Deja Vu

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.

Maybe not more likely, but definitely more fun is the potential that wherever déjà vu comes from is the same place that the placebo effect comes from. The mind has the potential to, when tricked, put an insomniac to sleep , relieve chronic pain (or at leastplay a significant role in its relief), or even work as a fairly effective anti-depressant.

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