The night before my step-mother-in-law’s funeral, I dreamed that I was at the funeral and ran into an old friend of mine, Gary. We stepped outside and smoked cigars.
The next day, which would be last Thursday, we were at the funeral luncheon. I stepped outside and saw Gary. He was smoking a cigar.
Meeting Gary was not the weird part. He was married to one of my step-mother-in-law’s daughters. We worked together on a construction crew back when we were both first married and I was still in college. I thought he would be at the funeral, and I was looking forward to seeing him again. What was uncanny was the detail of the cigar. He never smoked them back when I knew him, and his wife told me later that he had just started smoking the things a few years ago. Somehow, I dreamed this encounter.
It wasn’t a premonition of some big important event. The cigar part had no significance at all. It was just a detail. But why would I have dreamed this? And how could I have dreamed something that would actually happen the next day?
This was not just
deja vu. Scientists explain the experience of having done something already as a false memory. The brain, for some reason, stores an experience as it is happening in its memory bank, so that we perceive it as having already happening. Could this have been a false dream memory, so that I didn’t really dream it, but just remembered that I did? Maybe, but the dream was different in important ways from the reality. In my dream, Gary looked like he did when I was working with him. In the reality, he was a grizzled grandpa thirty-some years older, like me. Also, in the dream we were both smoking cigars. In the reality, I was too flummoxed to ask him for one.
I admit that the experience, which suggested that life to some degree is planned out ahead of time and that there are mysteries that the mundane mind cannot explain, was comforting to me at the funeral as I contemplated death. But my mind is still boggling.
My college roommate, my cousin and good friend, used to interrupt whatever we were doing sometimes by saying “I dreamed this.” He would have this experience several times a week.
Have any of you experienced anything like this?
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