Déjà vu in the Bardo of Dream Travel

A vignette from my pre-pandemic travel journals:

March 12, 2018 

The Woman in the Zulu Hat

I look behind me and there she is again, the mountainous woman in the Zulu hat, coming along the ramp behind me. I step on board the plane and the flight attendant takes my coat, exactly as he did before.

"Sorry to bother you again," says the man who needs me to stand up so he can sit in the window seat. He fires up his computer and starts watching the same old movie he was watching before.

The man who is going to sit behind me fumbles with stuff in the overhead compartment and I brace myself in case he lets something fall on my shoulder as he did before. But he catches it this time, pats my shoulder and says, "Good thing I knew what was going to happen."

"We've met before," the man across the aisle says to the woman next to him. She says, "In your dreams."

These incidents unfolded during my trip home from Atlanta last night. The first plane broke. They found us another plane, unbroken but otherwise identical, where we took the same seats we had before. People were blurry, taking off after midnight, 2 1/2 hours late. It was hard not to feel we were in a Twilight Zone episode in which things go on repeating until you wake up to the fact that you are dreaming, or dead, or both.

When Dreams Are Memories of the Future

 

You have dreamed the future. You say you don't remember? Think again. Surely you've had the experience of déjà vu. The cat crosses the street in front of you, the tall guy steps into the restaurant, the light shimmers on the water or on your new lover's hair just so, and you know you have been in this scene before. I have yet to meet anyone who hasn't felt a tingle at a moment like this, a shiver that brings with it the knowledge that the world is deeper than we have been taught.

      What has this got to do with dreaming the future? Everything. In French, déjà vu literally means "already seen". The phrase begs the question of how we can possibly have "already seen" something we have not set eyes on before. In most cases, what is going on when we experience déjà vu is this: an event we once dreamed is now manifesting in waking life. We may have forgotten the dream, but now that it is playing out in the physical world, we remember something. If we wanted to describe the phenomenon more accurately, still borrowing from French, we would call it  déjà rêvé, "already dreamed".

     What comes back to us, in déjà vu, is a memory of the future. We traveled ahead of ourselves, in a dream, and forgot the trip until we found ourselves back in the same place.

     The sporadic experience of déjà vu is just our entry point here, just a way to establish that we are talking about something that is common, if not universal, human experience. To get better at remembering the future, we need to become active dreamers. In dreams, we are time travelers. Released from the laws of Newtonian physics and the consensual hallucinations we harbor in our everyday brains, the dream self travels into past time, future time, and alternate realities.

     I have the impression that every night, my dream self is traveling ahead of me on my possible roads into the future, scouting the ways. He brings me memories of the future, the way you or I might bring back postcards and souvenirs from a trip abroad. Part of my daily practice is to scan every detail that I remember from my dreams with this in mind, asking: is it remotely possible that any of this could happen in the future, literally or symbolically?

     Memorias do futuro. Memories of the future. I once saw that sign on a bar in a dusty town in the northeast of Brazil. If we truly have memories of the future, does that mean that the future already exists?

     Yes and no. Any  future we can foresee is a possible - not inevitable - future. When we wake up to the fact that we have access to memories of the future, especially in dreams, we can start drawing on this data bank to change things for the better. We are not condemned to stay on a particular event track unless we have totally forgotten where it leads, and refuse to consider switching to a different line. We can use souvenirs of the future, delivered in dreams, to avert an unwanted future event, or to bring a happy future event into manifestation.

     To do these things, we need to grow our understanding and our practice. For simplicity, we can distinguish several modes of knowing the future: 

Precognition

Through precognition, we see events and circumstances ahead of time, as they will be played out. A precognitive dream may be literal, or symbolic or both. For example, a dream of a twister might turn out to be both a preview of a literal disaster and advance notice of an emotional storm that will hit with the force of a tornado. Once you have confirmed your ability to see - or rather remember - the future in this way, you are ready to do much more interesting things.

