books, they are a statistic. In speeches, a myth. But here, they are all eyes. All breath. All waiting.

They do not weep.

Instead, they begin to dance.

It is not joyous. It is not sorrowful. It is something else entirely. It’s a rhythm born of return. The air itself seems to shift around their movement, bending as if to make space for them at last.

The man who fell, that man to whom I am somehow tied, lies somewhere beyond the ridge, broken. And the people know. All of them. The wind carries the news across fields, through cities, beneath roofs. And what follows is not mourning, but celebration. A quiet, defiant joy.

I see old women lighting fires, not to warm their bones but to cleanse their memories. I see children drawing shapes in the sand, shapes they were forbidden to draw in daylight. I hear songs long buried under fear, now rising like the tide.

Someone claps once. Then again. And then, the sound spreads, hands meeting hands, a storm of applause not for a life lived, but for a shadow lifted. Bells ring from places that never had bells before. Doors are opened that had long been shut. The people are not cruel in their rejoicing. But neither are they ashamed.

I do not join them.

I remain on the ridge, alone, watching. I feel no tears rise in me. Only a slow, unfurling clarity. I was born beneath the same totem, branded by the same ancient name. But I never believed it gave me the right to wound. I never thought our shared beast made us brothers.

In the dream, I lower my head, not in mourning, but in thought. The air is still now, as if the world has exhaled.

And then I wake. Always just then.

There is no message scrawled into the walls of my mind. No angel with a trumpet. Only that lingering image of a sky reclaiming what man had stolen, and a people remembering the names of their dead in full voice.

I do not know what it means. I do not know if it is memory, omen, or the residue of a world too weary to hold all its truths by daylight.

But I write it here, that I might not forget.

And that perhaps, in some distant season, neither will you.