Salman Rushdie reveals he dreamed he was a gladiator being stabbed just TWO ... trends now
Salman Rushdie has revealed he was shaken by a ‘premonition’ of being stabbed by a Roman gladiator, just two days before the knife attack that nearly killed him.
The Satanic Verses author said he thought he would die as he opened up for the first time about the assassination attempt on stage at a New York literary festival that cost him an eye and stab wounds to his face, neck, chest, abdomen, thigh and hand.
He said the attack two years ago still ‘upsets me every day’ as he prepares to see his account of it published in ‘Knife’, his 22nd book, on Tuesday.
‘I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way,’ he wrote.
‘So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, 'So it's you. Here you are’.'
Salman Rushdie described how his attacker slashed his throat during the assassination attempt that cost him an eye and nearly killed him in August 2022
It took 27 seconds for festival goers and festival staff to drag Rushdie's attacker off him
The author spent eight hours in surgery, 18 days in hospital, and three weeks in rehabilitation after being airlifted to hospital from New York's Chautauqua Amphitheater
‘I remember thinking that I was probably dying. And it was interesting because it was quite matter of fact,' Rushdie said
The Indian-born author spent ten years in hiding after Iran placed a $3million fatwa contract on his life for the ‘blasphemy’ contained in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.
His police minders alerted him to half a dozen serious assassination attempts from state-sponsored terrorists before Iran called off its attempts in 1998.
But the fatwa remains in place and a lone wolf nearly claimed the prize after Rushdie accepted an invitation to speak at the Chautauqua Aphitheater in August 2022.
He nearly pulled out after having a dream two nights earlier in which he was being violently attacked.
Perhaps spurred unconsciously by the venue's name, he found himself dreaming that he was in a Roman gladiatorial arena.
‘It was just somebody with a spear stabbing downwards, and I was rolling around on the floor trying to get away from him,’ he told CBS.
The dream was so vivid he thrashed around in his bed trying to escape, waking his wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who had to wake him in turn and reassure him.
‘I was quite shaken by it,’ he told the BBC, ‘and I said to Eliza, I don’t want to go.
'And then you wake up a bit more, and you think, it’s just a dream, and you’re not going to allow your life to be ruled by something that happened in a dream.
‘And so I thought, I’ll go. It’s a gig.’
He brushed his fears aside but discovered that there was no security as he took to the stage to deliver a lecture on the importance of protecting writers whose lives are under threat.
‘In the corner of my right eye — the last thing my right eye would ever see — I saw the man in black running towards me down the right-hand side of the seating area,’ he writes in his book.
But he did not see the knife and thought, at first, that he'd just
