I mentioned in a previous post that while looking for the draft of a western novel I had written more than a dozen years ago that I had found my Reflections duotang from Grade 12. At school in Cole Harbour, we began writing weekly reflections/essays/stories in grade 10. It was a simple assignment: fill one page of looseleaf with writing. It could be on anything. Heck, it could be a letter to your ex-boyfriend telling him what clown he was.

The objective was simply to write. For me, that was the easiest ten points on my term mark I could get. Often, I didn’t fill one page; I filled two or three or five.

After reading a few Reflections, I realised my thought process hasn’t changed much. On the outside I may look a little different and my daily activities have completely changed, but on the inside, I’m still the same person.

Below is the first entry. It’s appropriate since I’m a dreamer more than anything else in the world.

I Was, I Think

Many people dream. I am one who dreams many. A lot of people try and come up with reasons why people have dreams and what they all mean. What I think is that dreams are like subconscious videos of your life in the past or it could be of the future.

There is a saying called déjà vu. This could simply be explained by someone having a dream and not remembering it in the morning and then when they have done what they had done in the dream they remember doing something like that before.

I believe that a person’s body dies but not their soul. The soul lives on in other bodies throughout the years.

When I dream I never see myself. I always see other people but not myself. I talked with my sister about this and we wondered if we looked different in our dreams. I wondered about this for a long time and then one dream I looked in the mirror and through the eyes of me I saw someone else. It was either a dream from the future or from the past. I could not really tell. But from what I figured in your dreams you are looking out of a different body.

Some people, in my dreams are familiar to me. At least they seem familiar. Only a few times do I dream with people I know in them. It is usually people I have never seen for a long time or someone who I had just recently met. People who I do not know in my dreams from reality I know in my dream. They can be brothers, or sisters or best friends in the dream which gives you a weird feeling when you wake up because you know that you know that person and you’re not going to meet him or her in real life.

…I still remember the dream in which I looked into an oval hall mirror and saw another face staring back at me. I had initially passed the mirror and was on my way down the hall when I realised I should look into it and see my appearance. For some reason, my awake hours spent thinking about what I looked like in dreams gave me the ability to intentionally stop and look into that mirror.

Have you ever seen yourself in a mirror in your dreams?