Young Writers Society

We only live once twice

Everyone has heard of Déjà vu, the feeling that one has lived through the present situation before. This feeling of ‘already seen’ is rarely experienced, yet all of us have certainly felt it in our lives. But have you heard of Master Zhuang’s Paradox? There is a famous story in the Zhuangzi (c. 3rd-century BCE), one of two foundational texts of Daoism, in fact, it is the most famous one, “The Butterfly Dream”:

“Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up, and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he were Zhuang Zhou who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and a butterfly, there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.” (Watson 18)

Don’t take it as the movie scenes in which the protagonist is sad and is lamenting on something and wishes it all to be a dream and things would return to normal. No. It is a highly infrequent feeling which you might experience in instances similar to those in which you experience Déjà vu. The way you feel, “Wait! Has this happened before?”, in a similar way you suddenly feel like, “Wait! What if I am still in a dream? What if I am still a kid who is taking his noon nap sitting on the window seat of his school bus? And all of this world built around will blow out as the bus stops at my bus stop and I would wake up to see my mom waiting for me at the stop.”

Maybe these all appear to be a hoax, because how can you dream all of this in that short nap. And this is the point which makes me question, what was the longest time for which we slept? It takes me back to our origin. The time when you were in the womb, sleeping for approximately nine months. The longest you have ever slept. Can it be that we experienced the paradox in the fetus? Maybe in that entire period of sleep for nine months, you dreamt of all the transformations. Dreaming from the moment you were born and saw your mother for the first time till your death. Experiencing every pain, suffering, and happiness in that nine-month-long dream till the time you are pushed out of the womb. Maybe the moment you are being pushed out is the moment at which you dream the last part of your life, the dream of you dying. And as you are pulled out, you shut your eyes because you can’t imagine anything as just a second before you saw yourself dying. You cry out loud because you are dawned upon with the grief of your death. You deny believing it and in an attempt, you open your eyes, and as your eyelids unfold, you see your mom holding you, the very same scene that you saw in the womb when you began dreaming, your first déjà vu. You smile as you are elated that you have got a chance to live again.

As we grow up, we start forgetting everything we dreamt but our subconscious mind remembers it all. Probably, everything you face, every hardship, every loss, every pain is a bit less than what you saw in that dream as your subconscious mind is silently shaping you to do things a better way as compared to the way you would have originally done because it remembers every bit of that nine-month-long dream. The time we spend on lamenting and doubting ourselves is unnecessary because every pain is lesser and every pleasure is greater than what it would have been in the original life which we saw in the dream. And this is why every déjà vu is real because we have ‘already seen’ them in the dream when we lived once, and these are mere flashbacks in life when we are living again.