I frequently have the sense that I’ve experienced a place in a dream before –in a different dream– but am never entirely sure it isn’t the dream itself that’s making me feel that way — that it’s not just “deja vu in a dream”, but the same dream location I’ve witnessed on different occasions of dreaming. (I guess with the implication: there exists a sort of dream world.)
This time, however, I’m quite certain this was a place I’d dreamed about before, it was so unique, though I don’t think I have a written confirmation of that, which would be the holy grail.
It was a place I’d gone to do my laundry. To get to the laundry room you needed to go up to a guy’s apartment then drop down –no ladder, no rope– through a square hole in his carpetted floor to the room with the machines below. To get out, you had to somehow wrestle your way back up. This time it was a new guy in the apartment and he said he didn’t want me going through the square hole because the flooring had gotten old and he was worried it would break. Was there another way to the laundry room? I asked. Not really.
Also notable, this was attached to a specific time, Easter Sunday morning. Before entering the building with the laundry, I’d paused to look at a church across the way –strangely illuminated in the sun against a blue sky, almost too perfect, an advertisement– my arms resting on a fence to look.
Adendum: this was written “in the spirit of the dream” — still in the thrall of its feeling. While “in the thrall”, this person’s apartment above the laundry machines really did seem such a unique and familiar place, I must have really known whether or not I had dreamed of it before. Now, just a few hours later, I think — perhaps not; think this may well have been “dream deja vu.”
Which gets me thinking. A lot of the time that I experience “dream deja vu” it concerns repetitive tasks. Doing the laundry, which I do in the same place quite a lot. Walking by a location I’m very familiar with but doing it in a strange manner … So: dreams transform ordinary experiences into extraordinary experiences, and the dreaming person’s experience of the waking person’s routine is of a place that is very strange but which yet he has been to before? A dreamer’s “deja vue” is a wakers repetition.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 