deja vu

08Oct09

Awhile back I had this random dream.  It was so every day life blazé you wouldn’t think I’d have even remembered it but for some reason I did.  I was in a kitchen and I was cooking something.  In the dream I was married; my husband and I were assisting each other in cooking.  I took a bite of the food I was preparing and passed it to my husband for testing.  He agreed that it was satisfactory.

I was at a friend’s house the other night and experienced an identical series of events, though I was not married, I was only cooking.  I have always been fascinated by deja vu and occasionally experience it very strongly.   I was joking when I said, “Wow, deja vu.  I have obviously cooked here before.”  Ironically the other night is among the first times I have visited this kitchen.

As I finished preparing food and moved on to the next steps in the evening, the dream came back to my mind.  Whenever I dream about something, I always dream about a place I have been before.  I put things into a context with which I have some level of familiarity.  If I dream about cooking for example I am at my house or my parent’s house or a specific friend’s house, whatever.  I dreamed this cooking dream in a place I had never been before. These things often come back to my mind only after I have experienced the deja vu.  For example, I recently experienced deju vu in my office, another place I dreamed of before I actually had been in the room.

As I sat there thinking about this in the moment, I wondered:  maybe this doesn’t really count as deja vu because though I am in the same kitchen and I was still cooking, I am not married.

And then I laughed out loud for a moment.  Partly because this was funny to me and partly because I was hugely uncomfortable all of a sudden.  See, a lot of people have different thoughts about potential meanings behind deja vu.  I happen to choose to view deja vu as some kind of encouragement, like my mind knew I was going to be here, or providence/omnipotence knew what might be ahead a gave me a little glimpse beforehand.  That was funny, encouraging.

Also I realized that I am constantly having to come to terms with my weaknesses.  When I was younger I believed that the only connections that mattered in life were cosmic ones, and a little deja vu or some emotionally moving spiritual experience would cause me to consider selling everything I owned or moving to a different country, or both.  I suddenly wondered whether I had the maturity or character to see beyond some minor deja vu episode or whether I would revert to my former ways and try to figure out why providence thought it important for me to take a bite of food and pass it to another person.

In a way I feel a little sad that things that once made us a bit vulnerable can have a tendency to hang on.  However, I guess it might also be fair to say that I am grateful for the occasional bump in the road, for being aware of my own weaknesses, and for the opportunity and the free will to slow myself down enough to think that just because I’ve ‘cooked in this kitchen before’ doesn’t mean I’ll be cooking in this kitchen forever.

Filed under: glimpses of the piping hot bowl of crazy that is me, life overdramatized, probably shouldn't have said that, what i did last night   |  Leave a Comment