Believe it or not, in my life, I have done some unusual things. I blew up dozens of pens simply by holding them in my hand. When blindfolded, I knocked down an opponent using martial arts techniques which I could never repeat. In the dim light of my cellar, I stopped breathing. During the athletic class, I jumped so long that I squashed against a wall. I also dreamed a lot, often they were terrible nightmares. The day before the first day of school I dreamed of the face of my teacher, whom I still did not know. Speaking of dreams, I made a couple of so-called "lucid dreams", those where you actually realize you're dreaming. It is not easy to maintain awareness within the dream, but I tried and succeeded for a short while, and then I could do whatever I wanted, fly or build very high towers with my imagination. I believe that the power of creation is within us all. Perhaps it is the trace of the breath of God, which has remained attached to the skin of our soul, perhaps it is our own breath when it is almost able to syntonize with the rhythm of the whole creation. I also believe that a story, for how simple it may be, is never just "a story". If we stretch our ears, we will hear the distant echo of unknown melodies. Perhaps, sometimes in a story we will encounter a sliver of creation, we will find ourselves and, if you'll excuse me, it is no small thing.

From the peak of the Little Ararat, Vartan "Tiger's Eye" observed his hometown, Yerevan. In the ample pocket of his tunic, well sheltered from the harsh wind, his squat fingers were playing with two graceful jade discs, while his steed, foaming with fatigue, seemed moved and reinvigorated at the sight of home after months of traveling. In Vartan's eyes, the only veil was that of an incommensurable fatigue for the long trip. An Armenian merchant of precious stones, merchant son of merchants, he did not care how arduous the journey was, nor how many moons had rotated above the long caravan: his mind was a precision balance, incessantly weighting and estimating without respite Indian emeralds, Burmese rubies, Pakistani aquamarines. This was Vartan's life since he was in the cradle: he made profit, and he did it surprisingly well. A fresh night in March happened to him to have a dream. Being an unusual experience for him, he awoke in a sudden, throwing in the corner of the room the brocaded bedspread, upset and sweaty despite the breeze of dawn. In his family no one used to have dreams, there was no space for these frivolities. If he reflected well, maybe a couple of times he had dreamed of carving a gem or making a good deal, but he never came across those kinds of mind trips, surreal like a sand mirage in the ocean. The dreams began to visit him more and more frequently, like the unstoppable progression of pot-bellied drops in an August downpour. Frankly, it was a very unpleasant situation for Vartan, who was soon forced to invent every kind of night stunt to justify the increasingly evident dark circles. Then one day, while he was asleep, the unthinkable happened: he suddenly realized that he was living a dream. That first experience of dreamlike lucidity did not last long, nothing but an imperceptible beating of wings of awareness before the rules of the dream came back to swallow him and relegating him back to a mere spectator.

Night after night, he began to understand the laws that governed that world and how to bend them under his creative power. Thin and rarefied realms could become dense with colors, shapes and perfumes. The Escheresque geometries of dancing fractals disobeyed space/time but, very gradually, Vartan learned to attribute a new meaning and content to the term "comprehension". For every new dream he was immersed in, the breath of that universe and his one were one only thing for longer and longer. In his dreams, Vartan traveled beneath the folds of reality, learned the lost language of angels and, together with them, he played dodging bolts of lightning in the heart of perennial storms on unknown planets. What was happening in Vartan's soul could not remain hidden to the eyes of the family, his friends, the entire city of Yerevan. The news of the crazy gems merchant spread like the concentric waves created by one of his jade pebbles in the water. Soon, disowned by his own parents, he had no choice but to saddle his steed and leave his old self behind forever, looking for a good place to rest undisturbed. There was a man who had once measured the days like carats of precious stones. In his place, now, there are a thousand men, one for every window that opened up on the vibrant and boundless realms of the dream.