Short Story: John's dream opens another page of his life to his own understanding

Tweet

John Jovling was dreaming that he was in a large secondhand bookshop. He picked up a large one-volume dictionary/encyclopaedia book, and as he was looking through it, he noticed that the page, numbered "41" had been torn neatly out of it. The pages in the book went from page 40 to page 42. When John woke up, he realised that when he was 41 years of age, that was when he had really bought a second-hand bookshop, in his real life. His subsequent years running this shop were amongst the happiest ones in his life. What was the significance of his dream here though, he speculated to himself, while he still lay in his bed, that morning? John had had to close that bookshop, well over twenty years ago now. The mean owner had kicked him out of his shop, just before Christmas one year, (the busiest time for John, in his shop) wanting the shop back for himself, so that he could set up his own accounting practice in it now. This had been Paul Wethead's (the owner) aim all along, of course, but he hadn't let poor John ever know about this, during his five year tenure here, in his shop. The shop had been an enormous success for John, who also had changed jobs to take on this role. He had been turfed out of his comfy office job, due to a culling of staff numbers, and he had taken a redundancy, as a result of this. The canny owner had stitched John up by offering him an initial three year lease, and then after that, he had been placed on an ongoing 12 month renewable lease, in subsequent years. The owner had retired from his Government position as a Tax auditor, which perhaps explains, his ruthlessness here towards John too. He took his shop back without any warnings to John, telling him to close down, or move. John had run a two month closing down sale, but even so, he lost thousands of dollars here, plus his ongoing earnings from this business. Of course, the number 41 appearing in John's dream does represent an age for him of major change in his life, but the torn out page means that a part of John has been torn out of his heart, because of this actionable painful experience in his life, and so far, until now, John is still feeling much bitter resentment and unhappiness as a result of this, as he really wanted to stay in that shop until he really did retire, at perhaps, 70, or more years of age. This shop was to be John's watermark of his life, and now it had been stained, and ripped out of his heart, and life. No wonder he hurt, and this is showing to him in this dream, nearly a good thirty years later now, probably, because now, the other day, he had just turned 70, ( the year that he had planned to retire from his shop). It's funny how the numbers add up, and explain things like this. Galileo, ( 1564 to 1642), who had one of the greatest mathematical minds in man's history, believed that numbers are the language of the Universe. Here's a quote from him: "[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word." Numbers have power, and hidden messages for us behind their simple appearances in our lives. There's a truth contained behind each number that shows up in your life, as there was for John here in this story. Photo Credit: The photo used in this article was sourced from the free media site, pixabay.com The fact that this was an old and valuable book, that someone had destroyed, by tearing out a page from it, like this, obviously carried meaning for John here too. If we can read the meanings of these appearing numbers in our lives, we might see that all of life's happenings really fit together neatly like this too, as numbers connect them together.