Writing Exercise 29: Is it Déjà vu?

Writing Exercise 29: Journal about something that recently happened.

For all my life, I have had the experience of being in a present reality when I can also recall dreaming about that situation long ago.  I used to call that déjà vu.  However, after researching the terms more thoroughly, I learned that the experience of dreaming something that later happens in real life is commonly mistaken as having déjà vu.  My research indicates that déjà vu is actually being in a new place, but somehow feeling like that place is familiar.  My experience is quite different. 

For example, last night, I was walking about the cruise ship, bored, when all of the sudden a memory hits me.  I recalled that I had a conversation about 10 years ago with my then partner, Johnathan, about a dream.  Standing on the ship last night, I remembered the words I said, and then I started getting flashes of that dream.  As I looked about the stairwell I was climbing, I noticed the wooden bannister, art deco designs in the wall, the glass vases, and the patterned carpet.  All of these images were in the dream I described to my partner so many years ago.  I am certain of it as I apparently dreamt and then shared my dream with my partner thus making me remember more of the details.

Another reason I remember vividly having this conversation with him is because I remember feeling so puzzled.  We were relatively poor and in debt, living in a small rented 2 bedroom apartment in Mohegan Lake with his eleven year old son.  However in this dream I was on a lavish cruise ship with my adopted African America 21 year old son.  In my dream, I also lived in a nice converted 2-bedroom Bronx coop.  None of this made sense.  How could I be living in the Bronx, be on a cruise ship, and have an adult child when we could not even afford the outrageous prices of gas for our cars?  It seemed impossible for me to be living in the Bronx when we lived in Mohegan Lake, and I worked in Rockland County.  I had no ties to the Bronx, and thus dismissed my premonition as merely a wacky dream.   

Well, as it turns out, Johnathan and I split up for years ago. And after climbing out of the ashes of that dissolved relationship, I moved to the Bronx, where I taught, and still teach, at a local private college on Jerome Avenue.  One year later, I was in the process of adoption, and after six months, I was visiting with an 18 year old foster kid once a week, who would later become my son. 

As I write this in the library of the cruise ship, glancing out the window at the gently textured open blue waters while thinking, the dream I dreamt so many years ago doesn’t seem so wacky anymore.  It has become my reality.  My relationship with Johnathan, and his son Jake, is becoming less and less real, and my life with my son is no longer a dream. 

When I have dreams that turn out to be more like remembering the future, I am always left to wonder two things.  Did I have a premonition back then or did I dream of something and then I turned my reality around to make that dream come true?  I suppose it doesn’t matter because I am here now, and I am grateful.  And I so appreciate the ability to have these sorts of dreams and then see them come to life in my waking reality even if my research says that I can’t call it déjà vu.