A dream premonition that led to a novel

Prepare yourselves. The story of how I came up with The Mayflies are Gathering sounds far-fetched but I promise you it happened...

The nightmare that came true...

It was 2016 and I woke up sweating having had the most vivid dream of my life. It was a single scene and it was so clear it was like watching a movie. I was standing at the end of my garden. It was a beautiful summer day and the countryside was rolling in a patchwork of golden and green. I wanted to go for a walk but I knew I couldn’t leave my garden because there was an airborne virus outside, which had sent the world into chaos. This was four years before COVID 19 hit the headlines.

I had no reason to think about an airborne virus. I’m a writer not a doctor and I don’t tend to worry about illnesses or my health. Yet the dream gripped me so much I then read several books about viruses before deciding an airborne virus was a good premise for a Young Adult novel. After a few rewrites with my agent and publishers, I finished The Mayflies are Gathering in November 2019. In January 2020, COVID 19 started hitting the headlines. Six weeks later we were in lockdown and that dream about not leaving the boundaries of my garden became my reality.

Are dream premonitions real?

Did I have a premonition? When wearing an objective journalist’s hat, the very word ‘premonition’ seemed ridiculous but whenever I told my premonition story amid the laugher, there was always someone who shared a premonition story from their country or culture. I realised that dream premonitions are relatively common. Indeed, the psychologist Carl Jung spent much of his life interpreting dreams having experienced a series of vivid dream premonitions himself. In the run up to World War I, he had several dreams depicting rivers of blood sweeping across Europe and even once heard a voice in his dream saying ‘this is real, this will happen.’

The more I Googled dream premonition, the more strange stories I found. One of the strangest was about the children trapped in the terrible coal landslide in Aberfan South Wales in 1966. The landslide hit a school and killed a hundred and sixteen children. Two families later reported that their children had foreseen the incident in vivid dreams in the weeks running up to the incident. On the eve of the disaster, an eight-year-old boy named Paul Davies had even drawn a picture of figures digging in a hillside and written the words “the end” underneath it. The next day the boy died in the school.

Some would say this dream or picture is a fabrication by a grief-stricken family but having experienced a dream premonition myself, I can only conclude these families were telling the truth. Perhaps sometimes we humans pick up on the thread of the stories around us and have an innate ability to foresee where this thread is leading us. I will leave it to the psychologists of the world to figure that one out… for me my premonition became reality in more ways than one.

Stories as warnings...

The story I ended up writing in The Mayflies are Gathering was not an exact depiction of the way COVID 19 unfolded but the themes echoed much of what we saw in the wake of the pandemic. My imagination took over where my dream left off and I saw a much more dramatic path for the virus. In this story, the victims of the virus experience swelling of the brain, which causes them to hear dark voices in their heads and feel an insatiable hunger for violence. This created chaos and highlighted how different people react to disaster – many people rise with altruism but many also sink into divisive survivalist behaviour as they seek a scapegoat for their suffering.

Like many dystopian stories, I think I wrote The Mayflies are Gathering as a warning. But that warning was not about the possible physical threat of airborne viruses, it was about the moral threat to humanity. I saw a divided world where moral compasses had been needlessly abandoned in the quest for power. I saw a society following a questionable leader without question because he had an iron grip over the media. And I saw how hatred and the need for revenge can sometimes be all consuming but never fulfilling because a life lived without love is not a life worth living. My story was an appeal to people to always seek out the altruistic path forward and keep a grip on their moral compass… no matter how scary their vision of the future.