Déjà vu usually lasts a second. Craig Rozniecki stretches it across a whole poem and asks what happens when the feeling won't pass. The speaker finds himself somewhere "strangely familiar, / Yet uncertain," unable to say whether the place is memory, dream or waking life. The central idea is that the border between sleeping and waking is less solid than we assume, and that when we are inside the confusion, no inner test can settle it.
The opening lines establish the mood through contradiction. "I've been here before, / Or so it seems" commits to a claim and then retreats from it in the same breath. The word "uncertain" appears early and returns later ("Uncertain of my past"), so the poem begins and drifts back to the same doubt. One line is especially interesting: "Surreal in setting, / In feeling, / In this real?" The repeated "In" sets up a list, and then the list tips over into a question. Whether or not this was planned, it works. The doubt seems to arrive in the middle of a thought, the way it does when a dream starts to wobble.
Time goes next. "Time appears frozen, / Stuck in the present," and the "past and future" are simply "non-existent." This is a good description of how dreams feel. They have no yesterday and no tomorrow, only a sealed-off now. The speaker then tries to investigate. The scene is "Impressionistic from a distance, / Realistic up close," so the vague becomes sharp as he approaches, as if the dream is built to survive inspection. He even tries a physical test, "Rubbing my eyes, / To see more clearly," the most ordinary gesture of waking up. It doesn't help. "Confusion strikes me," and he is "Suddenly forgetful of life's details." Losing the facts of his own life is the real danger here, because without them he has nothing to measure the scene against.
The form carries this uncertainty. There is no rhyme scheme and no regular metre. The lines are short and uneven, some only two or three words, so the poem moves in small, hesitant steps. The punctuation matters just as much. Nearly every line ends in a comma, and the only full stop comes at the very end. The poem is one long, unresolved sentence broken by two questions ("In this real? / Or am I dreaming?"), and it never settles into a firm statement. The reader is carried along without a place to rest, which is how the speaker feels. The vocabulary is plain and abstract, with words like "surreal," "reality" and "confusion" doing much of the work. That keeps the poem easy to follow, though it offers fewer concrete images than a dream might in real life. The few images it does have, such as the rubbed eyes and the view from far and near, therefore stand out.
The ending is where the idea pays off. "The previous night's dream being fresh, / I awaken, / Yet am still asleep." The speaker believes he has woken up, which is the very thing a dream would let him believe. The last line, "As I dream inside a dream," is the poem's only full stop. It finally names the situation, but the name doesn't solve anything. It describes a trap with no exit. "The blurred line of reality" is left hanging as a phrase, which keeps the blurring in the reader's mind.
The title recalls Edgar Allan Poe's "A Dream Within a Dream," which also asks whether everything we see might be a dream inside a dream. Rozniecki's wording is plainer ("inside" rather than "within"), and the poem alone cannot tell us whether the echo was intended. What the text does show is a different emphasis. Here the question is less about whether life as a whole is a dream and more about one disorienting night, with a speaker rubbing his eyes and testing the room.
The poem is significant because it puts a familiar but hard-to-describe experience into simple language. Anyone who has had a "false awakening," or has felt for a moment that a place was somehow rehearsed, will recognise the speaker's panic. By refusing a tidy ending, it leaves the reader in the same unsettled state.