I’m going to offer this up for your consideration.

Almost a year ago — May 2019 — my dear friend Frederica Mathewes-Green, the Orthodox Christian writer, e-mailed to say that she had had a disturbing dream the night before. She said that she’s not in the habit of telling people her dreams, but this one felt prophetic in some way. I can tell you that I’ve been close friends with Frederica since 1994, and know her to have great spiritual sensitivity. But she is not in the habit of telling me her dreams.

She has now made the contents of that dream public. I assure you that this is exactly what she wrote to me in 2019. Her account starts like this:

One aspect of getting older, for me, is that I don’t remember my dreams as well as I used to—there are just little scraps of dreams that fly away when I wake up. But last spring I had a dream that, even while I was having it, I knew it was important to remember it. Even as the dream was ending, I was already counting up the points I needed to recall.

In my dream, we all knew we were going to die. Everyone in the world was going to die. A cloud of air bearing very fine, sharp particles was slowly encircling the earth; when people inhaled, it infiltrated the lungs, piercing the cells and destroying them. There was no way to stop the advance of this fog, and its effects were incurable. Wherever this fog had gone, it had killed the entire population. This cloud was gradually encircling the entire world, and eventually it would reach America.

Everyone in our local community knew this was coming. But somehow my husband and I knew that it was coming much faster than others expected. In fact, it was now very near.

I remember four scenes from this dream:

+ One, there was a naturally-occurring oil that could alleviate the pain, though it couldn’t prevent death—maybe delay it a little. A neighbor was happily telling me he had discovered a source for this oil on his property. He showed me in the palm of his hand the clear, slippery liquid. He explained that he was going to bottle it and ship it all over the world, charging high prices and making a lot of money. All for free, because he found it right there in his back yard.

I pitied him, because it seemed obvious to me that, once when word got out that it had been found here, people would descend from all directions and just take it for themselves. I said to my friend, “But don’t you think they will all just move here?”

There’s more to the dream, but you’ll need to click here to read it. The part at the end about faith is especially important.

Last week, when Matt Colvin, who lives near Chattanooga, was in The New York Times for having bought 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer, which he hoped to sell at a big profit, I e-mailed the story to Frederica and pointed out that this guy lives just down the road from her, in eastern Tennessee, and had cleaned out all the rural stores of their hand sanitizer, which he intended to sell.

Obviously the virus hasn’t “killed the entire population” of any place. Yet, anyway; scientists believe it’s likely to be with us for a while, mutating. So we’ll see. Also, about the “very fine, sharp particles” piercing the lungs: I e-mailed Frederica when I saw that scientists were using the term “ground glass opacity” to describe conditions in the lungs of badly hit Covid-19 victims.

Anyway, it’s just a dream. Make of it what you will. I just want to verify that Frederica really did send this to me almost a year ago.

Here’s a link to Frederica.com, her website.