Updated May 16, 2010. Interesting related link at the end to a Philip K. Dick video.
A deja vu, as most probably know, is a strange physical sensation that you’re experiencing something you’ve already done before. Not just that you’ve done something similar…but that you’re actually repeating yourself in the same exact way. The sensation usually appears out of nowhere, last for several seconds or longer, and then fades out again.
Thanks to the 1999 movie “The Matrix,” many people now jokingly (or seriously…) think of deja vus as something being changed in the program of reality. Mainstream science would have us believe that deja vus are nothing more than a meaningless and explainable biological phenomena centered in the brain, with no known reason for why or how they happen. And at one point in my life I would have accepted the scientific explanation and dismissed the idea of deja vus having some special “woo woo!” meaning behind them. Not anymore!
Rather than write out an explanation of why I no longer accept the mainstream scientific explanation for them, I’ll just let my log book do the talking. Below are excerpts of some of the more notable and outstanding instances of deja vus that have happened to me over the past few years, followed by some theories as to what it all means…
March, 2002
I was working at _____ Restaurant, (waitress, Florida) and was in the kitchen in the middle of the dinner rush, making a salad at the salad bar. Suddenly I knew that I was going to have a deja vu. I even paused what I was doing and waited for it (!) like, okay, where is it……come on……THERE WE GO!!!!!!!!!! And when it hit, it REALLY hit. It was THE strongest most crazy deja vu I’ve ever had, ever. Just insane. Plus, the fact that I had a premonition about it beforehand was amazing, and has never happened before.
November 12, 2002
Tom, Rob, Mike and I were all hanging out, and found ourselves at the Coral Ridge mall. (Fort Lauderdale, Florida.) We were talking about getting something to eat. Mike had suggested Denny’s earlier, and I remembered that I had all these coupons for Denny’s, courtesy of Ryan at work. Ryan had given them to me two weeks earlier, and I’d been holding on to them. These were really good coupons too, for like free meals and half off the ticket, and all that. Free food, basically. Pretty tempting. We started considering going back to my apartment to get the coupons, when suddenly, Tom had a MAJOR, MAJOR deja vu, probably his strongest ever. It went above and beyond any normal deja vu, because not only did he have the feeling that we’d been there before, having that same conversation, but, he actually saw everything that came after……which technically had yet to even happen. He actually saw us all driving back to my apartment, in his car, sitting at red lights in traffic, then getting the coupons, and pausing to hang out for a bit, playing with my cat and talking. I’ve never heard of that, where the deja vu memory continues, and you have the entire memory of what has yet to occur. So, starting off as a deja vu, then turning into a premonition, basically.
Well, because of that, I became suspicious and said, You know what, let’s forget Denny’s why don’t we? Besides, I don’t feel like driving ALL the way back home, just to get some coupons, when we can just go to IHOP instead, which is right down the road. IHOP has better food anyway. ;) AND, factor in the weird lightning storm that was going on outside, out of nowhere, on the same day that all four of us just so happen to come together to hang out in the same place, and this entire thing is MAJORLY suspicious. So, you know what, forget it. We’re not goin’ to Denny’s, we decided. And we didn’t.
January 16, 2003
Minor deja vu while talking to Tom on the phone. Then shortly afterwards I had an ear ringing in my right ear. This is an interesting one because this is the night we came THIS close to breaking up. Up until this point there were things going unsaid, and this night was when it all came out. And coincidentally, I get an ear ringing, AND a deja vu during this conversation?? !
Friday, March 21, 2003
1:05 — 1:10 a.m. approx.
Was talking on the phone to Tom when I had a deja vu out of nowhere. It was a weird one. Something involving a t.v. screen and something I was watching on t.v. on September 11th……?? So I could directly remember the exact date of when this deja vu connected to. It wasn’t a normal deja vu where I thought I’d had this conversation before. Instead, it was a deja vu that didn’t have anything to do with the conversation we were having, but rather, involved that particular moment somehow connecting to September 11th. I’ve never heard of that, but, it could definitely be an indicator of a timeloop, that’s for sure, of merging realities.
(HAVING A DEJA VU RIGHT NOW AS I TYPE THIS – March 30, 2003.)
April 18, 2003 — Friday
Deja vu when I got home. Parked my car next to some van that was there for my neighbor, a vendor or repair man or delivery guy or something. I got out, and had a strong, short, deja vu. I know logically that this incident hasn’t happened before, that was the first time I came home to find that van and that delivery guy there. But yet I also knew that this had happened before.
If anything, the deja vu may have had something to do with the fact that on the way home, I was faced with a “fork in the road” decision moment, however small, anyway. I was exiting onto the 441 heading home, and had to decide whether to go to the bank to cash my check, or just go to the post office then home. I opted to just go to the post office and home, didn’t feel like standing in line at the bank. Maybe that decision was a timeline altering one?? Who knows.
Monday January 5, 2004
11:53 p.m.
Had a deja vu simultaneously with an ear ringing in my right ear.
