Maryam's Days

Mit Antar, a village in the Talkha district near Mansoura, summer 2023. The heat walks into the houses without asking. Maryam, the village seamstress, 29 years old, measures the bride Shaimaa's dress with her father's wooden ruler, pins between her lips. Shaimaa laughs and says: I want a wedding the whole village will talk about. That night the dream comes: many coloured lights, a pipe playing, a white dress moving. Then a crack, then darkness, then women screaming. Maryam wakes up at exactly 3:00 and finds her mother Safia standing in the doorway. Did you dream? she asks. Maryam lies and says: no.

This is a suspense novel with a countdown. Each chapter carries the number of days left before the wedding. For 15 years Maryam has dreamed of moments that later happen to the people she has sewn for with her own hands, and she has told no one. That is why she refuses to sew a shirt for Anwar, the village pharmacist. The dream returns every night, and grows clearer as the day comes closer. So Maryam starts to act to protect the people she loves. But every step she takes changes something around her. The village talks, and the groom's mother believes in good and bad omens. At home, a mother covers the mirrors every night and has kept a secret for 19 years, since the death of the father, Abd El-Aati, the village electrician. Will Maryam save the bride, or will she be the cause of what she fears?

Behind the story is real science, explained without equations. In 1948 Robert Merton described the "self-fulfilling prophecy": a false belief that people accept, so they change what they do, and it becomes true. Antti Revonsuo suggested that in dreams the brain rehearses danger, like a fire drill at school. After the Aberfan disaster in Wales in 1966, John Barker opened a "Premonitions Bureau" to collect people's dreams before disasters, and none of them was proven. A final section at the end of the novel, "What is real and what is imagined", tells you clearly where the science ends and the fiction begins.

The book is written in Arabic.