Deja Two

You know that feeling of deja vu you get when something strikes you as totally familiar yet there should be no way you've been there or experienced it before? In the past week I've had two such incidents, totally unrelated other than that this type of thing is happening in my life with more and more frequency.

The first happened last week when I finally was able to return to archery practice with my local SCA group after a long absence. I had been sooooo itchy to get back out on the range again, that in the past few weeks I have found myself actually, spontaneously going into an archer's stance like I was drawing a bow. I also had been promising to take my best friend with me and was able to finally carry through on that promise, which is where the deja vu thing comes in. My friend hadn't shot for about 20 years, and that had only been for a week or so, but as she stepped onto the line, nocked an arrow, and drew back the string with perfect and noble grace, it was obvious that this was not a foreign experience for her. And it was so unbelievably familiar to me to see her that way.

But wait! There's more! The sense of familiarity only deepened as I approached the line. She is left-handed and so, me being right-handed, I naturally stepped up behind her, so my back was to hers. I raised my bow and took aim, but as I saw her drawn bow out of the corner of my eye, I had to lower mine again. "Holy crap this is familiar! We've been here before." "Fighting back to back you mean?" "Yeah!" "I know, huh!"

Wow! Still blows me away.

The second flahback occurrence happened last night as I was watching Avatar. I mentioned in an earlier post how this movie had elicited multiple feelings in me that were closer to being memories than being fiction. Well, I was excitedly watching my very own, newly purchased copy, and was at the point where the Nav'i climb up to the place in the floating mountains where they first become bonded with the mountain banshees. As they approach the mouth of the cave where they will emerge to perform this rite of passage, my mouth dropped open. I had been there, or in a very similar place. The view outside the cave was almost exactly as I remember it from a vision I had years ago.

It was one weekend when I was still married. Saturdays had become a time when I could sit at the kitchen table and draw comics to my heart's content, and as I would do so, my ex would sometimes read to me. This particular Saturday she was reading from one of Anne McCaffrey's Dragon Rider's of Pern books. I don't remember the scene she was reading about, or what was happening in the book, but at a certain point I momentarily flashed to somewhere else.

I was humanoid, I was pretty sure, as I sat at the lip of a large cave and let my legs dangle over the edge. I turned to my left and there, lying or sitting beside me was a dragon -- my dragon! I just spontaneously, and without thinking, reached out my hand and stroked its neck. I still have the tactile memory of that experience. It really wasn't scaley at all, but more like the soft suppleness of human skin -- perhaps a bit denser and thicker, but definitely a softness that was pleasing to the touch. It lasted but a split second, but had the impact to still be etched in my memory all these years later.

So it was interesting to have two such occurrences happen in a single week. Things in my life, are definitely exhilarating. And now that I've broken you in with my dragon experience, and assuming you're still reading and not convinced I'm totally off my nut, perhaps soon I will write about my experiences with Unicorn...