Déjà vu all over again

October 13th, 2023

I thought it funny to start with a title that is a Berra-isms, but after some more thought, I realized that I am doing it again — trying to make it funny when something is a serious thing. I do it habitually when I don't really want to face the seriousness of something that happened to me and instead make a joke or funny quip.

So, let's be serious —

It happened to me again, the pervasive feeling that what I was experiencing in the present had already happened to me before. It was the literary definition of déjà vu. I was at a lecture at a company event on Wednesday, you know — hosted by a celebrity who gets paid a lot of corporate money to talk to office drones about how to succeed in life and how we need to constantly strive for the best in what we do and to appreciate and be thankful for little things in life…

But that is not the point. The point is that soon after he started talking I realized that I had heard and seen it before, down to the smallest details like the stage set up and the sound of his voice and the place I was sitting in. In my mind, I went back to previous events like that in my life and tried to find any sense in what I was sensing. No — there was nothing close to what I was experiencing last Wednesday. I tried to shrug it off but to no avail. Everything there was already known and seen by me previously. But in real life, I realized that I had seen it before in a dream. In some state of fading consciousness right before falling asleep. I had dreamt — months or years ago — about an event that happened two days ago. I am fully sure of that. Now, what to do with this knowledge? Nothing I guess, except to marvel at the human mind and neurons and quarks and string and potential unseen dimensions that apparently are all around us, and sometimes even come (by design or accident) to the forefront of our carnality.