Griffin

by JunoMagic
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives-ShareAlike license

Griffin

I had been trying to learn lucid dreaming all summer long. Couldn’t I have come up with a more useful project? Sure. Actually, I should have. But after Christopher went back to America, I found myself at loose ends. Some days it was an effort to get out of bed at all.

It was either another typically hare-brained project, or none at all. And Christopher wasn’t here anymore to prod me towards more productive pursuits, after all. Thus lucid dreaming ended up being my summer project.

And so far, I’d made as much progress that I could just as well have had no project at all and simply lazed the summer away. I’d analyzed my dreams and come up with a few reality checks.

Mass was one thing. In dreams, I didn’t seem to weigh as much as I did in waking life. So I figured that shifting on your seat or feet, feeling your body would work to determine if you’re dreaming or not. Breathing, too. I never seemed to breathe in my dreams, and I was pretty sure I spent most of my waking life breathing. And, oh yeah. I never wore rings in my dreams. But while awake, I never went anywhere without the ring Christopher had given me. Damn him.

I’d been doing reality checks for weeks now faithfully, every hour on the hour.

But so far they hadn’t followed me into my sleep, just left me feeling increasingly stupid. And sometimes, they even made me wonder if it was all a giant mistake and if I was already asleep – dreaming a very persistent nightmare in which Christopher had left me. When I woke, I could turn around, and he’d be back, kiss me, laugh with me, love me …

Okay, probably not. What else could I do? Some books recommended a tight bracelet. Like the charmed talisman of a fairy tale. I guessed I could do that and went to scrounge the various tiny antiques shops and shoppes along the bridge and the canals.

Today I’d finally found one that suited me. Well, I guess I could have used just a string of wool, yes. But that’s just not how I did things. The one I was fingering now was the tiny bronze figure of a griffin threaded onto a leather thong.

‘This one, please,’ I said decisively and slid it on the counter.

‘Ah, this one it must be. A beautiful bracelet for an even more beautiful young lady, perfect. Or is it to be a gift? For a young gentleman maybe?’ the sleazy shopkeep oozed friendliness.

‘No, just for me, thanks. How much is it?’

‘That depends,’ he replied, turning it around, and holding it against the dim light streaming through a window almost obscured by silken scarfs and golden sun and silver moon pendants. ‘For what do you need it?’

That’s what you get for buying in an esoteric shop, I thought. Aloud I admitted, ‘I want to learn lucid dreaming. Does that make a difference?’

The man smiled, showing rather yellow, rather crooked teeth. ‘More than you think, more than you think. Why do you want to walk the dream path? Is this life not enough for you?’

I scowled. I hated being asked questions about my intents and purposes by my relatives and I appreciated it even less in shopkeepers of brocantes and junk shops. ‘I guess right now it’s rather more than enough for me,’ I ground out.

‘Ah.’ The man hmmed softly. ‘Twenty,’ he said at last.

And looked at me expectantly.

But I was not in the mood for haggling. I simply put the money on the counter, grabbed the bracelet and left.

I hid away in a corner of a little café behind an enormous latte macchiato, once more missing damn Christopher who should have been here to help me fumble the damn bracelet onto my wrist. But of course, like all men in my life, starting with my grandfather, he wasn’t.

The rest of the day I spent in fidgety discomfort because of the continuous scratch and pressure of the bracelet around her right wrist. That was how it was supposed to be, I figured, but still, urgh.

Then my mother called and my land-lady needed help with her whiny brats of toddler-twins, and I only had time to think about sleeping and dreaming – lucid or otherwise – at ten in the evening, when it was time for me to actually contemplate calling it a day.

By that time the discomfort of the bracelet was such that I contemplated taking it off. I only decided against that because twenty squid was really too much money to spend on a whim and which I then didn’t even try to indulge in. So the bracelet stayed on.

After washing my face and brushing my teeth, the leather thong that held the little bronze griffin in place was uncomfortably wet to boot. And I wondered if I’d be able to forget it long enough to even fall asleep while wearing it so I could remember that I was asleep because of wearing it.

Eventually, however, I must have drifted off.

Because suddenly I stood in the square in front of the cathedral and was rubbing my wrist. And as I was rubbing my wrist, I suddenly thought – I’m rubbing my wrist.

