“Ruminations on Recall” is a biweekly column on memory, and how it’s refracted and warped by the world we live in.
You’ve been in this hallway before. But, not quite. It’s slightly refracted, a shadow of itself this time around. The patterned carpeting is a slightly different shade today, but the dim fluorescent lighting, white wood, and damp smell is the same. Maybe you have been here before. But, no, that can’t be. The hair on the nape of your neck straightens, goosebumps galvanize, a wave of eerie unease shivers down your spine: something’s not right. You must be dreaming. But the hum of the ice machine from around the inevitable corner sounds so real… You don’t know what’s happening. All you know is that you’re extremely unsettled. You want to leave. You blink hard, but you can’t seem to wake up. You have to walk down the hallway. You have to reach the end.
This is déjà vu.
Well, at least this is how it feels for me.
I’ve been walking down refracted hallway after refracted hallway in my mind far more than usual these past few weeks. And these hallways are getting weird, man. I don’t like the frequency with which I have to scamper down the wall-to-wall carpets. I don’t like the feeling of my skin crawling every few hours. I don’t like not knowing why this is happening.
The other week, after escaping another wonky mental motel, I decided I’d had enough. I wanted answers. Not knowing where to start in the slightest, I decided to just chat with some people who inhabit their own creepy hostel hallways. I’ve gathered a thought or two from these conversations.
I’m in the moment of premonition, one friend whispered through a connecting door. It’s a feeling that I’ve dreamt about before, admitted someone else. In a similar vein, another revealed that it blurs the lines between reality and dream. Some crawl through their respective inns: I’m reliving an experience, but I can’t place it. I feel like it didn’t happen to me, but somehow I simultaneously lived it. And others waltz with themselves in their own lodges: I’ve had this exact moment happen before to the point where I can predict what will happen next. And some people are in their own creepy cabins entirely: it’s a straight-up glitch in the Matrix.
Isn’t this so weird? Our brains are programmed to make us feel this collective unease, to make us question our simple reality.
I mean, in a more scientific sense, she says, lisped, pushing her taped glasses up the bridge of her nose, déjà vu is caused by a momentary glitch or delay in how the brain processes information. A dual-processing theory suggests that there could be a slight delay between the brain’s hemispheres receiving sensory information that can make a single event feel like two separate ones, like a memory. A Cognitive Science major friend revealed—and blew my noggin off with—the fact that you can remember something before you even experience it.
It freaks me out, he said. Well, yeah, same. I was freaked before, and I’m even more freaked now.
Ig Nobel Prize winner on this subject Dr. Akira O’Connor mused, I guess that makes sense because if you’re going to feel any kind of unfamiliarity, it’s going to seem the most weird if it’s something that’s super common and familiar to you.
But that’s just one theory. Psychiatrist Carl Jung also popularly theorized in the early 1900s that déjà vu could be related to a collective unconscious: a universal, shared pool of inherited memories.
With my own small sample size of a very non-scientific experiment, I realized that everyone has their own, unique relationship with déjà vu. Sure, none were really in the Jung boat. But at the same time, no two people described their sensations identically. Cog-Sci friend confirmed that we know literally nothing about subjective perception in the brain.
For me, it feels more spatial and tactile than collective.
The other night while I was going on my routine midnight stroll—to release the pent-up energy bottled up from the day before hitting the hay—my phone buzzed in my back pocket. It was a birthday text from a friend. I paused my music, sat down on the ledge of the brick wall behind Pierson, and began to read. After tearily giggling my way through the thoughtful note, I took a breath and stared directly ahead facing The Richmond, a forest green arched doorway numbered 246. Then it hit me in a big way: that oh-so-funny feeling.
Instead of trying to brush off the immediate discomfort and flee the scene, I sat in it, standing still in the hallway. Not attempting to run out the nearest door. Time collapsed. I was in the past, present, and future simultaneously. In this warped reality I tried to identify how I got there. It was the velocity and angle of the quiet wind on my saltily peach-fuzzed cheeks, the positioning of my knees curled into my chest, the faint crickets from across the way, the blocky font of the green “246.”
Everything stops.
One of my friends had extreme difficulty putting into words how she felt, but I poked and prodded at her inability to verbalize the sensation because I knew there was something special underneath. I got to the bottom of her discomfort: it makes me question reality, and then I’m like ‘what is life?’ She giggled—too life-threatening to say with a straight face.
Déjà vu strips us of basic, daily comfort. It takes us out of the driver seat of our own lives, ripping out the one form of consistency we feel from day to day, hour to hour, second to second: time. Then, in those moments, we have to search for something else to ground us. What brings you calmness and gives you purpose when the nature of reality won’t?
That’s what déjà vu is to me. It’s cosmic. It’s a limbo. A hallway. A question. A whisper in the wind: why? why? why?
Did you forget what you meant when you were at your descent?
Why
why
w h y y y y
