Getting Stuck In Déjà Vu

it started when I was young I would feel a weird sense that I had already experienced what I was experiencing I would go somewhere or see something for the first time and recognize it like I had been there or seen it before the first time it happened it scared me so badly I cried to my mother and asked her why everything felt so weird she told me that it was normal that it was a thing called deja vu and I didn't need to worry about it at that age I basically believed anything my parents said and even though it still scared me I trusted her of course when my mom told me it was deja vu she didn't actually know what it was or why it was so called normal no one did deja vu was a phenomenon of the brain that science didn't really understand and beyond that no one else could have ever been in my head to really understand or know what I was truly experiencing as I grew older into my teenage years it became even more intense and increasingly difficult to ignore a trigger be it a visual or an odor or a thought or an emotion or everything all at once would seem to cause the gears of everything to stop turning and it would feel as though time stopped and I became stuck in a moment whenever this happened it almost seemed as if I could see things around me in time the same way I could see things around me in physical space It was as if to my left was the past and to my right was the future and the present was exactly and only where my body was I tried to just rationalize it away convincing myself it was just some strange normal thing but when I explained it to my friends and family they didn't really understand they said that they all had their own unusual experiences of deja vu but none of them shared what I described this kind of scared me but it quickly became one of those things that was easier to deal with by not dealing with it so I didn't then when I was around 19 or 20 I was sitting at the kitchen table in my parents house I was eating soup and watching TV when a deja vu hit me a sense that I had already watched the episode of the show I was watching which I certainly had not paired with the sense that my brother and father were about to walk into the house from the side door then in the next moment they did I told my brother and father what happened as they settled into the kitchen we agreed it was just a strange coincidence and laughed it off together it terrified me though and I couldn't sleep the next couple nights then it kept happening I would have the sense that I already experienced what I was about to experience and sometimes it would seem to come true along with myself my parents and friends became incapable of ignoring it my parents in fact were rather disturbed by it and we decided it was time to talk to a doctor to the best of my abilities I explained to my doctor what was happening she essentially had no clue what was going on beyond just general theories of deja vu which were of course inconclusive and of no help she found my situation to be exceptionally abnormal deja vu was common she said but the intensity and frequency of my experience were concerning ly unusual by her understanding she decided it would be best if I saw a neurologist after a period of tests evaluations brain scans and so on the neurologists found nothing wrong with my brain and also struggled to diagnose me beyond just an unusual case of deja vu however he predicted that I might have some sort of temporal lobe damage and was experiencing seizures during the episodes of deja vu he referred me to an epileptologist a doctor specializing in epileptic seizures I explained to the epileptologists what I explained to everyone that when it came on I felt like my relationship with time didn't exist not so much that time didn't exist but more like time and I broke up for a few moments I explained that during these moments it sometimes seemed like I knew what someone was about to say a few seconds before they said it or what commercial was about to come on TV next or if someone was going to enter a room and that sometimes it actually seemed to happen after more tests and evaluations he basically confirmed what the neurologist predicted and surmised that I was having many seizures which were inciting vivid hallucinatory deja Vu's and causing me to see and connect things that weren't actually real he said that the seizures were causing a flurry of neurons to fire all at once throughout my brain causing my conscious understanding of things and unconscious processing of things to get mixed up and fall out of sync in other words I was perceiving things that weren't happening in the way or order that they were actually happening the sense that something had already happened or was going to happen was a result of my perceptual experience occurring earlier or later that my conscious comprehension this made a lot of sense and was a huge relief however the epileptologist went on and said that there was nothing showing any evidence of damage or alteration to my brain on the EEG CT or MRI brain scans but said that this didn't rule out the diagnosis and that normal brain scan readings didn't necessarily mean I had a normal brain and that the problem was likely just not physically manifesting itself I wanted more than anything to believe him but I got the sense that even though he was an expert he