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...

My Fair-(y) Lady

Since last summer I've had an art project going, but for some reason have been unable to finish it. A friend has a small cottage on her land, and we were hanging out there one day when she started talking about how she wanted a big faery on her wall. "Got a pencil?" I queried. "Now?!" She asked. "Mm-hmm," I nodded.

Shortly I had pencil in hand and was drawing the largest figure I think I've ever drawn, reaching nearly from floor to ceiling, and dominating the little cottage's wall. I remember stepping back and looking at her with eyes of wonder, as I seem to always do when drawing, "Did I really draw that?"

Finally, gathering up my courage, I began adding color, which was very intimidating because I'd never worked on that scale before, and it had been a while since I worked in color even on normal sized drawings. What made me choose the colors I did, I'm not sure, but I didn't get very far, stopping with just her face in color, because it felt more and more wrong. She was beginning to appear Vulcan. Needless to say, that was not the effect I was going for.

And so she has lingered for months, in her state of in-completion. I would check in on her when I went up to visit my friend and always got a twinge of guilt for not finishing her, as well as for the color scheme which put a knot in my stomach. Still I felt no energy to go in and fix her. Not yet anyway.


At the time my friend asked me what her name was and all I remember was that it started with an "A" and sounded similar to 'appaloosa'.


Meanwhile, life moved on and during that same summer I took a reiki class (in the same cottage with the 'green appaloosa' faery overseeing us), getting attuned to reiki II. I haven't been doing a lot with the energy healing other than mostly helping friends, but still I became aware of a guide that always showed up at those times to aid in the healing. She was tall, with large wings behind her, and she was blue. I started calling her my Blue Faery, especially because she reminded me of the one in the movie Pinocchio, having very similar gentle, loving, helping energy.


Then recently, I went to reiki workshop, seeing as I haven't done much with it and I wanted to discover more of its potential. It was an amazing evening, ending with us doing a sort of 'lightning round' with everyone there getting a couple of minutes on the table while everyone else sent healing energy. We were stacked 2 or 3 deep at times, putting our hands on the person in front of us to combine our energies going to the person on the table, and all I could think of was that beautiful scene from Avatar where they were healing Sigourney Weaver's character and all the people were reaching out to touch each other, literally creating a web of healing. How cool is that?!


Before that point, though, we had paired off and were taking turns doing reiki on each other. When the woman who was my partner started giving to me, I saw my Blue Faery again and she gave me her name -- Alphalucia. Shortly after that I realized her name meant "First Light" (and as I write this it has occurred to me that Lucius, the name of my drum bag also means "Light"!). Then I remembered my cottage faery whose name sounded like appaloosa. It's her!!


It took until the next day for all of this info to filter through, and as soon as it did, I texted my friend. I now had a name and I knew why I hadn't finished her yet. She's supposed to be blue!

The pencil drawing of Alphalucia with some faery orbs appearing in the picture

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