I think it's safe to say that most of us are familiar with the phenomenon of Deja Vu, and have most likely experienced it at one time or another. I've experienced it quite frequently; that unsettling sense that what is happening has already happened before. Now, it seems that no one has a really solid answer on what causes this. Explanations range from an association with another memory that you can't quite recall, to a crossing of the wires between long-term and short memories giving you the false impression that you're remembering your current experience. Some of the explanations are slightly more exotic, involving delays in the processing times between your two eyes, or perhaps a mild epileptic episode. But we want something more, don't we? Uncanny experiences beg for uncanny explanations. So with that in mind, I figured I'd throw around a few more radical possibilities (for entertainment purposes only, of course.)
THE MOBIUS THEORY
Scientists have speculated that The Big Bang may be a re-occurring event. At some point it is believed that the universe will collapse in on itself in something called "The Big Crunch." Possibly this could lead to another Big Bang and the whole cosmic carnival could set up its shops and tents all over again. If this is so, we tend to imagine these cycles as consecutive, one following after the other in time, but what if they are actually concurrent? What if The Big Crunch simply leads right back to the same Big Bang that started it all? Rather than a series of universes, you end up with time just endlessly looping back on itself. If this is the case, the fabric of space-time might be getting warn out and warped in some spots like a cassette tape that's been played over and over. Deja Vu would be our momentary experience of these warps as we pass through them.
THE REPLACEMENT THEORY
Some have speculated that when you die your soul might go to a sort of Purgatory, a limbo-like place which is neither Heaven or Hell, but some kind of vague waiting area in between. It's believed that your soul has to do penance in this place in order to move on. Now, no one has ever been exactly clear on what this "penance" is. Perhaps we have to briefly re-experience certain crucial moments of our lives, moments that might have seemed inconsequential at the time. We have to briefly re-enter our bodies at some point in our lives and subtly nudge ourselves in a slightly different direction that will make all the difference down the line. Our living consciousness, and our afterlife consciousness are momentarily unified and in sync. One slightly spills over into the other. This gives our afterlife consciousness the tenuous ability to affect our actions, while simultaneously giving our living consciousness the disorienting sense that it's remembering what's happening which we call Deja Vu.
THE CONTROL THEORY
How can you truly know that the things that you remember are real? What evidence do you have? Well, you have the fact of the memory itself, and you have the external evidence around you that bears witness to the past. You continually use the one to verify the other. You remember taking the garbage out. You go look out in the can, and its there. So what if there was an agency that could control your life by reprogramming your memories, with say, like a sort of wireless modem in your brain? And what if they had people on the ground that could clean up the details so that it fit these new memories? Everything would fit perfectly, and you'd be none the wiser. Perhaps, though, there is a slight sensation you experience when new memories are being downloaded, or your existing memories are being altered. Your brain has no way of noticing that your memories have been changed because it can't use the old memory as a point of reference, so it misinterprets this sensation as a confused double vision of the current experience called Deja Vu.
...and no, I'm not completely insane.
