As much as I would enjoy taking the credit for proving the existence of magic - it isn’t really my concern. I have little issue with people who do not think magic exists, refuse to play with magic, or need to discount it for their own self preservation. I know it exists and figuring out its nuance and learning to balance it within normal society is my goal. As mentioned in my previous post I put deja vu into the category of magic because there isn’t any external measurable quantities or factors that can help describe deja vu, but the fact that it is regularly accepted as an experience by all makes it a phenomenon.
The experience of deja vu always felt like a memory to me. A feeling like I was remembering a dream I had experienced. When I was younger it felt much more disorienting and less so as I’ve gotten older (more on that later). As a youth I wanted to believe it was a dream and that I was reliving my dreamworld in reality. It also astonished, frustrated, flabbergasted, and mystified me that something so powerful was unexplainable. I didn’t intend to set out to define it or figure it out but I was always intrigued. It got to the point that when it happened I would stop what I was doing and just listen to my intuition and try and decipher the secret it was trying to whisper.
It was 1994 my second year of college at the University of Minnesota. I lived alone in Dinktyown, the small collegeville on the Northeast side of the Mississippi River. I lived on positively 4th Street which 30 years before was also home to Bob Dylan when it was just 4th Street. The positively came later when Bob became Bob. It was a beautiful spacious apartment for just me and my cat Nike. As larger spaces tend to acquire more thins, the apartment required the domesticated upkeep that was lower on my to-do list. On this one particular evening I was cleaning while listening to Thelonious Monk. As I was putting games away and stacking books my eyes caught the game MindTrap that was stashed under the coffee table. I reached for it and the deja vu started and I just sat down and relished in the actual feeling, the buzz of it was like my skin was a harmonic chord of music. The deja vu subsided and I went back to my cleaning.
About six months later I was sitting in the same room with my friend Nate relaxing and watching National Geographic. The phone rang and it was this girl I had met a couple of weeks previous. She was going to stop by with a group of her friends. I yelled to Nate that we needed to rally and clean the whole apartment, girls were coming over! I started shoving things into the closet when my eyes met the same MindTrap game. The deja vu happened again and I felt like for a moment I was looking through my eyes and listening through the ears of myself but at a different time, and because of the game I had a frame of reference.
That’s when it occurred to me. Deja vu feels like we are experiencing our dreams; but actually, what if it is us experiencing ourselves at a different time in our lives. It makes sense, because the moments collide with our consciousness and for a second or two or longer we are experiencing the same moment in two different periods of our lives. The idea of feeling like we have done the moment before is true, we have. The feeling is also unusual because we are still us but we are hanging out with a younger or older set of eyes, ears, smells, feelings, sadness, excitement. We change everyday but we don’t really notice the changes because our frame of reference changes daily as well. But if we get the opportunity to feel the essence of our youth or aged self from the perspective of years apart it would feel weird, yet familiar at the same time - like deja vu.
There are two windows, the first window is when we experience a deja vu episode for the first time and the other side of the window is sometime in the future. I believe now, that the longer the distance between the two windows the stronger and more intense the experience. The youthful first windows are by far the more intense as we are experiencing the older, wiser, more experienced selves and likewise the second window is less intense (hence why we feel it less when we are older or less intensely) since we have been there before, and it’s like putting on an old worn-in catcher’s mitt. The first window is less comfortable which is like the stiffness of fresh leather seeking the oil of experience. Regardless, for a moment in time, two selves of the same person are sharing in a single consciousness moment with a little of both sides seeping through to the other.
I know it sounds crazy or stoney but try it on. It’s magic, there is no way to prove it right or wrong, but if it was the true, then that is pretty darn cool.
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