wasn't really sure and when I asked how that would explain the fact that when I would tell someone else that something was about to happen and they would confirm my prediction when it did he didn't really have an answer and just brushed it off as coincidence or a part of the whole mental disorientation of the seizure I hope that he was right but struggled to fully believe he was and despite how similar they might seem hoping and believing are two completely different things in response to the diagnosis the epileptologists prescribed me dilantin an anti epileptic medication as well as lexapro an anti-anxiety medication the epileptic medication didn't stop the episodes from occurring and the anxiety medication made me nauseous and numb after about a month of waiting and hoping the anti epileptic medication will begin to work it never did the doctor began to discuss some alternative methods and the possibility of some procedures that might help however the problem was we had to determine exactly what and where something was wrong in my brain before we could procedurally correct it while I continued tests and evaluations the deja vu episodes continued they seemed to get even more intense and weren't merely brief momentary sensations anymore but prolonged episodes in which I became nearly incapacitated then one day when I was at work everything broke it was as if something had been building up inside me and once it became sufficiently heavy enough it cracked the surface of everything it felt like I could see behind the curtains of reality and saw all the things that went into creating the show but would never otherwise see as a part of the audience I saw the choreography of all the particles dancing in and out of nothing I heard the music of all the quarks and electrons vibrating in the background of every object I saw the mask of time in the set design of space I saw the reason for the chaos and the meaning of the meaninglessness I saw the spotlight of existence isolated on one small spot center stage and the darkness of oblivion just one small step behind it then I saw my whole life all at once like if each frame of a movie were laid out on a table and you could see the first and last with a slight adjustment of the eyes and just like how a series of movie frames is only experienced as a movie in time by playing it through a projector or DVD player or file player and so on I saw that I was the projector DVD player and file player of my life and that the whole thing was already there just like how a full movie is always on the film reel DVD disc or file no matter what part of it you are watching it was a strange ineffable flurry of what I can only describe as rapidly fast-forwarding and rewinding everything in my life and just like watching a movie fast forwarded or rewound at 6x speed it was blurring and hard to process but I could catch the main ideas of scenes as my unconscious mind worked to fill in the blanks then suddenly I found myself at the end and at the end I saw the end of everything not merely the end of my life but the end of everyone's I saw the earth moving towards the Sun or the Sun towards the earth I saw the world burning as it degraded into some sort of chaos I saw that all of humanity was during my lifetime going to die in a catastrophe of some random cosmic circumstance then as if the director of the show realized its mistake the curtains pulled back to their proper place and I came back to into the most overwhelming state of panic disorientation and paranoia it took me about a week to even begin to recover and frankly I never recovered at all I worked so hard to rationalize the experience to convince myself it was a dream or a psychotic episode or literally anything else after I finally built up enough stamina I told my parents and girlfriend and doctor about it I went through another round of brain scans and tests and still nothing wrong was found the doctor essentially concluded the same original diagnosis and he and my parents worked it convinced me that it was just a severe epileptic episode and was not real in the way that I felt it to be I was incapable of fully coming to terms with this I wasn't sure what happened or what was real but I struggled to ignore the possibility of what it was or could have been it's hard to see or feel something and be convinced by someone else that you didn't just because they didn't how could anyone else know what I experienced inside my head without having been there themselves and how could anyone else actually know whether or not I was experiencing something real even if it was an epileptic episode I wondered if that was actually more real than my normal sense of real what if everything that was real day-to-day was only real according to conditions of my normal mind but during these moments of all my brain neurons firing at once I experienced what was actually real the conditions of reality outside of myself without all the filters and lenses and perceptual parameters my brain worked to hold up in every other moment I tried talking this through with my parents and girlfriend and then the next time I saw my doctor he increased my medication referred me to a psychologist and began to seriously consider the implementation of an electronic brain stimulator to counter abnormal brain activity I spent some amount of the following year