I return in memory to when I was fourteen years old, to a dream I have never forgotten. In that dream, there was a vast crowd of people, and it was clear they were awaiting the arrival of a great figure. Joy was written on their faces, and my younger brother stood beside me. As sunset drew near, the people began to disperse, but I knew with absolute certainty that they had been waiting for the Virgin Mary.
Suddenly, I felt a hand touch my right shoulder. I turned quickly to see who it was, and there she stood—the Virgin Mary herself, smiling, radiating a light unlike anything I had ever seen before. Angels surrounded her, and even the moonlight in that dream was different—pure, beautiful, celestial. She reached out, placed something in my hand, and said: “It is yours, Ahmed. It is yours.” It was a stone.
Two years later, in August 1996, I was walking with my brother along a street in Cairo. We chose a different path to reach home more quickly, and we began to run together. Suddenly, I stumbled and fell onto the sandy ground. Instinctively, I stretched out my hand and picked up a stone. The moment I held it, a brilliant light shone from within it. Looking closer, I saw the image of a pregnant woman—eyebrows, eyes, a nose, clear features. And I knew instantly that it was the Virgin Mary.
I kept the stone in my pocket and returned home with my brother. As soon as we entered, my mother scolded us for being late. But when I placed the stone on the table, her eyes fell upon it, and she exclaimed without hesitation: “This is the image of the Virgin Mary, with Christ in her womb.”
The stone also bore a shape resembling the trunk of a tree, and everyone who saw it confirmed the same thing: it was indeed the Virgin Mary in pregnancy.
Yet the greatest revelation was not the stone itself, but what followed. From the moment I found it, I began to see Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary often in my dreams. They would tell me of events yet to come—and what astonished me most was that these visions came to pass exactly as I had seen them. Among them were the coronavirus pandemic, another deadly plague arising from Europe, and visions of the eastern seaboard of the United States submerged beneath the Atlantic Ocean.
From that moment on, I understood that the stone I had found was no coincidence, but the very sign given to me in that first dream—when the Virgin Mary placed the stone in my hand.
