When I was a teenager my friends A and E went with me to the Renaissance Festival in Maryland, which I feel pretty safe in saying is the best Renaissance Festival in the country. My mom has a friend who actually works at the Renaissance Festival in Texas and the size and sheen of her Faerie Queen wings along with her brood of children dressed like fairies in sunshine-y Facebook pictures once led me to suspect my Renaissance Festival was NOT the best Renaissance Festival in the country. But then I remembered her Renaissance Festival was in Texas, and I felt better. Sorry, Texas. You’re like the rich kid in Catholic school who wears his tie all loose and shirt untucked and has a cocaine addiction. You’re really loud and obnoxious and think everyone wants to be you. Every now and then we kind of do, but really we just wish you’d transfer out of our class.
Anyway, we went to the Renaissance Festival, and one of them forked up the $20 it took for a tarot card reading. In all the years I’ve been going there, about 15, there has been a dude (the same dude), sitting on the balcony outside the Tarot hut, every weekend, every season, every year, ALL DAY, without fail, screaming “foooortUNES, GEEEET your fortUNES, FORTunes read HEEEERE” like he’s selling hot dogs at a baseball game. And he’s one of those uncomfortable hollerers who makes eye contact with you when you walk by. We always joked about doing it but this year, I think it was E, was ready to do it. E and A’s attraction to mysticism began and ended with Jesus, but E had a serious dose of Buffy the Vampire Slayer coursing through the religious centers in his brain that allowed a modicum of benign fascination with things like Wicca, séances, graveyards, and the occult. As a Star Wars nut flirting with atheism who really didn’t care if she pissed off any gods or spirits, we had a pretty fantastic time doing whatever ridiculous thing we decided to do that day. A didn’t care for half of it, but he stuck around for our daily Moulin Rouge! and Whitney Houston sing-alongs. I miss those guys.
Now that I think about it, it might have been A who got the Tarot card reading. All I know for sure is that one of them got it, cajoled the tarot reader into letting all three of us into the reading room, and somebody kept kicking me under the table to get me to stop snickering. And one of them spent $20 to be told, by a shirtless, bearded, 70 year old man, that “they have some hard times ahead, but ultimately they’ll triumph.” Because if you’re a weekend tarot reader making some extra cash at the Renaissance Festival to supplement your day job as a produce stocker at Whole Foods, what else do you say to middle class, white, high school boys?
All my snickering and atheism aside, though, I wasn’t the one to get my cards read (although they first offered to pay for ME to get the reading), because I do know certain truths about myself, and knew them even as a 15 year old high on chocolate-dipped cheesecake and curly fries, excited to go to the Rennfest without her parents for once. The first thing I know is that I am terrified for anyone to know my innermost thoughts, desires, hopes, and dreams. The second is that I’m pretty sure that anybody, even a hack tarot reader, will be able to see them in my eyes if he sits in silence with me in a dark room for a few minutes. The third is that NO ONE is allowed to know my future before I do. I was terrified of prophesy before I even knew what it was. All those philosophical/physical postulations about the observed object changing behavior for the sake of being observed and the mere act of knowing the outcome dictates your present actions were scary and real, because I knew I would do that. I don’t need no Tarot card reader telling me I’ll have hard times ahead. A and E’s great fortune was an overarching belief in the Lord, and so all other spirit magic was declared null and void and thus a non-threat. Even at 15 I had a vague appreciation of the One Soul concepts and space-time jumbles my hippie grandmother used to feed me, that Time as we know it is less of a line and more of a cloud and the past, present and future were actually one.
I’ve had prophetic dreams for as long as I can remember dreaming. I’m not talking about an oracle coming to me in my dreams and proclaiming crucial world events as it hovers in a blinding white light. I’m talking about stupid little moments in my life that I can only recall dreaming about when they happen to me. This weekend I went for a walk and there was a point where a man I’d never seen before walked a dog I’d never seen before on a stretch of sidewalk I’d never walked before, and I had dreamed it all before. That one little instant in time like a snapshot (man in khaki pants. Dog with red collar. Pink flower petals in grass. Blue and white sneakers. Taking a walk. Gray shorts.) was something that happened in my brain before and I feel a pulling sensation in my chest like the moment I’m living now is lassoing the moment I dreamed and syncing them up into one. I’ve tried to talk to people about it before and everyone is pretty convinced it’s still just re-constructed moments from previous days sifted together into a dream that happens to match the moment I’m living now. But this time, that explanation doesn’t work. I bought those gray shorts in the morning at Marshalls, having never seen them before, and put them on 2 hours later to take a walk in the afternoon. I’ve never owned a pair of gray shorts in my life until Saturday.
I’m fascinated with books that can assess my character based on the day I was born or what my name is. We have a book at my parents’ house that describes “Jackie” and “Jacqueline” and I’m a perfect meld of each. But why? Is it because I actually am that way, or is it because I read those entries when I was 16 and, having known them, grew into the person I was prophesized to be? Can the power of suggestion really be so great that I can be influenced by 6 paragraphs in a compendium of names? And why, if I am so susceptible to all this otherworldly influence, do I think hypnotism is such a crock of shit?
Despite how eerily accurate I’ve found these predictions to be in my own life, I suspect they are catered to play to social norms that most women will conform to in their life. One entry tells me a Jackie “wants it all – the job, marriage, and children; she’ll have at least three,” which is probably true of almost all Jackies out there. On that same token, I don’t believe that all Jackies “will excel in music and will probably pursue a career in teaching or writing.” Whatever. The more I talk about it, the less equipped I feel to talk about it. Probably won’t have three kids, is all I can say. And, I spell my name with a Y. So that MUST affect SOMEthing in your little runic interpretations, Mr. Prophecy Book.
I like the idea that Time isn’t linear. I think it would explain a lot of things, like how I can dream moments in my life before they happen and how I can meet someone and feel like I have an instant connection with them, like I’ve known them forever. I think it would explain a lot of things, like the soul mate concept. I’m pretty sure quantum physics is going to explain it all. I just have to wait for some smartypants scientist to bring it all down to my level.
I always feel like a monkey banging on a keyboard when I talk about this stuff. I had a prophetic dream and wanted to talk about it, since no one believes me and I can never remember it when I wake up to tell anyone, unlike my dreams about splitting myself into three off-beat personas disguised as professors named Dino (a guy with a blond beard), Bino (a woman who wore scarves and funky glasses) and Gino (a turtleneck wearing guy with black hair). I remember that dream really well. I adopted different personas to steal my students’ credit and buy a bunch of stuff. I was a benevolent crook, though, because I would only steal credit from underage kids, and their credit would just re-set when they turned 18. So one day one of my students was crying in class because her credit had been stolen and I consoled her by saying “don’t worry, you’re only 17. It’ll clear on your 18th birthday.” Then she told me she was 19, not 17, and her credit was ruined forever. I had racked up $516 billion worth of credit card debt on her name. I felt so bad, I confessed to my three personas and everyone felt betrayed. But then they invited me to a dinner party. I asked if I could come as one of my personas, because “I’m so boring when I’m just me.” The dream people let me do it, and then for the rest of the dream I kept at my three professor’s jobs and interacting with everyone, and all the people I met knew I was playing a character and they played along with me because they felt bad for me and knew I was uncomfortable being myself.
The deeper meaning there is hardly deeper. But I take comfort in the thought that it indicates I can at least pretend to be more than just myself, and my imagination can’t fit into a mold laid out by some book on a coffee table, even if my personality can.
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