I haven’t thought about self-fulfilling prophesies for some time now, even though I have had my suspicions that many of the major experiences in my Life could have come about because I thought about them beforehand. A good example of this would be my Vietnam experience. 

Before I enlisted in the Navy back in 1966, I had had a reoccurring dream in which I woke up in a cold sweat. In the dream, my vision is blocked for some reason but I could see fresh blood on my green pant leg. There is a burst of gunfire and then a feeling of being forcibly propelled forward into a black wall, at which point I would wake up. 

The first time I attributed the dream to a news broadcast on television about the Vietnam War but I had a deferment because of my work status as a psychiatric nurse so I didn’t think much about it. The second time the dream came to me, just a week later, I gave it more thought, but again, because of the escalation of the war, I attributed it only to the fact that it was on everybody’s mind and came up in daily conversations. A few days later the same dream caused me to sit straight up in my bed and question the meaning of it and I concluded that it was my destiny to die in Vietnam.

I enlisted in the Navy so that I could be a Marine Corpsman a few days later and just after the Tet Offensive of 1968 I voluntarily exchanged orders with another Corpsman so that I could fulfill what I believed to be my destiny.

In May of 1968, while on Operation Allen Brooke with the 7th Marines, I entered the dream. There were only 13 of us left after three days of heavy fighting, and as the Sergeant called us together I knew exactly what would be said because I had been there before. The following morning we came under machine-gun fire and as I was working on a wounded Corporal, a grenade hit close to us and a piece of shrapnel went through my glasses and into my left eye. As one of the men was putting a bandage on my face I looked down but all I could see was the blood on my pant leg. A medevac helicopter rescued us but as we lifted off, several enemy bullets penetrated the bottom of the helicopter causing it to eventually crash land. I was thrown out of the machine gun portal and the helicopter came down on top of me, causing me to lose consciousness.

Was it really my destiny to go to Vietnam or did I create the experience because I believed the dream was prophetic? Could I have prevented it from happening?

This was only one of many experiences I have had in my Life… but today I am asking for a different reason. It has long been prophesied that the end of the world would come as a result of a Battle at Armageddon. With the lack of good leadership around the world today, and in the foreseeable future, mankind may be very close to being on the Eve of Destruction.

Is it our destiny to destroy ourselves… or has our collective consciousness created a self-fulfilling prophecy? Do you think there is any way that we can prevent this from happening?

Your thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated in the comments below

Wayne Dale Matthysse