Deja Deja Vu

I stood on the paved walkway, where adults stroll for afternoon sea breath, and looked across the sand dunes onto the shore. The tide was so far out that it lay beyond the horizon, but the gaggle of little children over to my left hadn't noticed. They were too busy playing with their plastic sand trucks and toys, deeply absorbed in complex play.

Then I saw him. The lone two-year-old boy, silently watching, way over to my right. He couldn't play with the other kids because he didn't understand their game. In their eyes he was retarded, simple. In his eyes he was simply alone.

I climbed over the dunes and approached the simple boy. I held his hand and suggested we go over to join the sand truck game, but he declined and looked towards the exposed shore. He was right: why play with pretence when the whole mystery of the sandy bottom of the ocean is exposed before us?

Still holding hands we ran a huge semicircle across a few kilometres of wave-rippled wet sand, all the way out to the receded water's edge, and then continued to circle back to our starting point. The run was easy, joyous and I savoured every stride, smelling the touch of salt on my face and in my lungs. As we ran we saw tiny, white shells glistening in the sand, and as our footprints passed over them they transformed into white butterflies, lifting from the sand and flying skyward.

The circle completed, we sat together on the wet sand and laughed. I showed the simple boy the sky, not blue, but sandy yellow, also rippled and pebbled with shells, forming a backdrop to the fluttering white butterfly wings. 'Look', I whispered, 'the sky is a mirror of the ocean floor!' I stared longer until I saw more: pitted and raised clumps of sand all over the sky. Suddenly I recognised them. 'Look again', I encouraged the boy, 'those are the patterns you see when you look through an electron microscope. We are seeing the microscopic particles which form the universe.'

The simple boy turned and looked me straight in the eye. 'Do you think you're dreaming?' he asked. 'No!' I laughed, and continued to contemplate the sand-reflected sky. 'Jane, I think you're dreaming,' the little boy insisted. 'How could I possibly be dreaming?', I shouted. 'Watch!' I slapped my hands in the wet sand beside me. 'How could I be dreaming when we can hear that slap and smell and touch the sea water bubbling up and puddling around us? How could you be so stupid?!'

'But Jane, I really think you're dreaming,' he persisted. To humour him I blinked my eyes in an effort to open them wider, and instantly he was gone. I lay in bed beside Glen and could not comprehend the infinitesimally small amount of time, perhaps indeed no time, in which I was transported from one reality to another. I moved from total faith in the dream reality to total belief in the waking reality in the blinking of an eye.

Are we really so blind to our illusion that reality is defined by faith alone? The simple boy was the only one who knew the truth.

I had this dream a few years ago, and it was only in the planning of this book that I realised how beautifully it told the same tale. I named it 'Deja, Deja Vu' in recognition of its muddling of realities and time, and its quality of paradoxical truth.

A friend who heard this tale came across a quote in a book shortly afterwards, which acted as a synchronicity experience for her. I'm unaware of having seen the quote before, but it closely resembles my dream and introduces the fish, which is a dream symbol of spirituality.

"Time is but a stream I go fishing in. I drink at it but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains. I would drink deeper. Fish in the sky whose bottom is pebbly with stars."
Henry David Thoreau, Walden

All characters in dreams are aspects of the dreamer, so the little children on my left represented my left brain analytical self, dealing with modern ideas (toys) and forming complex concepts (complex games). Deeply engrossed in the illusion (game) of manipulating and explaining the false material world (plastic), I was blind to the greater reality offered by the right brain (the little boy on my right), with its much simpler yet wiser view. I had abandoned my right brain wisdom (it felt lonely).

In joyfully embracing the wisdom of the right brain, I came into contact with the ocean floor (the basis of the collective unconscious), discovering that a journey across such territory (the run) gives transformation (butterflies) through recognition of hidden thoughts (shells). In one run I saw the standing waves (rippled sand) related to the 'coffee cup' theory: the way in which the unconscious (sea) leaves its mark on the material world (sand), and yet also the way in which that material world is subject to change (sand shifts), with every ebb and flow of changed thought. The circle is a dream symbol of wholeness and completion, indicating that balancing right brain wisdom with left brain analysis gives a more holistic and complete view.

The sandy sky was the mirror of life, and so was the ocean floor. A hint of the importance of order of magnitude (quantum physics) was supplied with the symbolism of the microscopic imprint on the sky: as if I was experiencing reality from a different scale. The imbalance between left and right brain activity calls to mind the need for balance, so emphasised by the Taoists.

The simple truth is that our most trusted reality can change in the blinking of the waking eye and it is simplicity itself which leads us home.

The caged bird sits and watches the shadows march daily across her cage
Shadows long: child's laughter
Shadows short: heat and more heat
Shadows flip over: TV pictures flicker
All is shadow, all is dark: the bird counts time
Knowledge, predictable safety - tick, tock.

The cage door opens, the bird stretches,
flies beyond and watches
a glowing, golden orb crossing the sky.
The bird, transfixed
never sees the shadows of the trees that count time,
caught in one wondrous moment
'til all is shadow, all is dark:
When the confused bird counts time.

Liberated by her dreams
she flies alongside the golden orb
The bird, transfixed
never sees the shadows cast by her flaming escort
dream-flying ever alongside
eternal light
until she wakes, in her cage.
Shadows long: child's laughter:
the confused bird counts time.

Tilting the mirror in her cage
She questions her reflected mate
'Have you too met the bird of light?'
In one blinding flash the mirror falls
suns rays strike rebound the silvered surface
and so the bird knows
she and her mirror mate
are one with the light.
So why count time?

The bird lies still,
no shadows obscuring vision
no heart beat, no metronome,
nothing to count.
She is the silent flutter of a myriad wings.

And there had been no cage.
Tick, tock: the loud imaginary sound
measuring the illusionary bars
of no-risk bondage.
The choice was, is and always will be
In the same moment
Sincerely Yours.

Jane Anderson.

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Epilogue 2: Appendix

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