Unitalicized text is background and exposition.
Italicized text is the dream.
Last night before I slept, I was thinking of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. He was a famous Roman general whose own father, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo was a general too, a rather vicious one. I had reread Colleen Mccullough’s Masters of Rome series this year, so the characters and events of the books are rather fresh in my mind.
The incident I was thinking of was during Strabo’s capture of Asculum in 89BC during the Social War. When he took the town, he ordered the execution of most of the population. He kept a few of the children to march in his triumph in Rome at the war’s end. At the end of the triumph, the children were driven out of the city to fend for themselves in winter. However, I was thinking of a (probably fictionalized but plausible) incident during the capture of the town. It appeared most of the young women were spared and Strabo said to his men “use them”. Given the times – harsh, with few rights for most people and especially women; the circumstances – a brutal civil war; the man – a vicious person who was nicknamed carnifex (the butcher); the rape was not the worst thing to have happened. However, the casualness, seeming normality, expectation of the soldiers and the glee with which the order was received; including Magnus (who was not Magnus yet, but was on the way to earning a first nickname of adulescentulus carnifex (kid butcher) excitedly telling Cicero to come quickly to their shared tent (shared with probably six other young men) because he had secured a rather fetching young woman so that Cicero could get in early, is horrifying. The word "use" even though innocuous had a chilling ring to it in the text of the book.
In the dream I was at a reunion of my secondary school. We seemed to be staying in the hostels. And eating in the dining halls. When we went to eat, there was even the rowdy behaviour that we used to exhibit with people fighting to avoid being shortchanged or even not getting any food at all. There was a menu with two options, something that had never happened while I was there.
I was sitting beside a friend nicknamed Acid, who was a classmate and who had been in the same squadron as me. He was unsuccessfully cautioning me to be careful and not get any food on my clothes, thus staining them. He had been sensible then and he is sensible now. We are still in touch.
There was a conversation by some NCOs about the surprising effectiveness of MM’s command and suppression of an insurrection in Osun state. One of the people talking was Sergeant S. The conversation was talking approvingly of the events partly because MM’s dad is a famous general (thus the link to Strabo and Magnus) and partly because the insurrectionists were other i.e. not Hausa-Fulani and not Muslim and so deserving of whatever befell them at our (Hausa-Fulani, Muslim, born rulers) hands; similar to the way Strabo and Magnus had treated the people of Asculum.
MM is not a soldier. And even though he was an effective prefect while we were in school, he was and is a gentle and kind person. So, it is incongruous that he would have been a ruthless battlefield commander.
Other people that featured in the dream were my mates - UA, TS & TO. I'd only met with Acid and MM regularly since graduating although I had seen pictures of TS on his WhatsApp status, I found it interesting that my mind made all of them look older, to match me now.
It seemed to be a reunion of more than one set, along with GAMUS girls, students from our sister school. The only girl I noticed was not a GAMUS girl though. She is someone I met in university who is memorable because I had a crush on her and there was an incident where she showed me my bigotry.
It was a more than usually interesting dream, since everyone thinks their own dreams are interesting. Or so I imagine.