Déjà Vu

 Ghosts and spirits scare me. And I’m terrified of snakes. But what really freezes me right down to the guts are unexplained things. It is a human tendency to be scared of things you can never really understand.

Déjà vu or ‘paramnesia’, meaning ‘near memory’ is one of them. Enlightening you on the term, déjà vu refers to a sequence of events or incidents you feel has happened to you before, but which you are actually experiencing for the first time. It leaves you feeling weird and the situation eerie. Many scientists and psychologists have tried explaining the term before, but there is no certain proof as to why this happens. Science claims you might have subconsciously travelled to the place or imagined an event happening. And when it really happens, your mind which is constantly trying to make you comfortable in a certain phase of time and aids you in recognizing people and places, suddenly strikes a bell. It puts two and two together, and lo! You get the shock your life looking at a person you are meeting for the first time while seeing a rerun of the incidents that have happened at a previous time in your head. And if you consciously try and see what’s next your head, it most often does not happen. (Read again!)

But what is really dangerous is sometimes you imagine that those things have already happened and you imitate them in the present. I recall an incident. I was cutting vegetables and suddenly I felt I had seen this before, all this… the same movie was playing on the television, I was sprawled on the floor in the exact position, and I was still coordinating things in my head, when I saw my finger getting cut due to the sudden shrill of the doorbell. Then the doorbell actually rang, but I was expecting it and so did not actually cut my finger. But still subconsciously (that’s how I explain it), to my horror I saw myself cutting my finger for real, for no reason at all. I perhaps remember this one incident because I cut my finger.

Some also say it’s a warning to what will happen in the future, most often remnants from your dreams. A precognition. It could be. But it is risky to try and know what will happen in your head next and save yourself from it, because in the process you are reading two time frames simultaneously which will wreck any chance of you being able to avert a danger for real.

These incidents are not uncommon. They happen to most of us at some point of time, for some very frequently. But we generally have very less memory of them later. And it is best to forget them and move on with life. The only thing you should do consciously is that when you get a taste of déjà vu, close it in your head immediately and get back to the real life.

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