It was the night of Friday, June 4, to Saturday, June 5, 2004. Thomas (=Gloomy) had been working intensely for days on a dossier detailing how his family had been terrorized by the homeowners and their associates for quite some time.

The pressure was immense: the police had urged him the day before to submit his dossier as soon as possible. If he failed to do so, he risked transitioning from victim to suspect.

That evening, Thomas received three phone calls from people he barely had contact with anymore. The last call, at 12:30 AM, particularly caught his attention. It was John, a young man he had temporarily provided shelter to a year earlier. “They’re after me again,” John said. He described the dire situation he was in, and Thomas did his best to advise him based on his own experiences.

At 3:30 AM that night, Thomas placed the final period in his dossier. Exhausted, he crawled into bed. But before he fell asleep, he felt it: a paralysis of his body. This phenomenon, sleep paralysis, was not unfamiliar to him. He knew it was often a precursor to intense, almost prophetic dreams.

Suddenly, he found himself in his childhood home in Zonhoven. He sat in his room, hearing voices and noises outside. Through the curtains, he saw a small family with children walking past his window. But in Zonhoven, this was impossible without going through the front yard.

To his astonishment, they continued toward the backyard, past the pond and the field behind it, as if privacy did not exist. The situation escalated. More and more people appeared, as if an invasion was taking place.

When he went to his neighbors for answers, they too walked past him silently, like automatons. The street filled with a crowd of strangers, screaming children, and dogs. No one listened to him. Back in his childhood home, he found strangers in the living room indulging in his personal belongings and destroying everything dear to him. In panic and rage, Thomas began throwing objects at them, but nothing had an effect.

Even when he used knives, the blades broke, and ultimately, he injured himself. Desperate, he fled to the shed by the pond, a place that had been a refuge in his youth. There, he encountered a gigantic Bengal tiger. The animal looked at him with innocent eyes and seemed to wait patiently.

Overwhelmed with fear, Thomas fled back to the house. Inside, he collapsed against a wall, resting his head, exhausted with closed eyes. When he opened them again, a second tiger leaped at him. The creature landed right in front of him and began licking his wounds.

What was initially a moment of pure fear transformed into a feeling of calm and comfort. For the first time, he felt at peace despite the chaos around him. In the garden stood four men. Thomas grabbed a broken knife and pointed it at the throat of one of them, who looked exactly like him. He shouted for answers. The man calmly replied, “Think of the tigers.” At that moment, Thomas was overwhelmed by a sense of peace. He woke up, still paralyzed, but with the certainty that this dream had told him something important.

In Dutch, by Erik H. Jansen on Substack

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