Here we are again

I’m going to talk about Mushi-shi again, but don’t worry… you haven’t traveled back in time to yesterday because you are caught in a Groundhog Day loop. I am only going to use it as a jumping off point.

I just watched an episode of Mushi-shi that was all about a man who couldn’t understand why the smell of flowers at night always made him anxious, and who often felt like he had forgotten something extremely important. He also often felt like he had done things before, been at that exact moment of time before, even if that was impossible.

Turns out, he was the victim of a mushi that bends time into a loop[1]. Every time he reached the moment when he went into a cave that was the mushi’s lair, he went back to the beginning of the loop, way back into his childhood. Once Ginko told him this, he was able to remember not to go into the cave, and experienced the joy of truly new days.

But then his wife fell off a cliff and was gravely injured. He knew he could not get her to a doctor in time to save her life. So he took her through the cave with him, so that they both could live again. [2]

This episode really hit me where I live, because I have suffered from both deja vu and the deep and terrible feeling that I have forgotten something extremely important for my whole life.

Were I inclined towards mysticism, I would think that this means I have some sort of special relationship with time. Like I am caught in a time loop, or I have some kind of precognitive powers that only work in retrospect, or some such thing.

And truth be told, that’s exactly how it feels. When I get one of my intense rushes of deja vu, the sensation is overwhelming and extremely powerful. It really seems like, for a moment, I was suspended in time and that time was going to loop back on itself from that point forward.

It used to terrify me. Who wants to live the same time over again, like in Vonnegut’s Timequake? I suffered from the same fear that Mad King George III did in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, that time was going to start flowing backwards.

Luckily, I am over that now. Or at the very least, I have control over it, which is half a victory at least when it comes to battling a phobia.

Now this deja vu feeling was never a huge problem in my life. The attacks were extremely intense but infrequent. They stick out in my mind because they are the sort of full-mind transcendental experience that leads others to religion, and they probably contribute substantially to my feeling that I’m not really here and the world isn’t really real, but other than that, it’s never been a huge problem in my life.

But I wonder about it. What causes these highly unique and rather frightening mental events? I have read some theories about the causes of deja view, ranging from “harmless mental hiccup” to “sign you’re about to have a seizure”, and various brain regions have been fingered as the place where deja vu happens.

But I have yet to find a truly satisfactory answer, and I suspect that is because the answer I seek is not found in science, but in the depths of my mind. The truth is that any experience of transcendental intensity is going to be flagged in our minds as really, really important, and then we are left with the unenviable task of trying to make sense of it.

This is how religion works, by the way. Telling someone who has had a very intense transcendental feeling of connection to God that God does not exist is futile. They will laugh in your face. The experience is too important to have been caused by nothing. God must exist, otherwise where did that feeling come from?

And that conviction is far more powerful than reason. To them, you are standing under a blue sky trying to prove with science that the sky is green. It doesn’t matter what your facts, figures, and arguments say. You must be wrong. Compared to the personal experience of religion, all else is sophistry and trickery.

So I guess that means that my deja vu attacks are the closest I have come to a religious experience. Perhaps that is why they scared me so. Without any context for the experiences, there can be no meaning to them, and the human mind inherently resists the idea that emotionally intense experiences are meaningless.

Hence, all I could do with the experiences was fear them as we fear anything else we can’t explain. In the context of traditional science and reason, deja vu experiences are meaningless fluctuations in brain activity.

The closest I can come to explaining them is that it really feels like something build up in my mind that, if not expressed another way, will express itself as an attack of deja vu. Like an electric potential builds up, and then discharges all at once as the intense experience of deja vu.

That is a little better than meaning brain hiccup, but not by much. Perhaps one of the perils of a reason-bound mind is that you are simply incapable of processing intense experiences like the ones I have had via deja vu.

As for the feeling that I have forgotten something terribly important, that simply comes from experiencing my own forgetfulness time and time again. That’s not an irrational feeling. Often, it’s completely accurate.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. They never explain why, though. What does the mushi get out of bending time? Eh, whatever.
  2. Frustratingly, the story ends before we can find out if he saves his wife’s life this time through. For me, that was the whole point of going back : so that this time, he could keep her from falling off the cliff. But apparently, that was not the point according to the writer of the episode. Maybe I am being too Western about it.

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