Dreaming - Jennifer Baljko

“Jenn.” I heard a familiar voice calling from behind me.

“Mom? Hi,” I said, turning around. The room was black, bare, except for an old dark wood dresser in the corner, illuminated from some unknown light source. Four drawers, old wrought iron style handles.

“Jenn, get the statue of Saint George out of the drawer,” my mother’s loving voice told me. My mother died three months earlier, but still had things to tell me. She told me what I needed to know in my dreams. Only her voice came through, never with a physical form.

I walked over to the dresser, opened the third drawer, and pulled out a figurine of Saint George, the patron saint of England and Catalonia. He was on horseback, wielding a sword, about to slay a dragon.

“You have to give the statue to P.’s father. He has demons to kill. I’m going to help him. And, so is Saint George,” my mother told me, in the voice I remember her using when I was a kid. She was referring to my former husband’s father, who was close to death in the hospital across the planet.

“Mom, how am I supposed to give him this statue? I’m in Barcelona. He’s in New Jersey,” I asked, probably with some speculation. These strange instructive blurs played on my imagination, and always seemed to lack a logical link for executing the plan.

“You’ll find a way. You’re creative,” she chuckled.

“All right. Thanks, Mom.” I have no idea what I came up with. I think I put the statue on the dresser – I saw it there before the room went totally dark – and I think I asked Saint George to ride his horse to New Jersey. I woke up confused, feeling weird, feeling like I had just been part of a strange death ritual, participating on the fringe somewhere and not certain what was happening where.

Later that afternoon, I found out P’s father had passed away earlier in the day. I got a chill when I read the email. It would have been around the same time my mother had stirred my pre-dawn slumber, and roused my intuitive need to somehow help.