Does that mean I’m asleep or that I’m awake now? I started, and my heart started pounding. All of a sudden, my weight was back. I felt like myself. Mass, weight, gravity. I could even see the bracelet on my wrist and the damn ring damn Christopher had given me.

But it definitely was a dream because I was all alone on the square, save for the column with the winged lion at its centre. And you’re never all alone on that square. Never. Best reality check yet, I thought and kept scratching at my wrist.

What now? I was awake and aware in my dream, and supposedly I could do just about anything now. Like dream myself to Christopher or dream Christopher back to me. Strangely, thinking about that, and him, just left me with a sulky sort of meh-feeling. Was I already getting over him? Oh, fickle heart …

At that moment, a sound made me look up. A whooshing of wings, and a deep rumble.

‘Wha…?’ the question turned into a gasp as I found myself standing nose to nose with the winged-lion variety of a griffin. Like the one on my bracelet. Like the one up on that column. Wasn’t I supposed to have full control of my dream now? I certainly hadn’t imagined a griffin coming to meet me now. So where did he come from?

‘I live here,’ the griffin said. His voice was so deep that it thrummed inside my bones like the deep drumbeats at a rock concert.

‘Here?’ Then I caught on. ‘In my dream?’

The griffin nodded. ‘In all of your dreams. But this is the first time you have found me.’

‘Yes, I know. Why now? Why never before?’

The griffin smiled, a most curious expression for a winged lion. He looked like the cat that got the cream. Or the mouse. I’d seen cats look like that before. It didn’t bode well for the mouse, if there was one. And I didn’t see a mouse anywhere.

The griffin stepped closer. He was even bigger than an ordinary lion. And the ordinary lions I knew from zoos and circuses were already quite big enough for my tastes, thanks very much.

‘Because,’ the griffin said, ‘only now you are ready to stop depending on others. All your life you have depended on others for your dreams. Your grandfather. Your parents. That string of suitors, one worse than the other.This is the first time in your life that you have pursued your own dreams. And not the dreams that society or the people in your life regarded as appropriate for you to pursue.’

I frowned. ‘I wanted to learn lucid dreaming. That’s not exactly much of a dream to pursue on my own for the first time.’ At the same time I wondered if the beast could possibly be right. I knew I was something of a push-over. But did that mean I had no dreams of my own?

I looked back at the griffin. We were standing nose to nose now.

‘Maybe not much of a dream,’ he agreed. ‘But it did get you talking to a winged lion, didn’t it? That’s already something.’

I wrinkled my nose. ‘Probably.’

In my non-lucid dreams, I’d probably climbed onto its back and we’d have flown away … and as soon as we were airborne, I’d have fallen off and woken from the small jerk of an involuntary muscle-spasm. Now that I was as self-aware as in my waking life, I had no clue what to do next.

‘That’s the whole point,’ the griffin said. ‘It’s up to you what to do next. Christopher certainly won’t tell you.’

‘Ha, bloody, ha.’ I knew that by now.

‘It’s still your dream,’ the griffin pointed out helpfully. ‘You could climb upon my back and we could fly away.’

‘Didn’t you just tell me how I shouldn’t let my dreams depend on other people?’

The winged lion sat back on  his haunches, ruffling his feathers, preening, and chuckled.

‘What do you think I am?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘A winged lion. Griffin. Some bizarre outgrowth of my subconscious -‘

I stopped. ‘Oh.’

‘Get on my back,’ the griffin said. ‘And we’ll fly. You’ll fly.’

I did. We did.

~~~*~~~

I never dreamed of the griffin again. But I still like to think that this was the night when my life took a turn for the better. Christopher never came back, but remained an amiable, distant acquaintance of many e-mails and Instant Messenger conversations.

Eventually I pulled my head out of my arse and finished school. I can’t say I ever got around to having grand dreams, either lucid or otherwise. But I guess I managed to figure out how to live my life. The way I wanted to live it. More or less at least.

That’s something, isn’t it?

I still have that griffin bracelet somewhere.

Song of the day:

Link(s) of the day:

The Gryphon Pages | Griffin at the Medieval Bestiary | Griffin or Gryphon in Bulfinch’s Mythology

…and my wish for you today is:

That you discover the wings of your very own dreams, and that learn to fly with them!

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