Two dreams ten years apart

The other night I had an unforgettable dream that rocked me out of my sleep:

I was traveling and it looked like I was in New Orleans or a place very similar. I was hungry and I went into a restaurant/pub, it was packed so folks were sharing tables. I ended up at a table with two women. We hit it off pretty well, small talked about the place, the food normally being better but figured since it was so packed the cooks were harried, etc. etc.

All the while we were talking, I kept feeling some kind of haunting familiarity with one of the ladies. I just knew there was some kind of connection with her, tantalizingly deep, but I couldn’t pin it down.

She *knew* though. And she knew exactly what to say. She looked into my eyes and said something about “helicopters flying around town” and POW!

I was hit with a tremendous surge of an old dream from ten years ago, flashing back to when I was in a helicopter with her, this very same lady.

She was my friend’s fiancé and was in a bad accident; her face was badly cut and we were on the way to the hospital. I don’t remember why, but her fiancé either wasn’t there or couldn’t make it so I accompanied her to the hospital so that she wouldn’t be alone.

The dream-memory jumped ahead to where I was visiting her in the hospital. Apparently her fiancé had wigged out on her because of the big scar on her face. Not wanting her to be alone, I hung around to lend moral and emotional support.

(I distinctly remember there was an underlying mutual attraction between us from the beginning when her fiancé first introduced us. It was a quiet, instantaneous bond.)

She was terrified because she had decided to undergo surgery to take care of her scar, she was still in pain from the accident and felt so alone with her fiancé bailing out on her.

As she was being taken to the operating room, she freaked out and changed her mind, deciding against the surgery. I calmly stayed by her side and the dream-memory ended.

Flashback over, I was back in the restaurant, staring at her, mouth agape.

*Now* I knew why she felt so intimately familiar! It was *her*, the one whom I felt some kind of bond with and stayed at her side in the hospital.

She must have had the surgery done some time after the initial dream-memory — I saw a faint outline of the scar on her face yet she was the same beautiful soul I felt such a deep kinship with.

I shouted with joy, “Oh my God, it’s YOU!” and leaped over to give her a hug. We held each other for a long time, a decade rapidly fading away.

As I started to wake up from such a powerful jolt of recognition, the dream sped forward and I saw how we ended up as we were meant to be, kindred souls, kindred lovers, melting into each other’s hearts as the future unfurled.

I woke up that day with my heart singing all day.

What a heck of a dream! It’s amazing a dream connected to another dream I had over ten years ago and it continued from it, like an epilogue in the same book.

Parallel universes, anyone?