Dog Karma

I was in Hoboken the other night with my friend Jessica to pick up a coffee table she bought for her new apartment. Jess told me Karma Cafe was a good place to eat when we passed it. I'm in that "must explore everything in this area before I leave" mode so I took Katy and her friend Amy back Saturday night to check it out. I thought "cafe" meant it would be like a coffeehouse with light fare, but turns out it's an Indian restaurant. Fortunately, Katy and I like Indian food. It was a new experience for Amy, but she seemed okay with it.

Quick restaurant review: Love the name of the place, but thought it much better for a coffeehouse than Indian. That's just me tho. Food wasn't bad (all three of us had Tikka Masala Chicken), but even though I was really hungry, it wasn't as good as Mela in Ridgewood. The chai was mediocre. Naan was a little too much like Native American fry bread. Atmosphere was only a 5 outta 10 because they had a bar with a TV over it. I'm all for alcohol served in restaurants, but it just doesn't jive with Indian fare for me. Also, if we hadn't been sitting in the window seat, my eyes would've strayed to the TV too often and I've never found that to make for a good dining experience. The waiter was really nice though, and the service was okay. If you're looking for Indian food in Hoboken though, I'd recommend Bombay West over Karma Cafe.

Now back to our previous tale...

As we were finishing, a guy walked up with an elderly dog that looked very much like Jazz, except the air about this dog was totally dejected. It looked miserable and slumped on the ground while waiting. The guy had come by once before while we ate, presumably to order food, and I guess this time he was there to retrieve it. He tied the leash to the railing before he came in.

We paid our bill and walked out, stopping to see if the dog was friendly enough to pet. It cowered in front of us, and that made me really sad. I wanted to give the dog some Reiki and good energy, but suddenly it was like my attention was ripped away and I couldn't focus because I was having a freaky deja vu.

It covered the time from walking out of the restaurant to walking away, but my awareness of it started when I bent to pet the dog. It came in this surreal rush, like two realities playing out at the same time in my brain - one in the present moment at normal speed, the other recorded earlier playing in fast forward. Everything seemed to happen twice but at the same time, and for a couple seconds I didn't feel quite like I was physically present in either space, just suspended between worlds - A Wrinkle in Time, if you will.

I could clearly remember dreaming the whole scenario (after some thought, it was probably around Thanksgiving in 2006), and I also remembered that in the dream I knew we were moving to California with certainty. That detail was clear because I woke up thinking it was strange that I would dream of moving there since Santa Fe was the first choice of place to move at the time. Mark and I had even discussed it. I brushed it off tho as just part of a dream.

On the sidewalk, my mind raced ahead trying to remember other nuances of the dream, as if I wanted to predict the future. In the dream, I'm pretty sure there was a stranger who said something to me about California, which is what made me aware that I knew we were moving there, but that didn't happen in the real life moment. It may have if I'd stuck around a few more minutes - maybe the dog owner would have said something to that effect - but I felt oddly panicky like I was stuck in this weird space and the only way to break the illusion was to walk away, so I told the girls to come on and we left. That ended the deja vu.

This kind of thing has happened to me before, but it never freaked me out quite like this. Most people experience a normal deja vu and it's just a cool phenomenon to them. I used to have those, but in high school I started remembering dreaming the scenes I was having the deja vu about. When it would happen, I was pissed that I couldn't prove (to myself or others) that I'd dreamt the very same thing, so for a long time I wrote down every dream I had. After awhile I gave up recording my Dreaming unless it was something truly out of the ordinary. Not being able to prove anything was probably the Universe saying, "Oh yeah? How's that working for you? Are you done yet?"

Thinking about this makes me wonder if the experience of deja vu is like jumping from one life path to another. Forgive me if I've written this before, but the best analogy of Life I've ever read was in Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch (of course I can't find the page to cite now - maybe it was Celestine Prophecy?), where he describes life as being like a video game on a CD. All the possibilities of where you can go and what actions you can take already exist on the CD. As the player, you are only choosing which path to take through the game.

I think we all have free will, but I also believe there are some milestones in life that we set up before we enter this reality, and we will reach them no matter which road we choose. (Have I said that too? I repeat myself a lot.) Your daily decisions probably make subtle changes to your path that go mostly unnoticed, but you'd think a major shift would be marked with some magnificent crescendo moment in life. I would not consider petting a dog a spiritual left turn at Albuquerque, but maybe that's where my path realigned for California. Who knows. Certainly felt like an etheric earthquake at the time.

Oddly (or not), while searching Google to find if I was attributing the CD analogy to the correct book, I came across this page:

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/articles004.html

This is a fantastic summation of elementary physics and how it relates to out of body experiences. I don't believe I had anything like a near death experience, but I found it interesting and relevant all the same. I like his idea that death is just losing your notion of time and space. I've always said time is only a human agreement anyway, and that's why I have such trouble abiding by the clock.