Salman Rushdie reveals he dreamed he was a gladiator being stabbed just TWO DAYS before he was knifed at New York event

Salman Rushdie has revealed he was shaken by a ‘premonition’ of being stabbed by a Roman gladiator, just two days before the knife attack that nearly killed him.

The Satanic Verses author said he thought he would die as he opened up for the first time about the assassination attempt on stage at a New York literary festival that cost him an eye and stab wounds to his face, neck, chest, abdomen, thigh and hand.

He said the attack two years ago still ‘upsets me every day’ as he prepares to see his account of it published in ‘Knife’, his 22nd book, on Tuesday.

‘I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way,’ he wrote. 

‘So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, 'So it's you. Here you are’.'

Salman Rushdie described how his attacker slashed his throat during the assassination attempt that cost him an eye and nearly killed him in August 2022

It took 27 seconds for festival goers and festival staff to drag Rushdie's attacker off him

The author spent eight hours in surgery, 18 days in hospital, and three weeks in rehabilitation after being airlifted to hospital from New York's Chautauqua Amphitheater

‘I remember thinking that I was probably dying. And it was interesting because it was quite matter of fact,' Rushdie said

The Indian-born author spent ten years in hiding after Iran placed a $3million fatwa contract on his life for the ‘blasphemy’ contained in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

His police minders alerted him to half a dozen serious assassination attempts from state-sponsored terrorists before Iran called off its attempts in 1998.

But the fatwa remains in place and a lone wolf nearly claimed the prize after Rushdie accepted an invitation to speak at the Chautauqua Amphitheater in August 2022.

He nearly pulled out after having a dream two nights earlier in which he was being violently attacked.

Perhaps spurred unconsciously by the venue's name, he found himself dreaming that he was in a Roman gladiatorial arena. 

‘It was just somebody with a spear stabbing downwards, and I was rolling around on the floor trying to get away from him,’ he told CBS.

The dream was so vivid he thrashed around in his bed trying to escape, waking his wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who had to wake him in turn and reassure him.

‘I was quite shaken by it,’ he told the BBC, ‘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.’

He brushed his fears aside but discovered that there was no security as he took to the stage to deliver a lecture on the importance of protecting writers whose lives are under threat.

‘In the corner of my right eye — the last thing my right eye would ever see — I saw the man in black running towards me down the right-hand side of the seating area,’ he writes in his book.

But he did not see the knife and thought, at first, that he'd just been punched.

‘I think he was just wildly, you know, flailing around,’ Rushdie said.

The Indian-born author had a $3million fatwa placed on his head and endured at least six state-sponsored assassination attempts after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988

The book sparked worldwide protests among Muslims outraged at its alleged 'blasphemy' 

But then he saw a pool of blood ‘spreading out from my body’, and realized that his right eye was ‘kind of hanging out of my face, sitting on my cheek, I've said like a soft-boiled egg. And blind’.

‘I remember thinking that I was probably dying. And it was interesting because it was quite matter of fact.

‘It wasn't, it wasn't like I was terrified of it or whatever.’

Rushdie's account of the attack will be published by Penguin Random House 

It was 27 seconds before festival staff managed to pull the attacker off the then 75-year-old.

‘That's quite a long time,’ Rushdie said.

‘That's the extraordinary half-minute of intimacy, you know, in which life meets death.’

The author was airlifted to hospital where he underwent eight hours of emergency surgery before being placed on a ventilator, unable to speak.

He said he felt a 'profound sense of loneliness' at the prospect of dying away rom his family, but recovered because 'A part of me, some battling part deep within simply had no plan to die'.

After 18 days in hospital and three weeks of rehabilitation, Rushdie was discharged.

One of his surgeons told him that he was both really unlucky and really lucky.

‘I said, 'What's the lucky part?' And he said, 'Well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife,’ Rushdie said.

His attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, was dragged off the stage by stewards and has been held without bail at the Chautauqua County Jail as he awaits trial.

Born in California to Lebanese parents he was found with a false driving license in the name of two Hezbollah commanders when he was seized, admitting he had only read two pages of the book which had so outraged the Iranian clerics.

Rushdie is likely to see Matar again in person when he eventually comes to trial but has refused to name him in his new book.

‘He and I had 27 seconds together, you know? That's it,’ Rushdie told 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper.

‘I don't need to give him any more of my time.’

The author has always fought against being defined by the attempts on his life and was reluctant to turn his pen on the attack that nearly killed him until he decided it might help him come to terms with it.

‘I need to focus on, you know, to use the cliché, the elephant in the room,’ he said.

‘And the moment I thought that, kinda something changed in my head. And it then became a book I really very much wanted to write.

‘I mean, language is a way of breaking open the world. I don't have any other weapons.’

His alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, admitted he had only read two pages of the book which had so outraged the Iranian clerics 

Hadi Matar, 25, returned from four weeks in Lebanon as a religious bigot his mother told Dailymail.com

Author Salman Rushdie has described his 256-page memoir as 'a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art' after the attack in August 2022

And he said he realized that his slowly growing confidence in an ability to lead a normal life had been a mistake.

‘That sense of time warp, you know, of being dragged into a narrative that I thought had concluded, and then it turned out had not.

‘I think that shadow is just there, and some days it's dark and some days it's not.

‘I'm hoping this is just a last twitch of that story.

‘I don't know. I'll let you know.’