Early Warnings

In dreams and intuitive flashes, and through the play of coincidence, we may receive an early warnings of a possible future development we may not want - a crisis at work, the bust-up of a relationship, a health problem, a car accident.

If we read the clues correctly, we can use such early warnings to avoid a possible future problem by taking preemptive action. 

Opportunity Calls

Our dream self returns from his night excursions with tips about coming opportunities. These tips require action if we are going to manifest a future we'll enjoy.You remember a dream in you are in your ideal home, or doing the work that nourishes your soul and your bank account, or you are with your soulmate, who is someone you have not yet met in the regular world. You need to take physical action to get yourself, in your physical body, to where your dream self has already been. 

Choosing Alternate Event Tracks

Dreaming, we discover and inhabit the true nature of time, as it has always been known to dream travelers and is now confirmed by modern science. Linear time, as measured by clocks, and experienced in plodding sequences of one thing following another, always heading in the same direction, is an illusion of limited human awareness, at best (as Einstein said) a convenience. In dreaming, as in heightened states of consciousness, we step into a more spacious time, and we can move forwards or backwards at varying speeds.We not only travel to past and future; we travel between alternate timelines. With growing awareness, we can develop greater and greater ability to choose the event track - maybe one of infinite alternative possible event tracks - that will be followed through a certain life passage, or even the larger history of our world.

This may be a case of the observer effect operating on a human scale. It is well understood that at quantum levels, deep within subatomic space, the act of observation plucks a specific phenomenon out of a mass of possibilities. It may be that, when our dream selves observe something of the future, we select a certain event track that will begin to be manifested in the physical world. By a fresh act of observation, through active dreaming, we can then proceed to alter that event track, or switch to an entirely different one.

 

For much more on this subject see chapter 6 of Conscious Dreaming and my book Dreaming True

Illustration: RM+AI

Déjà vu, how about you?

You walk into a room and meet a long-lost friend. You may smile and embrace, before you realize that you have never met before, in ordinary reality. You pull back, embarrassed. You may tell each other that you were both thinking about someone else. And yet, and yet...somehow you know each other. You drive to an intersection and stop at a red light. You don't hit the gas pedal when the light turns green because you know that behind that white car that is running the red light right in front of you is that truck, not yet visible to your ordinary sight, that is going to barrel through after it. I walk into a workshop space and recognize, in addition to my regulars, eight people who have definitely been in one of my circles before, though I have forgotten their names and the exact circumstances. I greet them one by one, and ask if they have come to a previous workshop with me. In each case, the answer is No, but we agree that we already know each other. The reason for this is not mysterious to me. We have been together in dreams, where I spend more time leading workshops than I do in ordinary reality. These are examples of what we call déjà vu. I'm sure you can add your own. The French term means “already seen”, but often the experience may better be called déjà rêvé, “already dreamed”. Maybe you dreamed an incident before it manifested in the physical world. You may have forgotten the dream completely, but as it starts to play out, you remember something. By my observation, the dream self is forever tracking ahead of the ordinary self, scouting challenges and opportunities that lie in the future.the roads ahead. Its expeditions leave trace memories of the future that come alive when we enter a scene we have dreamed. For some, the experience is so strong that they feel that they have entered a scene they have lived before in the physical sense, perhaps in a previous life. If we are going to continue to talk about these things in French, the correct term would now be déjà vécu, "already lived". While déjà vécu involves the sense of remembering the past — maybe a past lifetime or historical era — déjà rêvé often involves the phenomenon of remembering the future. A dream that is playing out in the world can now can be recognized as a memory of the future.
The edgiest and most exciting possibility is that your sense of déjà vu is generated by your recognition of a situation you have encountered in a parallel life that is now converging or overlapping with your present one. That can bring gifts or challenges, as you take on the karma - good, bad or mixed - of what you have been doing on a different event track that is now converging with your present life path. If you are keeping a journal (if not, start one today) you are poised to have serious fun growing your personal reality. Start by going back through your life memories and jotting down the incidents of déjà vu that you remember, or may have already logged. Study what followed each of these incidents. Now you are ready for your next experience of déjà vu. As it unfolds, you want to trust your immediate feelings. They may give you the sense that you are in the right place at the right time, but they may tell you something quite different. Does this feel like a blessing, a confirmation, a joyous reunion - or like something darker, that makes you uneasy, ready to back off or take cover? Ask yourself whether this could be a dream that is manifesting in external reality. If a dream is playing out, you may find you can now reach back into that dream - even if it was forgotten until now - and capture details that can offer your precious navigational guidance in a developing situation. If this feels like an encounter with a person or place from a "past" life, or like stepping into a scene from a parallel life, then try to pull up more information from that other life - and decide where you want to go with that connection in your present life. photo (c) Robert Moss
Partly adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

