I sleep hard, but sometimes I dream things. Things that haven’t happened yet. Sometimes I remember them, wonder about the dream. Then I go on my way and forget them.

Until they come true. They call it déjà vu. But I know I dreamed it. Stupid, everyday, unimportant things. Like looking for a notebook when someone is walking down a hall towards me. Or holding a conversation, when in the middle I realize I know exactly the next thing I am going to say. I would step into the now that had already happened months ago, years ago, in my dream.

It feels like a spell; I am split in two. The me who dreamed the conversation, or should I say, the me in the dream from the past, was fully engaged in what she was saying.

But the present me, the one living in the event which had already taken place, became distracted by the memory of the present.

How do I dream these future scenes?

How could I possibly see what hadn’t happened yet? What let me see the future? And why such irrelevant ordinary scenes from the future?

This makes me wonder how time works. Am I in time? Like I am in the universe? Or am in time like a fish in water?

A fish can jump out of water. Leap up high and dive back in.

For that matter, am I traveling through my life like a fish through a stream? Where the direction is laid out, only I can’t see far enough ahead to know that the biggest choices I have is whether to swim on the left side or the right.

Or maybe I am the stream. Maybe I am flowing for the first time. Perhaps my journey from the heights to the sea is unmarked. I, the water, flow because I must, but minute by second by future moment the way is chosen. Each obstacle changes the whole course. Over that pebble, pool below that hill, rapids here, waterfall there. Something new under the sun.

My dream moments might be telling me something. Who knows which moment is the decisive one? What choice is the fulcrum for an irreversible direction? Is some extra-temporal being trying to draw attention to the unnoticed as the start of some fork in the road?

But if that’s so, what am I supposed to do with this?

When the spell of a dreamed scene comes over me, and I am split between the layers of the dream memory and the identical present, I shift.

If the dream turned right, I go straight.

Who knows what’s at stake? Nothing? Everything?

But illusion, delusion or otherwise, I chose where to plant my feet.