I'm getting interested in dreams again. I went through a period in college where I was journaling before and after sleeping and prepping myself to have lucid dreams. It worked to a degree and was interesting. All that fell off of my interest list when I fell in love, got married, had children, stuffed my head with new ideas in grad school, got a job, etc. I barely find time to sleep and to dream. Much less do I find time to journal about it, but.

About a week ago, I was alone in Poland touring Auschwitz I with a group of strangers. When we came to the end of Roll Call Square and when we faced the building behind the hanging posts, I had a very strange episode of what I was then thinking was deja vu, but that I've since been told might be better described as pre-cognitive dreaming, a vision, or a prophetic moment (depending upon your religio-linguistic preferences).

I was walking about 15 feet behind and 8 to the left of our guide, a young Polish woman. She was in an intense conversation about other victim groups with a young American man from our group who was either very interested in the topic or in her. I was only catching occasional snippets of their conversation because I was just trying to take in the place and the history of the horrors that occurred there. As we got to the space between the barracks buildings and the building that fronts the hanging posts, I had a moment of disorientation because I was reliving an identical moment. I remembered everything about the next two minutes vividly from, what I think I recall now as a very vivid dream that I had soon after moving to North Carolina. I remembered the words from the conversation the people next to me were having. I remembered the guide's soft and gentle monotone voice. I remembered the light and the shadow, the posts, the signs, the angle change when I turned my head, the moment I said, "this is really weired," my looking around, a woman getting in front of me to take a picture, the breeze, the sun. All of it. I was reliving this dream moment completely. It was very strange and perplexing.

I remember that this dream took place soon after we had moved into the old Farmhouse in Willets, which would have been sometime in March of 2005. I also remember that the dream had no indications of where I was in it. It could have been any place with red brick buildings and with unkept cobblestone streets and curbs. The hanging posts could have been any sort of posts, and I don't particularly remember what little barbed wire you can see from that point of view. In other words, the dream gave no indication that it was in Poland or specifically in Auschwitz. It was only after I was "living" it that the location became clear, but only because I was there. There were no clues to the content or context of the place in the dream. I should also note that this dream was not particularly dreadful or scary at the time.

This made me think again about the nature of dreams and the mind and the connections to cosmic issues. Some possible explanations below, based on my understanding of various ways of seeing the world:

A spiritist tradition of some sort would argue that this dream was a transcendence of space time where my mind caught up with itself somehow. There are various possible mechanisms but they almost all would involve my mind having a connection to some universal transcendent something that served as a mechanism or perhaps as a catalyst for this episode. I think the "meaning" might be interpreted variously by people of this persuasion. The power of the evil of the place perhaps, connecting to some cosmic power that is related to the strong emotions I was feeling, etc.

In Christianity (especially the highly rationalistic version in which I was raised and nurtured) there isn't much of a good answer. Some more "spirit" oriented strands of Christianity might say that the dream itself was a vision or a part of a connection to the divine. If so, though, why was it so banal. Why didn't I get the foods of various sorts floating down on a blanket, or and angel handing me a scroll and telling me to eat it, or multi-headed heavenly beings asking me questions or sending me on a quest. Instead I get a 2 minute vision of an unrecognizable place that revisits me when I am in the moment. This doesn't seem to answer the question of, if this is a vision sent by God, doesn't it have some practical meaning that should be interpretable. Perhaps I need a Joseph.

A materialist would say that it really isn't a mystical experience, it is an illusion created by my mind because of some sort of malfunction (an electrical problem, an electrolyte or hormonal imbalance, a chemical issue). That my mind told itself that it had had this experience before and that I created the memory of the dream/deja vu to further explain the strange-feeling moment to myself.

I'm not sure I am satisfied with any of those answers.