And people believe that deja vus mean nothing, or else are just natural occurrences of the brain. ;)
Thursday February 5, 2004
Two mini deja vu things at night while we were sitting at the kitchen table finishing up our food and talking. The first happened at about 7:30 or so. The second happened at…
7:39.
In the ear ringing log there are two separate incidents of me getting ear ringings in my left ear at exactly 7:39. One a.m., one p.m., with the a.m. one coinciding with a helicopter flying right overhead. Now I got a deja vu at that time.
NOTE: Tom’s had deja vus here and there all week as well, so it’s not just me.
Monday, April 12, 2004
12:44 a.m. and 2:30 a.m.
De ja vus in the middle of ear ringings (?!?!?)
Ear ringing, right ear, faint, high tone at 12:44 a.m.
Another strange one, in my right ear at 2:30 a.m. exactly on the nose. Had a deja vu in the middle of both ear ringings. On a side note, there was also a storm that night which originated in Naples, while we were over on that side of Florida visiting this guy named Cameron. The storm followed us back to Ft. Lauderdale.
Monday and Tuesday, April 26 — 27, 2004
“Parallel Universes”
Deja vu on 4/26 while at Whole Food Market at about 9 p.m.
Deja vu when typing on the computer at home on 4/27 at about 7:30 p.m.
THEN…Tom and I were hanging out talking after my first de ja vu, and I mentioned that I had come up with a great idea for a thread topic (for the message board he runs) while I was at lunch today, but now, I can’t remember what it was. Completely forgot it, poof, gone. And it bothered me because I knew it was a cool idea. So then a little while later when we were talking, he tells me that he’s getting a deja vu, which lasted for a few seconds. I say, “Oh my god!” kind of kidding around, like, Wow!! Whoa!!! Cool. When I said that, he responded with, “Okay, now it’s over. I know you didn’t say THAT in a parallel universe.” A little humor about deja vus being related to timeline munipulation.
But that’s exactly what my idea was at lunch. A thread about parallel universes/alternate timelines. That exact phrase. And I wouldn’t have remembered it had he not had his deja vu.
But that was a first…a deja vu resulting in a specific phrase that connects synchronistically to something I had thought about earlier in the day. And the subject I’d forgotten about relating to a deja vu itself.
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
Had a REALLY strong deja vu this afternoon while walking back to work from Aspen ice cream. It stopped me in my tracks right there on the sidewalk as I looked around, curiously. Then it slowly faded out, and I continued on my way. This deja vu was the day before we left the state. Obviously tied into that. [NOTE: Hurricane Frances was offshore at this time, and we were in the process of getting ready to leave the state, which we did. We didn’t just evacuate, we actually full on left the state and moved to Virginia, so this was a HUGE transitionary period in our lives, and it makes sense that I would experience such a strong and intense deja vu the day before we moved. There was also other weirdness going on all week leading up to our leaving.]
November 8, 2004
Seemed to have a de ja vu while making a post to the Goro forum (it was a post concerning combining all the theories of Creationism, Darwinism and Intelligent Design…) It was also my 33rd post there, and after I posted and went back in later to re-read it, I was the 141st viewer for that particular thread. The deja vu lasted for awhile, and everything about what I was doing looked like I’d “done it before” …sitting at the computer in the late morning, cloudy and cold outside, the lighting, and what I was writing about as well.
July 19, 2005
Minor, but noticeable deja vu while at my (brief) temp job for _____. Turned out to be my last day there. I voluntarily gave up the assignment because it didn’t feel right and it wasn’t work I wanted to do. I wondered if the deja vu had to do with that or not. It could be a major fork in the road moment I suppose, whether I keep the job or go for something else and go down a different path. [NOTE: It was DEFINITELY a major fork in the road moment. I threw away this job and wound up getting an assignment that was literally, a million times better and was exactly where I needed to be at that time, teaching me all kinds of nifty tips and tricks that I would later use to generate my book. I wasn’t supposed to be at the other assignment.]
November 15, 2005
Deja vu “Time loop memory”
“Deja vu” while training at my new temp job….although this was something above and beyond. It was an actual memory of having played through the current scene before, but now the memory, the experience, was “plowed under,” or “over written” if you well….yet fragments were still there. Deja vus create that weird “sensation” in the mind……this had no sensation. It was a fragment of a real memory.
I was sitting at the receptionist desk, training, and while gazing off into the air in front of me I could feel the memory of doing this entire scene before already. It was on the tip of my brain, just far enough away that I couldn’t fully pull it up. I felt like I could remember the memory…just couldn’t fully access it. Again, no weird “deja vu sensation” accompanied it, it was just an actual tangible memory that wanted to fully emerge but couldn’t. Plowed under. Over written. I could only glimpse one tiny fragment…..enough to know that this scene had already existed before, and I was doing it again.
This whole month has been weird in general, and the idea of “time loops” has been a BIG theme, with a few people we know. So I’m thinking that one major possibility for this particular deja vu involves time loops. A lot of people don’t have any sort of knowledge or experience with the idea of “higher schtuff” playing around with our timeline, inserting things in, changing things around….over writing with a new version of events….but in my opinion it’s a very real thing. It’s a “timeline tug of war” you could say, and it’s been going on for thousands of years. I believe it only because I’ve seen my own personal proof for it, and not just with “deja vus.”
