Salman Rushdie says he saw himself being stabbed in a dream just before the attack

Celebrated Indian-born British-American author Sir Salman Rushdie, while speaking to The Telegraph in an interview, revealed that he had a dream that he was being attackedtwo days before he was stabbed in August 2022.

A man, carrying a knife, attacked Rushdie at a literary festival in Chautauqua, New York. He stabbed him in his eyes and sliced the knife into his face, neck, chest, abdomen, thigh and hand. In the deadly incident, the author lost one of his eyes.

Rushdie says dream was so 'vivid' that 'I was quite shaken'

The author said that in his dream he saw that he was rolling around on the floor of the arena and a man - who had a spear in his hand - was trying to stab him as Rushdiefrantically tried to save himself.

Also Read:India-born author Salman Rushdie opens up on horrific stabbing: 'It felt like...'

He said that the dream appeared so vivid that he started thrashing himself around in his bed violently and his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who is also a novelist, had to wake him up and reassure him.

"I was quite shaken by it," Rushdie said, adding, "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."

"Fifteen hundred people had bought tickets. I can’t just not show up because I had a bad dream," said the author.

The author said that he does not believe in prophecy or premonitions.

Watch:Judge rejects 'Top Gun' copyright claim from author's heirs

Till now, Rushdie has written 14 novels as well as two memoirs. Now, he has written his latest book on the incident which is titled "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder."

His latest book begins with the incident that changed his life. "At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheatre in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm," the book read.

(With inputs from agencies)