Am I Blue?

I don’t remember a movie that has affected me like Avatar has. Even in line at the theater, when I really didn’t know much about the movie, I felt a strange anticipation. The closest experiential approximation I could draw on was waiting to see Star Wars. However, this experience blew Star Wars out of the water.

I was totally and completely drawn into the movie, at times requiring the friend sitting next to me to remind me to breathe, and/or ask if I was alright. I mean I was that much inside the movie. When it was over, and I again remembered to breathe, my friend turned to me and asked, “Did that seem more like a memory to you than a movie?” “Yes!” I exclaimed, “That’s exactly what it felt like!” I knew these places, these beings, these experiences.

A few days later another friend saw it for the first time. Shortly thereafter I got a text from her asking the same thing. “Don’t call the people with the padded room yet, but did it seem like a memory to you? Like it actually happened?”

I discovered sometime after that, that James Cameron wrote the screen play many years ago, when he was sick with a fever. Pandora was the planet he went to in that state. Now, I understand that to some people that would cast the whole thing into the realm of fantasy or hallucination, but I have the opposite reaction. That information just solidifies it as a valid reality to me.

…But wait. There’s more!

Recently a couple of things brought the whole matter closer to home. First, I had a dream one night that I was one of the Nav’i. The most significant thing about this dream was that this fact seemed insignificant. It was like a “day in the life” type thing – like a memory. I had just made a kill, bringing down some sort of bird with an arrow. That’s it.

The second incident happened on my way down to Portland. I’d stopped at a rest stop, and after visiting the men’s room, was walking back to my car. As I passed this tree beside the path, I instantly had this recollection, like a physical muscle memory, of what it would feel like to spring into the branches – including what my tail would be doing!

If I dare take it a step further, I’ve been musing about how closely this second experience resembled how I felt as a kid after watching a Tarzan movie, when I couldn’t keep myself from running outside and climbing a tree. In fact there were a couple points in the movie where I was able to pull myself out of it far enough to think, “Man! What a cool Tarzan movie they could make like this!!” More recently this has brought me to speculating that perhaps my draw to Tarzan as a kid was the familiarity that those stories and movies awakened in me with unconscious memories. Another interesting twist is that, as a kid, one of my main comic characters was a feline version of Tarzan – perhaps a manifestation of these connections, and a buried memory of my ‘blue kitty’ self? As a kid, I actually had several dreams where I was this jungle cat-man. Hmmm.

Truth is, I don’t know, and can’t say for sure what is truly going on here. The fact is that it probably doesn’t matter. Still it sure is fun to think about, and the movie did touch something deep, deep down inside of me. In the end that is the important part – All of this brings me joy and makes me feel more alive. That is always a good thing.



Oel Ngati Kameie‏