In keeping with the theme of PSI dreaming, I made this comic after I had a
dream about a cartoonist who also drew his dreams named Sasa Rakezic, who uses the pen name Alekzandar Zograf. I hadn't met him at the time but I wrote him through the mail. He lives in a town called Pancevo, in the
Yugoslav country of Serbia. When I first saw his artwork, around 1992, The Bosnian War was just beginning to get attention overseas.We had both been published in the same issue of a comic called Weirdo. He later had a comic called Life Under Sanctions published here in the US. 


We had a mutual idea to try to put together a collection of dream comics by different artists for publication. It took some time to do but we eventually had a publisher agree to put the book out. We called it A Flock of Dreamers. During this time, the Bosnian conflict was ending as the US and NATO got more involved. A meeting in Dayton, Ohio, in Dec. 1995 brought about a peace treaty and the international sanctions brought against Serbia were lifted by '96.


During the war years, the airports were closed to foreign visitors with fuel and spare parts scarce commodities. In 1996 they were reopened and I arranged to visit Sasa in the Fall after receiving an invitation. It was prior to my visit that I had a dream of walking with Sasa and his then girlfriend, now wife, Gordana, in Serbia. I hadn't seen a photo of Gordana so the way I drew her in the comic was just as I dreamt her.


I was eager to see if any of the dream would come true. To my surprise, Gordana resembled the image I had of her. I was also surprised to discover I was one of the first Americans any of the Serbs had seen in years and since Sasa had arranged some exhibitions, I was interviewed on TV and on the radio. 



While on the radio there, I was asked to describe the dream comic about walking in Serbia. I went through the dream from start to finish but I left out the description of the sleeping people in the park as "refugees". For some reason, I was afraid to describe them in a helpless way, plus, during the Bosnian conflict, there hadn't been many refugees in Serbia since the war zone had been in the neighboring countries, mostly in Bosnia. That part of my dream, I felt, did not reflect reality, although we did take several strolls through parks while I was there.



A month or so after I left Serbia, where, by the way, we did a lot of walking due to the limited transportation at the time (I had a huge blister and lost a few pounds), there were huge demonstrations by the public in protest to fixed presidential elections. Many foreign correspondents, including Americans, flooded into Belgrade. It wasn't until a year later that Flock of Dreamers was published and then another year went by with more demonstrations.



Then Kosovo happened. The US eventually had a direct intervention with a systematic air war pounding the countryside and Sasa published another book, this time a dairy of comics during that new war. Because the country of Serbia itself had become a target, there were many Serb refugees on the move, afraid that the areas where they lived might be bombed. Many refugees during this time, according to Sasa, did live and sleep in the parks of Belgrade...the same ones we'd walked through. To me, my old dream took on a new meaning.



There is no way to really know that my dream foretold of this exact occurrence, which took place in the future from when I dreamt of it. But if you consider that there are or could be such dreams, I'd say by this experience that a prophetic dream could take place in time, even if it doesn't take place during the time you imagine it might happen. It might occur years later.