July 19-21, 2006
Both Tom and I were getting deja vus off and on for this three day time period. Then on July 21st I narrowly dodged, via some “outside help,” being in a car accident with a car that ran its very red light and which would have T-boned my driver’s side. Not only would my car have been wrecked, but I would probably have been hurt. The other car wasn’t going terribly fast….but fast enough to do some damage, that’s for sure. There’s more surrounding this incident, much more, and it’s multi-layered, since Friday July 21st was the weekend before I was going to upload my book to Lulu Press and make it available for purchase on my website in hardcopy form…including new, very important material that hadn’t been in the intital electronic free PDF version. Then this “accident” attempted to happen just prior to this, preluded by a number of deja vus between both Tom and I? hmm. ;) Further says to me that deja vus are about timeline alteration. In this instance, it’s an event that would have affected him as well, hence, his deja vus at the same time.
Those are the highlights, the best of the best and weirdest and a sampling of the different types of deja vus. They illustrate that for me at least, deja vus are not natural, meaningless and random occurrences.
So, what are deja vus then?
Letting the above log entries speak for themselves, we find several repeating underlying themes happening:
“Fork in the road” moments of choices and decisions being made are definitely one major component behind the meaning of deja vus. A fork in the road is really a timeline split – things are branching, parallel timelines are forming. So in “The Matrix”, when Trinity explains that deja vus mean “they changed something” in the program, in a way, it’s actually a bit accurate. Something is changing, or the probability is sky high that it’s about to at any second, and the future timeline is literally, hanging in the balance.
Connected to this are the premonitions connected to deja vus, indictating timeloops. How many times have we looped through an event that we can now “remember” that the deja vu is about to hit, (as with my March 2002 “Super Deja Vu”) or remember what happens after the deja vu (as with Tom’s November 12, 2002 occurrence) ? Or even worse…my November 15, 2005 deja vu memory of the scene unfolding before me, where the recollection was on the tip of my brain. Like it had been plowed under, or rewritten over. There’s a scary thought, if that’s indeed what’s happening. This particular aspect of deja vus interests me the most.
There are theories that our lives are actually a series of time loops; we repeatedly cycle through these loops until the choices we make can break us out of them. When we’re in a loop, we experience the deja vu, or the sensation of having done this all before…because we actually have. We “move forward” and break out after we do something “right” I guess…until we hit the next timeloop snag. ! So breaking out of a timeloop is actually creating a new and branching timeline, as one moves forward in life.
Based on this theory we wouldn’t remember all the times we cycle through a loop over and over again — we only remember the final version, much like editing a Word document 100 times. The reader only sees the final version, not the 100 draft versions that came and went before.
I’d be inclined to think this version of reality was a bit, um, far fetched, except how else can I explain knowing and expecting and waiting for the one Super Deja Vu while at work before it even happened?? I put my salad plate down, looking around for it…literally bracing myself, because I knew it was going to be a doozy. Kind of like I’d been through it so many times by that point that I knew the drill. A little weird, if you ask me. And highly indicative of a reality that was on repeat mode for some reason.
Then we have deja vus happening either at the exact moment of ear ringings and number sightings , or else clustered closely around these phenomenon. Since ear ringings for me have to do with monitoring and abductions, to have a deja vu coinciding with one, or centered around “my numbers”, is indicative of manipulation and interference by something that’s trying to meddle in my life and steer me onto an undesirable future path. So, in that regard, it’s an artificially created timeline split.
So at the core, deja vus seem to be all about…timelines and timeloops. Whether branching naturally or via negative meddling influences, or being caught in a repeating time loop, at the core, it seems to be all about time lines.
I’ve heard that science can duplicate the sensation of a deja vu by stimulating the temporal lobe of the brain – temporal = of or pertaining to time. However, a brain surgeon can also poke your brain in various spots and make you smell smells that aren’t actually there, like coffee, or flowers, or burning fireplace logs. So does it mean that every time you smell something burning then someone is poking your brain with a scalpel? Nope. Same logic applies with a deja vu. They may be able to artificially recreate the sensation, but it doesn’t negate the validity of it when it happens for real. It just means that for whatever reason, when “stuff” happens on the timeline, and things are shifting and changing, and we’re breaking out of a time loop, etc., that it creates a tangible physical sensation with an actual corresponding source location in the temporal/“time” area of the brain, which scientists have been able to pinpoint.
So if deja vus are a regular occurrence for you, then same as everything else, I recommend keeping a trusty log book to document your experiences. Nothing works better than a log book to get to the bottom of what something means for you personally.
Recommended link:
Philip K. Dick reveals the existence of the ‘matrix’ back in 1977. At the end he gets into deja vus, and their role in branching timelines/worlds and the program being overwritten. We’d independently come to the same conclusion ourselves, based on what our own personal experiences seemed to be indicating (thanks to logging things and paying close attention) having no idea that PKD had already figured all this out decades before. !!
© 2006-2015
Carissa Conti