Some Radical Theories on the Cause of Deja Vu

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.       

Grant Me the Serenity

We all have memories that are special to us.  Sometimes we wish that we could crawl back into these memories and somehow live inside them all over again, not to change things, but just to be there again, to feel the way the air felt different then, to look into the eyes of someone who has long since slipped away, to really savor and appreciate those moments in a way that was impossible the first time around when we had no idea how fragile and transient they were.  But the wave of time pushes us farther and father away from these memories.  We struggle against the sweep of the wave, straining to reach back and grab a hold of these things.  But the wave says, "No.  We have to keep going."

We've all had our share of regrets.  We turned right when we should have turned left.  We gave in to temptations that we knew we should have resisted, and we eventually had to face the consequences.  We acted on what we knew then, instead of what we know now.  We let opportunities slip through our hands, thinking that another one would be right around the corner.  We've all had moments when we finally realized it was too late to fix a mistake, and we clinched our fists and cursed our inability to undo our own stupidity.  We've all held something priceless in our hands, and we've stumbled and faltered, and before we even knew what had happened, we watched the thing shatter on the ground.  These shattered pieces are the wave of time.  One moment the thing is whole, and in the next it's laying there, broken forever.

But it's not only our own regrets.  We watch as the whole world moves and changes, evolving and transforming beyond our control.  We watch our old elementary school being torn to the ground.  We watch them build a shopping center in it's place.  We watch as stars fade out and things rust and rot away.  We carve our names into a tree, as though preserving it in stone, only to see that same tree chopped down and cut into firewood and then burned away.  We see the people around us passing one by one.  The wave keeps advancing, carry some forward, and leaving some behind.

But the wave sweeps on, and eventually we all succumb to the great equalizer.  Our bodies age and whither, until they're finally broken by the wave, scattered in pieces or laid in the ground.  New life is born in our place, and it grows and changes and undergoes the same processes along the crest of the wave.  Even the sun itself will die out and the galaxies will collide, and all the intricate traces that we've made in the sand will be smoothed out and erased by the relentlessess, unstoppable sweep of the wave.  But another star will be born in it's place, and again the process will go on, on a larger scale, until even all the stars and galaxies themselves are no more.  Eventually the wave will wash the entire slate clean and there will be nothing but darkness and emptiness and vast silence.  Then the universe will collapse in on itself, and maybe the result will be another Big Bang, and rebirth will happen once again on the largest scale of all.  And the wave will press on.

I know that time travel isn't a subject for everyone.  I knew that going into this.  Some people are fascinated by it's puzzles and possibilities, while others see nothing but confusing nonsense.  Nevertheless, I think time itself is something that we all care about.  It is one of the fundamental aspects of our existence.  In some form or another, it is a dimension of nearly every thought we have.  We think of it thousands of times a day, even now as you think of how many times you think of time.  It can seem cruel and relentless.  It can seem like a road of opportunities, waiting ahead.  Perhaps the true power over time comes not in looking for ways to manipulate it or alter its course, but to accept it as it moves us along to the next thing that's just about to happen...now.

(This posts is also available in extra cheesy version and chaos flavor and full-blown neurosis.)