Maybe in another lifetime, but maybe not

It is brilliant how many devices, systems of beliefs, or forms of analysis one will come up with to explain away and rationalize their experiences in the world. It isn't exactly a bad thing, and for total transparency, I too fall under this category of “skepticism”. A more recent circuit of thoughts I’ve been attempting to understand amongst my friends, concerns the content of my dreams. My incredibly hallucinogenic, sometimes surreal, and more frequent than one would think, incomprehensible zombie-filled dreams. Emphasis on the zombies, because for reasons unbeknownst to me, I have had one too many dreams these last few weeks battling the incompetent decisions of my straggling apocalypse survivor friends, rather than escaping the zombies themselves. 

The purpose of this written entry has more to do with the kind of supernatural or hopeful otherworldly openings that seemingly emerge from our dreams, the revelations that demand re-examination. The uncalculated possibility of pummeling into something beyond our experienced world, be it imagined or revisited. I have often wondered if maybe our dreams erupt as precarious flashes into lifelines outside of the one we live in. And how in this hypothetical scenario, there could be another version of myself who has never felt the granules of sand in Coney Island, or lived through heartache, through migration, through the seconds of fighting fits when a sour patch gummy hits the tops of your taste buds. 

In my dream last night, I experienced myself in another lifetime. The dream’s setting hazed into vision, it was a foreign apartment traversed by a young man with a face totally unfamiliar to me—in this dream he is my partner. I see myself seated by surrounding shelves full of books and objects that would have no place in my apartment back in New York. A mid-century wide-mouthed lamp is dimly lit humming in the corner of the room.

My witnessing of the exchanges between this version of myself and the young man is unnoticed by the two. I am somehow hovering in the air of space between me and whatever dimension of time they exist within.

Still from “The Mirror” by Andrei Tarkovsky. (1975)

Perhaps the strangest quality about many of my dreams is that I am always cognizant of when I am in a dream or dreaming; that there is nothing in the screened world of my subconscious that can reach or harm me, and that similarly, there is nothing in that world that I could meaningfully reach towards or retrieve. 

I carefully watch this version of myself, in this other lifetime, resting in an implacable apartment, with a man I have never met—connecting and meeting each other’s words. How in that moment she makes some sort of observation about a selection of images or things she has found, by which he is astounded by. Oddly enough, some part of me intuits that she is not an artist in this lifetime (hence the surprise in his response). 

This makes me terribly sad for a brief moment: to witness a representation of my life that is totally unlike my own.

Yet in this air of her delicate observation of colors and collisions, it is irrefutable that she has every artistic molecule pulsing through her. 

It was totally befuddling to me...because on some abstract level we have always maintained the belief that the implication of a multi-lifeline universe would produce no correlations between the decisions in each life. Each lifeline being individually complex and totalizing, never intersecting with the destiny or potentials of the other. But maybe we are wrong. What if things are not all that different? What if the kind of person we are meant to be in this world, is where we will arrive at no matter the circumstance, in every lifetime? 

A rush of heat flushed from the surface of my cheeks to my exposed knees.

For the last few weeks I have dubiously glanced at the question of how much gentler my personal life, my finances, or my career might have turned out to be had I not been so hellbent on becoming an artist from the age of three. But somehow this concern, stretching into the undefined gaps between these realities, had dissolved my ailment. 

Maybe I am ‘someone’ else in another lifetime. But maybe I’m not. 

Maybe none of us are, and maybe the decisions we mull over in this lifetime are not too far off in distance from the ones we would encounter elsewhere anyways.

This was the truth I felt. That despite my rumination, there was the possibility I was an artist in every lifetime (whether it was apparent to me or not). But perhaps that is worth more anyways. To embrace the chance that even in another hypothetical lifetime, I would still choose to be an artist a thousand times over.