I’m savoring a couplet from the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who has appeared in several of my dreams. He’s famed for his obscurity, but these two lines, from a poem about friendship, bring a bittersweet sense of something entirely familiar:

Nous immémoriaux quelques-uns si contents
Sur la soudaineté de notre amitié neuve

In rough translation:

We, the immemorial ones, are so happy
At the suddenness of our new friendship.

Surely you have felt something akin to this. In the presence of a new person, you know that you have met before, maybe long ago, in times “immemorial”. There is the sense of déjà vu, but it is more profound than the certainty that you have met before, probably in a dream. The sense extends to the feeling that you have lived important things together, before your present lifetime.

In  “suddenness” you realize that you are immersed, in that moment, in a “new friendship” that may in fact be the resumption of a connection from another life, or another dimension. In the truth of this moment, you may feel blessed to have rediscovered a member of your soul family.

Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé by Edouard Manet.