I was sleeping on a traditional wooden bed woven with coconut coir rope - the one where servants from rural islands slept at my home in the capital island Male' during my childhood.
I woke up and wondered what I was doing on the servants' bed.
I also felt disoriented: was it my childhood self or my adult self, I wondered.
I shifted my body so that I faced up and in my line of sight was the roof made from corrugated tin sheets.
I then wanted to get out of the bed and turned to the side and saw Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP)'s politician Mariya Ahmed Didi.
She was standing with her right side turned towards me and so she wasn't looking at me. She just stood there unmoving.
I wondered what she was doing in my dad's home (where I lived the better part of my life) and how she came to be standing near the servants' bed on which I was sleeping for reasons that wasn't clear to me because I had my own bed in my dad's home.
I also wondered how she had travelled back to the past - if the wooden bed is an indication that this was the past of my childhood times. It was the time when servants were given such wooden beds with coconut palm leaf thatch mattresses. Although that was the condition servants, all from outer islands, slept in Male' homes, the capital's families slept on steel meshed beds with cotton filled mattresses.
In my whole journalistic life, I directly met Mariya only once and that was when I went (to her apartment on the same street as my dad's home) to interview her at a time when MDP was hotly fighting against President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom's rule.
I don't remember the rest of the dream, so I don't know whether I interacted with Mariya or not.
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