On Deja Vu

By Robert Runté
Excerpted from "Have I Moved Yet?" FAPA Number 215, 1991.

Have I talked about this before?

I am one of those who often has the disquieting feeling that I have already experienced something that I am in fact experiencing for the first time. The intensity and significance of these experiences varies greatly.

At one extreme are the frequent but essentially trivial confusions of familiar actions. For example, I commonly recycle the same jokes in several classes, so it is not entirely unexpected that I occasionally lose track and sometimes feel as if I must have already told this one, when in fact it was to another class earlier in the week. By extension, if a student and I engage in some original piece of repartee, it is reasonable to assume that any sense of déja vu originates in some poorly recalled parallel with some similar incident months or even years before.

Similarly, when I was recently overcome with the feeling that I had already mailed a book to a friend as I was still wrapping it up, this is easily explained as my remembering having seriously thought of doing this chore on several occasions before I actually got around to it. Having repeatedly visualized some action, it is hardly surprising that the actuality should strike one as familiar.

Such incidents are entirely understand-able, and fairly universal. It is therefore tempting to extrapolate some combination of anticipation and remembered parallels to explain all déja vu experiences. Indeed, this is merely another example of the brain's insistence on pattern recognition, though in this case applied to temporal rather than spatial phenomenon. (The ability to timebind events, to recognize repeating cycles over time is, anthropologists tell us, one of our ancestor's chief advantages over competing species.)

At the other extreme, however, are entirely unique acts which nevertheless have very strong memory echoes. When these are associated with strong emotion, as they often are, I am inclined to dismiss the phenomena as some poorly understood subset of the memory process. It seems to me highly probable that traumatic or ecstatic memories might warrant a kind of subconscious ñinstant replayî, which then produces the familiar déja vu. Let us therefore discount this category of the phenomenon.

This still leaves, then, a significant number of events of varying intensity which would appear to be unique but which are neverthe-less accompanied by an overwhelming sense of déja vu. The most interesting of these for me are those that include that most useful of scientific verifications, predictability. If in the midst of a déja vu experience I am able to ñrememberî what comes next, well then, this seems to suggest we are dealing with some phenomenon beyond simple tricks of memory.

Even here, however, I have often been able to subsequently deconstruct the event and come up with plausible explanations that do not require reference to psychic phenomenon. For example, I recall a particularly strong sense of d_jö vu accompanying the viewing of a particular movie premi_re. Since I had obviously not seen the movie before, how could I ñrememberî the actor was about to say what he was just about to say? Well, of course it turned out that the movie was a remake under a new title of some classic from the thirties, which I had no doubt viewed on late night TV (possibly even dozing off half way through) years before and subsequently forgotten. So, no points there.

I am at a loss, however, to explain one pythonesque incident during my first year on campus here in Lethbridge. It was perhaps my most intense déja vu experience to date, and while I have no explanation, I do have a witness. The sequence of events in question has no particular cosmic or personal significance, so I can't see any reason why I should have an overwhelming sense of déja vu associated with it. If my mind is playing tricks on me, I still haven't worked out the joke. What's it mean?

I had flown down to Lethbridge for my initial interview in March of 1991. Much of that day remains a blur, as I was shuffled from one group of interviewers to another until everyone in the faculty had had their chance to chat with me. Having completed nearly eight hours of interviews and presentations, I was hustled over to my hotel to freshen up for supper, which was of course yet another forum in which to interview me.

My mind, therefore, was not entirely on my surroundings, and as the Associate Dean escorted me to the parking lot through the complex of underground tunnels that connects the campus, I was basically lost. Believing strongly in the bread crumb theory of navigation, I managed to make note of some of the murals in the tunnels so that if worst came to worst, I could reorient myself by remembering that the tunnel with the painting of the cows came before the tunnel with the Haida Volkswagon. (This latter is a fairly cool painting, incidentally; a modern car done in the style of totem pole art.)

As it happened, when I returned in August to take up my position, I arrived at the parking lot at the same time as the Associate Dean. Latching onto her, we retraced our steps from the parking lot to University Hall through the series of tunnels. We duly passed the Haida Volkswagon and a number of other murals as the Associate Dean explained how various student groups competed for the right to add their mural to this permanent display. As we turned a corner from one tunnel to the next, I became momentarily disoriented.

ñI thought we went from this tunnelî I said ñto the one with the cow paintingî.

ñCow painting?î asked the Associate Dean. ñI don't remember one with cows.î

ñWell, never mind that, where's the other tunnel then?î

ñThere is no other tunnel. Just these two, connected by this one bend.î She indicated the more or less straight line course from the parking lot to University Hall. ñThat's it. See, straight through here to the main building.î

ñNo cows?î

ñNot that I recall. These are the only corridors the students are allowed to paint.î

Well, fair enough. I had had plenty of other things on my mind, and if I confused a painting of University Hall for a picture of cows, so be it. I thought nothing further of it for nearly eighteen months.

Now, these were no ordinary eighteen months in my life. As recounted above, I was working flat out, and experiencing very high levels of stress; and was also probably suffering varying degrees of sleep deprivation. I was coping by ingesting very large quantities of sugar, fat, and protein, and well, gaining something like 100 lbs. (I'm allergic to coffee as it happens, or no doubt would have had long since overdosed on it as well.) Whether any of these factors figure in the déja vu experience, I couldn't say, but it is fair to say that my brain may well have been experiencing a number of altered states from my slothful norm.

In any event, as I left my office for the parking lot one evening, I passed two young women painting a mural in the first tunnel. Now, there were two notable things about the painting in question: First, they were painting over the existing mural of University Hall. To my knowledge, this is the only occasion in which one of the existing murals was replaced. Second „ well, you saw this coming a long way off „ they were painting in cows. Not just any cows, mind you, but the specific cows I remembered seeing nearly 18 months before they were painted.

The same week, a second group of students started painting a medicine wheel in the second corridor. Well, it's possible I suppose that I had seen similar medicine wheels in my youth, or that the artists were using the same traditional design I didn't quite recall having seen on another occasion, but tell me this „ how did I know that this particular medicine wheel was going to curve around the corner, that the whole circle wasn't going to fit on the one wall? Surely that is not part of the traditional design?

Standing in that corridor, looking at those two remembered pictures as they were being painted, I had an almost dizzying sense of déja vu. Nothing has come close to that intensity before or since. My explanation at the time ( and remember my circumstances) was that I had died, and this was purgatory. Spending eternity trying to finish my dissertation while teaching full time was pretty much my personal vision of hell, so I concluded that I was caught in an unending repetition of the pervious 18 months. That some memory of these paintings from near the end of the cycle should be carried forward into the beginning of the next cycle, seemed perfectly reasonable, given the somewhat hysterical assumption I had become trapped in an infinite number of repetitions of this, my worst nightmare.

Having subsequently graduated, however, this no longer seems an entirely adequate explanation. Life is pretty good right now, and I don't really see what the point would be in having us repeat our whole lives. And even if we were, why would such an unimportant detail like these two paintings be the things I remembered out of everything there is to remember?

So what's the deal with the cows?