I have always been intrigued by deja vu. I don't remember the first time I experienced it, but I experience it a few times a year, and each time I don't really feel a fear come over anymore, more of a comfort. I think this is because I've rationalized the whole thing, analyzed it as hard as I could, and thus took the mysticism out of it. It has lost its quality to me as prophecy, or precognition. Its also been scientifically explained as an anomaly of memory/vision, perhaps related to stress. Interesting, but boring, maybe. As a matter of fact, I had deja vu twice this week. I feel the scientific answer is right. Why?
Because it is boring. Each time I have deja vu, it occurs under tremendously mundane circumstances. This past weekend my friend Omar called me. We talked about football and I heard him say something hateful about Peyton Manning, then make a prediciton for the rest of the Green Bay Packers' season. Now he talks about this sort of thing a lot. But at the fringe of awareness I could sense that I knew exactly what he was going to say and how, not by intuition or familiarity, but because I was sure it was happening presently exactly the way I remember it happening, only it hadn't happened yet. Or did it?
Science says it did, that there is some sort of lag, on the level of milliseconds, where our memory records the event before we are aware of it. When we do become aware of it, we get that strange feeling of knowing what is going to happen because it has already happened, we were just unaware. This makes sense in regards to what we learned from Carter about there being a lag between the moment of perception and the processing of that perception. When deja vu occurs, there is a mis-step somewhere in the translation/transmission of this information that increases the lag. This is confirmed by our inability to change events as they are occuring - how can we change them if they've already happened?
When I was younger, being a hardcore sci fi geek, I used to imagine that deja vu was evidence not of memory anolmalies, but temporal anomalies. There was in that moment, for me, some sort of cosmic shift, perhaps a very tiny and imperceptible black hole passing through my neck of the universe, and time had blipped as a result, skipped like needle on vinyl, but had to right itself before some wormhole opened up to suck me in and transport me elsewhere a la Stargate. Or maybe it was a multi dimensional coincidence between two timelines in one moment, my entity having gotten off track, needing to press the reset button like Sega Genesis, so that this specific me doesn't die in a car crash next week, but of a heart attack at 54. Then I saw the Matrix, and the scene where Neo sees the cat twice is explained as a glitch in the system indicating that agents have arrived seemed to make perfect sense to me. I mean, they're all coming to get us right? We just haven't woken up yet. Then there's deja vu's brother and sister, deja senti (already felt) and deja visite (already visited). Is there some grand secret to the multiverse that we haven't unlocked?
Yesterday I was working on a manuscript and was shcoked to find that the pattern of letters making up the chapter's references were oddly familiar, exactly so, and the fact that there were 97 of them felt immensely significant. I knew I would then take a sip of the lukewarm green tea sitting in my mug to the left of me and that there was no way that I could not. A very short moment, yes; the sheer lack of control was quite a trip, as it always is, but accompanied by a Douglas Adams toned "great, here we go again." So am I a prophet? Are there going to be 97 deaths, intricately linked so that I must save the world from apocalypse? Am I a hero whose powers have not been realized yet? Is that it?
Not fucking likely. I probably just need some sleep.
Comments (1)
Deja vu sounds really neat, but I don't remember ever experiencing it. What I have experienced is a "knowledge" of what is about to happen, but hasn't happened yet. My mother-in-law (in her 90's and retired) is/was a recognized and respected psi researcher, and there is statistical evidence for some paranormal occurrences; however, I don't know whether my periods of precognition would be officially recognized as such. The most "fun" involved trying to foresee the outcome of various games: when I first tried it, as a preteen, at a summer camp carnival, I guessed correctly several times in a row which color a spinning wheel would stop at, but when I finally put some play money on a color, it failed. Years later, in my twenties, I watched some friends play cards, and decided at the beginning of one round that I would try to predict the winner. I stood behind my chosen player and watched them play, and "win": They declared a win and nobody disputed it, but I saw that one of the cards they put down was the right color but the wrong suit, i.e. a diamond for a heart or such; if they had meant to cheat, they would never have left the cards displayed on the table as they did, so I was afraid (literally) that I had influenced them on an unconscious level.
Posted by Lucy | November 20, 2007 2:55 PM
Posted on November 20, 2007 14:55