October 2, 2006

• Deja Vu

  I go through phases where deja vu happens a lot. It goes away for a long time and then returns sometimes, and sometimes not. Deja vu is almost like the opposite of depression, actually.

  Often I have trouble trying to figure out if it’s meaningful. Like, does it Forwarn Imminent Disaster(tm)? Or does it simply mean my mind is finding patterns deep in memory, and putting them over sensate reality like a template? Does my memory somehow spraypaint a stencil onto what’s coming in through the senses? Or am I touched?

  These kinds of questions used to fascinate me, because they seemed so open-ended and full of Potentially Very Important Realizations. Yes, I’m mocking the concept. Now, I don’t care so much about what they mean in the abstract as much as what they mean in the here-and-now.

  I was looking at Google Earth. There’s an entry on BLDGBLOG which talks about Skara Brae, an archaeological site in the North Sea. The town was buried under sand, and when the sand went away six thousand years later, it popped back into human consciousness. A bit like deja vu.

  Trying to find it on Google Earth, I ended up by accident looking at a section of eastern Europe where there are many, many small forests, separated by croplands. Only, initially, the high-res image hadn’t loaded, and for about ten seconds I thought I was looking at a system of lakes, with a lace-like fabric of land amongst them. More detail came, and it was apparent what my mistake was. However… I had made this exact mistake before in a dream years ago.

  And remembering the dream, it contained the lack of a clear picture, the view from above, the lakes-to-forests-again dynamic, and even the shapes of the forests were the same. But the details such as it being on a computer, or that I was looking at satellite images, or that I’d ‘blog about it… These things were obscured, filled in. It’s as if I was looking only at some parts, and couldn’t yet understand others.

  Does the dream mould to fit reality, or does the present mould to fit the past?

  More mundane memories and their current-moment machinations are subject to this question as well. Who really remembers? Who would want to?

  • 12:34 am
  • 1 Comment