Journal 6

Alrighty... here's a good one, a bona-fide, established wonder. Deja vu.

This is something I've gotten a lot... apparently I get it more than most

people, or so I've been told. Let me give you the story that made me think

of this... As I mentioned, I have a nasty, unpleasant eye infection. I went

to the hospital and they dilated the eye in question, while they performed

various tests that generally involved shining incredibly bright lights into

a really sensitive eye, presumably to see how loudly they could get me to

scream. Anyway, I went home and got on with my life, albeit in a monocular

sort of way. About eight hours later, I looked in the mirror and realized

that the eye was still dilated. It looked seriously creepy... one giant

pupil. So, I called the doctor and found out whether that was normal (it

was) and so on.

The next afternoon, I was sitting in my apartment thinking generally

about the day and how creepy my eye looked. I was sort of having a little

mental conversation with an imaginary doctor. I looked over at the table

and imagined telling him, in a funny way, "Well, my pupil's been dilated

since noon on Wednesday!" I then spotted dead in that train of thought.

Here's where it gets funky... I'm going to do my best to try to convey it

exactly as it happened. I suddenly realized that I finally understood why

I'd thought that bizarre sentence about a week previously. I had been lying

on my bed daydreaming, and I imagined looking over at the table and thinking

(in an inexplicably ironic tone of voice), "Well, my pupil's been dilated

since noon on Wednesday!" And then I had lain on my bed, on the verge of

nodding off, and wondering where in the heck a sentence that bizarre had

come from. I didn't wonder about it to much at the time, as weird little

sentences like that pop into the heads of daydreaming people on the verge of

sleep, or at least into mine, all the time. Now, though, I had just

actually performed that action. My initial thought was, "Ohhhhh, now I get

it!", followed immediately by, "Eek. That's weird." I just kinda sat there

staring at the table, trying to make absolutely sure that this was exactly

what had happened.

Now, I get deja vu all the time. It always feels like the memory of

having had a specific thought previously, on some unidentifiable date. Not

the memory of thinking it, but morel like the memory of thinking that I'd

already thought it. Sometimes it's even the memory of remembering having

thought it and then remembering having remembered (I'm honestly not trying

to be confusing, it just sounds like it.) For example, thinking, "Gosh I'm

out of Jell-O," then immediately thinking, "Wait, I've thought that

before!", and then remembering that what you'd actually thought before was,

"Gosh, I'm out of Jell-O... Wait, I've thought that before!", and all tinged

with the quality of having been a memory the first time, too. Usually when

that happens, I'll try to be sneaky and start doing things that I never

would have imagined before, only to discover that I remembered having

remembered trying that the first time. I keep doing that until it seems

like I'm finally doing new stuff. (Okay, pause here... have I explained

this in a comprehensible manner? Seriously, I looked back over it and it

reads like gibberish at first glance. I promise it all makes sense; every

word has been chosen carefully to convey the correct meaning so if you can

figure it out in any way at all, then that should actually be what I meant,

even if it seems inconceivable.) I'm not claiming anything special here,

this is just deja vu... everybody gets it. This time with the eye, though,

was the first time I could remember it not as an ephemeral maybe-memory, but

as an actual event. This was the first time I could remember having thought

something (or I should say daydreamed something, because it was really the

image of the whole experience... sitting, looking at the table while

thinking it), remember when specifically I thought it, and remember

wondering why I thought something that was such an extreme non-sequitur. I

recognized at the moment that it was a unique experience of deja vu for me,

so I tried my very best to burn it into my memory. Which, as it turns out,

is the only reason I can remember it clearly enough to explain it at all.

This all lasted maybe... 45 seconds, maybe less. That is as exact an

account of how it happened and how it felt as I can muster. Now, you know

how, after the initial realization, the experience of deja vu starts to

fade? It starts to seem like you imagined it... you realize that there's no

way this actually happened before. You can't remember when you thought it

first...it's all very hazy, just an impression, really. After a few

seconds, the only thing you can believe is that it was all in your mind...

you never thought it before, it was just... deja vu. A weird thing that

happens to people, probably just some function of the mind, albeit a strange

one. But definitely not something precognitive, like your initial reaction

would have had you believe. Well, that happened this time, too. After I

thought all of this, I suddenly thought it was my imagination. It wasn't

the normal fading, though, it was a sudden thing. Like my mind stepped in

and said, "No, no way." It was really like that; like a door just slammed

closed on the whole thing. I could still remember the whole thing, but it

suddenly just wasn't plausible any more (that's when I made the conscious

effort to burn this into my mind, when I noticed my reaction to it starting

to change). After another... 3 seconds maybe, tops, it was just this funny

thing that happened. I didn't really believe it anymore; I thought that the

whole memory of having been on my bed the previous week was just a product

of my thoroughly overactive imagination, me trying to romanticize something

perfectly normal. I think I can safely say that the only reason this sticks

out in my mind now as something remarkable is that I made a conscious effort

to remember how it had felt at first. I think that if I hadn't done that at

the time, which was really just luck and reflex, it would have become

nothing more than just another instance of deja vu, and it would have passed

from my mind without much more thought. As it was, in the next couple of

minutes I realized I had managed to preserve the memory of what I had

thought, and I could compare it to what I thought now... and manage to bring

back some measure of the initial feeling, if only as a memory.

Now... I could go in a lot of directions with this. Nine out of ten of

them will just sound nuts (which I don't know why I'd bother to worry about

now, after having said all of that!). But, here's what I'm thinking right

now. Having typed it all out and looked at it as a whole, I have one

overriding impression of what happened. Not of what happened that I had the

experience at all, that's a whole other area of speculation, but of why I

suddenly, instantly stopped believing it. It really, really, really seems

like a kind of safety mechanism... It could just be our heavily

indoctrinated modern minds, trained not to believe anything spectacular,

asserting themselves and saying that we imagined the whole thing. That

would be what I believed, hands down, if it weren't for the incredible

suddenness with which it happened this time. With that suddenness, though,

that feeling of a wall slamming down in front of my train of though, it was

like I was thinking stuff I wasn't supposed to be. Like I had stepped a

little too close to something, some realization I wasn't supposed to have.

Does that make sense? I'm not making any guesses as to why... I'm certainly

not saying anything specific, like "Aliens control our brains and don't want

us to know!" (that's just a joke, by the way, not a real consideration)

Nuh-uh... Maybe it's just our subconscious protecting us from something that

might seriously interfere with our sanity, or at least with our

much-beloved, regulated, easily-comprehensible daily lives. Maybe that

sense I had that I'd done it before, maybe deja vu as a whole, speaks

volumes about the way the universe works, about how time works. Or maybe

just about the potential power of the mind. I have no idea... really, all

it can be is interesting to speculate about. Like I said, I'm not making

aaaaannny claims to know about what any of it might mean. But I do have a

definite sense of being stopped, by myself, from believing it any further.

Interesting, huh? :)

Man... if you thought that was confusing to read, you should try writing it

coherently! My brain hurts...