or so trying to talk with officials and scientists and cosmologists and whoever else might be able to look into the possibility of issues with the Sun or celestial patterns or any other potential signs of problems no one took me seriously I seemed crazy and I knew it I gave up and receded into isolation the biggest problem was that in the moments of the deja Vu's or premonitions or whatever it was even if it seemed like I could tell that something was going to happen I never knew exactly when or if I was right there were no dates or certainties in the world of deja Vu's and premonitions and so I lived in fear not only about whether my premonition of the world's end was true but when it might occur if it was as I got older I continued to experience intense deja vu and permanent ory breaches of everything like that first one they were all essentially the same and despite their continuation nothing physically wrong was ever found in my brain far worse and more terrifying some of the senses and visuals I had during them began to come true and my life appeared to in fact be relatively synced up with whatever it was I began to realize more and more that it was likely something beyond seizures in this I started to feel the imminence of the end of the world as if it was already there an inescapable cycle between sadness for what would soon be lost and an anxiety about when my relationship with my girlfriend fell apart as I found myself struggling to love her with the knowledge that I would lose her with the rest of the world knowing that everything was going to end made everything slippery and transient and possible to commit to or care about I stopped caring about my job and my goals and my aspirations I couldn't find motivation to do much of anything knowing that whatever I did whoever I cared about and whatever I became interested in lose the dysphoria between me and the rest of the world further isolated and saddened me everyone was going about everything as normal chasing things attaching the stuff committing to stuff trying to solve stuff taking everything so seriously but no one knew or cared to know that it was all about to end forever I exerted whatever efforts I had towards trying to master the DejaVu and premonition experience now that I found myself recurringly sensing what was going to happen in the future I found myself desperate to try to do something about it I thought that if I could slow down or control the deja vu premonition experience I could find a solution to the impending end of everything and escape it nothing worked then many years later it began to happen a massive rogue planet floated into our solar system destabilized Earth's orbit and pushed us towards the Sun I was right or whatever the premonition was was right as scientists began to understand what was happening experts predicted about two to three months before a collision with the Sun if we didn't collide with Venus or mercury first the earth had about two to three weeks before everything was so hot the surface would melt this was initially faced with worldwide denial and skepticism then as the size of the Sun began to increase the world slowly began to realize the doom of the entire species in its entire heritage of species the closing chapter the final scene with no credits this realization was followed by mass hysteria and chaos the leaders of the world broke down mass suicides pillaging and far far worse when this happened and my final premonition came true I was 87 years old just nine years under the life expectancy of my generation I essentially had lived a full life at least in terms of years in the approaching final moments as the light increased in the darkness approached I sat alone in the chair on my porch and watched the Sun grow I drank whiskey as I reflected on how unfathomably real yet science fiction the situation was in this moment I realized that the whole time I knew that the world was going to end and I had a choice that came with that awareness I had the choice to live in spite of my foresight or live in fear of it and I chose the wrong one how foolish was I to know that the world would soon end and I didn't spend every possible moment and raptured by it and incomplete the light over the that it had not yet I essentially wasted my whole life worrying about whether or not I would live a full life which caused me to live a very shallow one the true catastrophe wasn't the end of the world but how I lived before it ended I was in the most ironic way possible sad about losing the world and not being alive while I was alive and the world was still there like never wearing your favorite pair of shoes because you're afraid you're going to get them dirty I ruined the thing that I feared losing with the fear of losing it and then just like I knew I would the whole time I lost it [Music] you

Channel: Pursuit of Wonder

Views: 1,142,493

Keywords: Déjà Vu, deja vu, what is deja vu, why do I get deja vu, the mystery of, consciousness, mind, brain, universe, story, short story, film, animation, pursuit of wonder, exurb1a, and then we'll be ok, philosophy, science, shots of awe, school of life, vsauce, wonder, time, David foster Wallace, ted ed, thought experiment, happy, happiness, sad, why, how to, what happens when

Id: xPkfKIV1zj8

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 29 2019