What the Dickens is déjà vécu ?

We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time - of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances - of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it! I never had this mysterious impression more strongly in my life, than before he uttered those words.

This is a very exact description of the experience of déjà vu, though the writer does not use that term. The source is David Copperfield. The author, the prodigious Charles Dickens, left us an even more vivid account of the phenomenon of déjà vu in his account of an incident on the road to Ferrara, in his travel book Pictures from Italy:

At sunset, when I was walking on alone, while the horses rested, I arrived upon a little scene which, by one of those singular mental operations of which we are all conscious, seemed perfectly familiar to me, and which I see distinctly now. There was not much in it. In the blood red light, there was a mournful sheet of water, just stirred by the evening wind; upon its margin a few trees. In the foreground [of a view of Ferrara] was a group of silent peasant girls leaning over the parapet of a little bridge, looking now up at the sky, now down into the water. In the distance a deep dell; the shadow of approaching night on everything. If I had been murdered there in some former life I could not have seemed to remember the place more thoroughly or with more emphatic chilling of the blood; and the real remembrance of it acquired in that minute is so strengthened by the imaginary recollection, that I can hardly think I could forget it. 

"There was not much in it," Dickens says before sketching his word-picture. Yet we feel at once that this disclaimer is not to be trusted. The light over the scene is "blood red". What could be an idyllic scene of girls leaning over the parapet of a little bridge, as evening falls, fills the observer not only with the certainty that he has seen this before but with a crawling dread. If he had been murdered here in a past life, he insists, he could not have remembered the place "more thoroughly or with more emphatic chilling of the blood."
    Dickens clearly felt that he knew that scene near Ferrara because he had been there in a former life, perhaps a life than ended violently at that very place. A generic term we use for this kind of experience today is déjà vu. Dickens did not have that term. He was writing in 1846; déjà vu was first used to describe this phenomenon by a French professor in 1876, and only brought firmly into the English language in 1895.
     In any event, déjà vu ("already seen") may be too generic for the Dickens experience. This is an occasion where we want to reach for a different French term, déjà vécu. It literally means "already lived", and it speaks to the sense of recognizing a scene that you feel sure you have lived, fully and completely, in a previous time. This recognition generally comes with strong emotion, though it may be bittersweet nostalgia, or a sudden afflux of joy, even exultation, rather than Dickens' "chilling of the blood".
     You walked that cliff, you kissed on that bridge, you fought on that field of battle. You are sure of it. Maybe specific memories begin to stir. Are they buried memories of an episode from earlier in your present life? Are they ancestral memories, of members of your lineage or your spiritual kin who loved and struggled in the place you are at? Are they memories of a previous incarnation of your own spirit? Or are they false memories, hallucinations brought on by travel fatigue or an over-excitable temperament, or even inserted into your mind by some psychic deceiver?
    These are questions that all of us who experience a strong sense of déjà vécu are going to want to explore as best we can. There is a legion of reductionists - some armed with some neuroscience, some recycling Freud - that will tell us that our impressions are the effect of an imbalance in brain functioning or the bubbling up of repressed fantasies. But we can take heart from the knowledge that the sense of déjà vécu has a highly distinguished literary and historical pedigree.



Art: "Dickens' Dream" by Robert William Buss