Seven Signs of the Lion

WHERE DREAMS HAPPEN, JOURNEYS FOLLOW

WHERE DREAMS HAPPEN, JOURNEYS FOLLOW

This story begins with a dream. The dream of Nicholas Bilanchuk to be more precise. It was a murky, dark dream, one that left him brooding. It was a call, an invitation to take a journey to seek out something. One of those lucid dreams that makes you shudder when you wake up because it appears so real that you’re not sure if it is, or whether you’re waking up in the dream or in your reality. It’s one of those dreams that make you question whether you even know what reality is sometimes. Even though the dream was lucid, Nicholas had waited too long before writing it all down, so he was left just with the patchy outlines of his fragmented memory.

It was a dark, misty night in the old downtown of a city with winding well-worn cobblestone streets. It looked centuries old, but there were slow-moving dark green tramcars screeching on tracks and people dressed in fairly modern clothes. So it couldn’t have been that long ago, and it could have even been right now or tomorrow. There were older, heavyset women wearing scarves selling some kind of blackish beans in paper cups and scruffy beggars sitting in doorways in scratchy dark brown wool pants with matching oversized suit coats that seemed to be as old and dusty as the beggars were. There was a balding, bearded man dressed in a colorful bowtie and black tuxedo, who seemingly had come to life after having stepped down from a statue on one of the buildings in the city square. He was telling Nicholas he had something to show him, even though Nicholas could not speak the language that the statue-turned-into-a-man was speaking. The more he listened, the more Nicholas understood the language. Something about keys to unlock locks. The doors of tomorrow. Equilibrium. Universe. Powerful energy fields rising from beneath the earth. All over the city. The eye in the triangle. Following every step. Dangerous passage. Restless spirits. Wandering. Steps to a cavernous cavern and an underground river where two worlds meet, or two sides of the same world, a line that was both a barrier and an interface. Something about signs. Signs of the lion. Seven of them. The signs needed to be found. Order needed to be restored. Order out of chaos. Out of the order – disintegration. Two worlds along the fault line of quotidian and non-quotidian time.

The man in the tuxedo and red plaid tie smiled and pointed at Nicholas. “You’re the one,” he seemed to be saying. “You’re the one.” Nicholas heard the thoughts even though he didn’t understand the language. And Nicholas felt a tug at his heart and mind. “Come to the city, the city of lions. All the answers lie there if you make the journey.” Nicholas looked up on top of a building and saw the head of the statue motionless and back in place on the roof. How it came down to speak with him he didn’t know.

Snippets, just patches of words quilted together. Nicholas wished he could have remembered more. In those moments right after lucid awakening, everything is clear. Just a short time later the dream memory like a stained glass window broken by a thrown brick and fallen to the ground was now shattered in shards and losing its narrative. You could see parts of it in individual pieces, but its wholeness was gone. Perhaps the wholeness of it would have made more sense to him. But then again, it was now a mystery. Mysteries leave a trail to follow to solve and a pressing need to solve and resolve them. And Nicholas needed to find the glue to reconstruct the shattered stained glass narrative for himself.