I remember having a dream once. In it, I was trying to figure out why I never give enough thinking to the problrem of luck. I was talking to a woman from work, who I hardly knew then, so even in the dream I asked myself in surprise: “Why am I seeing her in the dream? I never even think about her in real life.”

The woman was staring at me in the dream, and when I looked up, she said: “Luck is a spirit that lives in you until you fail to please it one day.”

“Really? What happens then?” I asked.

“It leaves you, so you lose your luck,” she said. And then, seeing that I was not paying attention, she added: “You don’t believe me. Too bad. It means that you lost yours ages ago.”

I woke up with a nasty feeling of having lost something, and that feeling kept coming back to me again and again during that day. Since then, I started thinking about luck. Later, I made Luck the narrator of my first novel.

I never happened to speak to that woman in real life after the dream. She left our team soon after that, and I did not hear about her for years. Just a few days ago, I ran across an old colleague in the street and we stopped for a few minutes to exchange some news and gossips – you know, the usual stuff. The first thing I heard from my colleague was the news that our former co-worker – the one from my dream – has been ill lately, and that she nearly lost her mind after a nasty divorce, resulting from an even nastier affair with another man, which also ended in nothing, but trouble.

I have been wondering: did she fail to please her luck at some point?