Once upon a dream

Kathleen knows that, as my husband would say, I am a freak. She knows that I began reading when I was 18 months old, and she knows (I think) that when I was four years old, I used to have dreams about my life and death in France during the Rococo period, complete with French that I understood and know now to have been real, actual French, because I recognized it immediately when I began taking lessons. I never made anything less than 100 in any of my French classes because, quite literally, I already knew how to speak it. I have no explanations, except that I am a freak, and that it’s my best argument for past lives.

What she probably doesn’t know is that I knew when I was a child that I would live in two places*, and one was … well, I’m sure you can guess. I have met one person here who I’m pretty sure I’ve “known before,” as it was less a first meeting and more of a “Where have you been?” on both our parts. (And that’s happened three other times in my life!) And I actually had dreams about that person BEFORE WE MET. The whole thing gives me the creeps.
I drive the streets of Denver with my old companion, déjà vu, riding shotgun. (Too bad a mental map isn’t part of the equation.) And there is no better example than the dream house.

Denver is full of “dream houses” – McMansions, they would usually be called – but this one is really, literally, my dream house. I’ve dreamed about this house many, many times since I was a child. I can visualize its layout in my head without ever having been in it. The first time I saw it, I nearly ran off the road. I screamed, “There it is!” I pulled up to it slowly, my heart racing, tears in my eyes. It’s a funky house, modest and cute, and not a house I suppose most people would call their dream house. But it is mine. I have informed my husband that, if it ever goes on the market, kismet dictates that we must make an offer. Because how often can one say one lives in a house of destiny?

* The other place I always knew I would live is Portland, Oregon. See we shall.