Being a highly
trained clinical psychoanalyst, I can speak about déjà vu and you should
believe everything I say. Right, then. Moving on.
When it happens I ignore it like
I ignore a clearly homeless person asking for money. Déjà vu actually has a lot
of similarities with homeless persons. It scares me a little because I don’t
know what it’s capable of or what it portends. If I don’t pay it any mind,
maybe it will stop bothering me. If I pretend it doesn’t exist, maybe it’ll
stop existing. If I give it attention, maybe it’ll lock eyes with me and follow
me home and live in my pantry, and then how will I get to my soup?
Déjà vu in French literally means
“already seen.” There have been studies on this thing and there have been
pretty much zero findings about it. It occurs most in age groups 15-25. About
70% of the population reports to having felt it at one point or another. It’s
been known to take place directly preceding seizures. That’s it. That’s
all we know about it. No one can really figure out what déjà vu is. Theories
range from re-living an experience from a past life to the brain suddenly and
briefly being unable to distinguish the past from the present.
If you’ve experienced it (which
I’m sure you’re a liar if you say you haven’t), you know it can be a fairly
powerful sensation. What’s it for? Why does it happen? I remember my first
encounter with it as a tiny child boy, and I can honestly say I toyed with the
idea that I was a pre-cog for a month or so.
I was pretty young. I’ll say
7-years-old, although to be straight with you, I don’t have any real idea how
old I was. I just know I wasn’t very aged. My mom had taken me to the church of
a friend of hers. A church I knew nothing about, had never visited, and knew no
one in. I was alone and uncomfortable as a man with too few hairs spoke to me
about things God-related. I listened about as well as a 7-year-old boy can,
which is to say half-heartedly. As the pastor rolled on, his words became more
and more familiar. The sense of familiarity grew as he continued. Each syllable
seemed more identifiable than the last until the sense of déjà vu was so strong
that I wondered if he was repeating a stock sermon he stole from another
minister that maybe I had heard elsewhere.
The unique thing about this
particular instance of déjà vu is that there was a climax instead of the usual
simple drop off. Eventually the sense that I had experienced this before and the
reality of what I was actively experiencing intersected. The man was speaking
about Noah’s Ark. About animals and how there were two of each. And
milliseconds before he said it aloud, I said it quietly to myself: “No amount
of air freshener could’ve made that boat smell any better.”
It’s benign and probably
meaningless and it has never happened to me since, but the déjà vu was so
powerful, I think perhaps there might be something slightly more fantastic to
the story than we can see on the surface. Or maybe not. Memory certainly could
have skewed the experience. Maybe I did hear those exact words elsewhere before
and that’s why I knew they were coming. But whatever the reason, déjà vu
doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t serve a purpose, and if it’s indicative of some
kind of neuroinstability, then 70% of the population is at least somewhat
off-kilter in their brainthoughts. Which wouldn’t surprise me.
Is it possible
that our minds not only have the potential to overcome neurological and
physiological hurdles, but also tap in to a collective consciousness of some
kind wherein one does not specifically read minds, but instead understands
intent of its counterparts? If déjà vu is the sensation that you’ve been
somewhere or seen something or heard something before, is the familiarity
caused because another piece of the hivemind is the one who has experienced it
and you’re merely tuning in to their reminiscence?
Probably not. But I’ve been wrong
before.
- The White Rabbit
