Tintin, Dreams and Musings
The incident with Tintin's dream about Chang wasn't the only instance in which he had seen something that turned out to be true.
Most of the time his dreams are madness and consist of what seems like pure nonsense, like most dreams. They're dreams; nothing more.
But on two instances (now three), the dreams become horrifyingly real. It's as though he is there, watching on, only he cannot move, nor make a sound. He is simply there, watching until he wakes up screaming in some way.
These dreams aren't a casual, idyllic scene of someone eating at a café, or a dog running through a field of waving grass in the late afternoon. They're always of someone he came family and they are always in some sort of danger.
The first incident was when he was about six years old. He doesn't entirely remember that night, but he does removed the image of his father's face wide-eyed and stricken with panic, desperately trying to right the aeroplane as it tumbled towards the ground in a fit of smoke. Tintin's father was never panicked in an aeroplane. He had been a pilot and well-trained in flying the skies. Yet the pure fear in his eyes as he stared out the cockpit window— into Tintin's eyes— sent the boy jolting awake in his bed, howling as his heart raced and the room spun.
He was inconsolable for the rest of the evening, no matter how hard his mother tried.
The next day, the telegram came announcing the tragic accident.
Tintin knew this was no coincidence.
The next time it happened was about six years later, in a cramped classroom somewhere in Antwerp. He had spent most of the evening awake writing for the resistance papers and sending coded messages via radios in the dark attic of the children's home. Despite his best efforts to listen to his German teacher, his eyes fell shut and his head dropped into a dream where his mother, (who Tintin believed to still be in Brussels also working for the resistance,) was being pulled off an overcrowded train by a soldier with a red, white and black armband. His unflappable mother who somehow woke up and went to the shops the day after the invasion as though nothing had happened was now stumbling across the snow to face a patch of trees, clenching her jaw to stop the tears from building in her eyes.
He snapped awake, yelping as the soldier's gun clicked, ready to fire the bullet.
His German teacher, a thin, pointed old woman who often rambled on about some perfect German race, narrowed her cold, calculating gaze. All he knew was that he wasn't trembling because of the new welt on the back of his hand, nor was he afraid to close his eyes because of her cane. Something else entirely had shaken him, and he knew when the Allied soldiers poured through the streets waving flags that his mother would not return home.
So when the haunting hyperealism in his dreams returned, this time of Chang's faint face and clouded gaze calling to him, Tintin knew this wasn't a simple coincidence. There wasn't a way to explain his visions without Haddock thinking he was a lunatic, so he have no explanation and steeled himself to face the potentially fatal Tibetan Mountains.
He had lost enough. He couldn't lose another.
