Deja vu

I recently came across a notation of a dream I wrote down years ago. There is no date on it:

The Christmas Thief

A thief stealing Christmas gifts from under a tree is surprised by Santa Claus whose hand thrusts the thief into eternity.

Standing for eternity with his hand on the thief’s shoulder, Santa takes pity upon him where upon the thief ceases to have ever existed but in Santa’s memory.

Residing in Santa’s memory, the thief now is faced with the impossible choice of spending eternity in a frozen moment of guilty revelation or never to exist at all.

What does this mean? I still don’t get it.

Dreams are strange animals.

I once dreamed I by chance met an old friend who I hadn’t seen in years. Most of my dreams are mundane at best and I quickly forgot it.

Then I was in a photography gallery contemplating making a purchase when who should walk in the door but my old friend from the dream who I hadn’t seen in years! I immediately remembered the dream. (That this should have happened in a photography gallery, where captured, frozen moments of time are displayed seems apt.)

It was a perfect déjà vu. Seeing him, I was shocked and amazed and speechless as I kept realizing our encounter was a replay of my dream. But the curious thing was that I acted the same way in the dream. I found myself caught between two worlds, identical yet interacting in my mind as the moments passed. Every time I tried to speak I would get caught in the déjà vu and balk which confirmed the déjà vu.

My friend must have thought I had gone mad seeing me incapable of normal conversation.  Perhaps I had; or one of me had anyway. It is a short circuit of time. The image of a mirror reflecting a mirror is commonly used and is a good but flawed analogy. That sight in a mirror is amazing and it draws you in with a sense of vertigo but it doesn’t create the sense of fragmented time that I felt.

The moment passed but I still puzzle over it. What does one do with such an experience? You can only attempt to capture it in words which are such a pale recreation of that extraordinary moment where you are literally in two places at once but the two places are identical.

It lasted just long enough to make me conscious of the possibility that it might not stop. But it did.