Prophetic Dreams

Early 1941, the nightmares started. Bob Paxton who billed himself as the Oracle in his private detective business was used to strange dreams. He had come to rely on seemingly prophetic dreams to help in his cases. He told himself they were just his subconscious picking up clues and signs that he wasn’t aware of. This was different. It wasn’t anything he was working on but with the clarity his prophetic dreams usually had, full of color, sensations and smells. There was a radio playing Christmas music, houses decked out in holiday ornaments and he heard the sound of airplanes flying overhead. The dream shifted. He could hear gunfire and bombs exploding. People were yelling. The acrid of smoke stung his eyes. He saw ships, several of them. A battleship in the harbor was on its sinking, a column of smoke rising like a dark snake into the sky. He saw flying men, flying men who were afire. He was under water but not drowning. Bodies of dead sailors, many in their underwear drifted by. Hundreds of dead faces flitted by, floating in the water. His stomach lurched and he woke with the taste of bile in his mouth. He thought of the mystery men he saw in the dream. He might be able to contact the Flame through his police contacts.

The hero known as the White Panther was also plagued by prophetic dreams. In his dream, he saw strange jungles not like his native Africa. He saw American soldiers fighting Asian soldiers. Among the Asian forces, there were monster men of varying sizes and deformities. Some stood twelve feet tall, others covered the ground quickly hunched over on almost all fours. They had clawed hands and foaming fanged mouths. They seemed to be led by a man in colorful armor, holding a sword. They swept over the American forces, brutally slaughtering them to a man where the monster-men showed cannibalistic tendencies. The jungles changed, he saw them swarming through African jungles, wiping out whole native tribes, killing the men and children and stealing the women. The various jungle lords banned together, some he knew but more he didn’t, but it was too late, the Asian armies too strong with the monster-men to be stopped by men armed with spears and arrows. Plus, the enemy had allied themselves with various witch-doctors and shamans whose authorities that the heroes had challenged for so long. The evil tribes followed them, the jungles burned. The temple of the cat-goddess was thrown down. With the shamans banded together, they called upon ancient blood and death magic and legions of the dead crawled from old graves challenging even Fantomah’s great powers. Scores fell but even she was eventually overcome.

The White Panther woke. He had been gifted with the power of prophecy, he knew how to read dreams and recognize a prophetic dream from a simple nightmare. He first went to the river to bathe and purify himself beneath the light of the moon. He sat on a grass mat facing the rising sun and meditated on what he saw. He rose, knowing what he needed to do. His dreams were of what would come to pass if he didn’t take action, but the future was not set in stone, just the path the world was already on. He would visit the cat-goddess, she could help.