How I had déjà vu for 5 hrs. and what I learned

How I had déjà vu for 5 hrs. and what I learned.

Hello Steemers, have you ever experienced déjà vu? I have to a marvelous degree and it got me wondering about the true nature of this experience and what it really means. Now I know science has tried to explain the phenomena as simply brain seizures or synapse flickering causing us to feel like we’re experiencing something that we have before, but I tend to believe that science falls short of explaining away the mystery and magic that we sometimes find in our lives. Just because something can be mapped as a chemical response doesn’t really mean that it has been fully explored and my own experience with déjà vu is not something that I could explain away with a scientific textbook explanation.

I had déjà vu for five hours straight and I’d like to share experience with you.

When I was eight years old I had a series of dreams that lasted over the course of two nights in which I saw a lot of fantastic things that I couldn’t explain but the experience left an intense impression on me, it was something that I couldn’t shake off for days afterwards. Being a kid I was at a loss to try and explain the experience to my grandfather who I was staying with at the time, but I tried nonetheless but words seemed inadequate and course and I remember just giving up and keeping the experience to myself.

Now these dreams were not like regular dreams, they were of a quality more intense and vivid, more visceral than regular dreams and after each dream I awoke with a start with the distinct impression that something important had happened. I recalled the dreams in great detail which was out of the ordinary for me and it was as if I experienced someone else’s life, watching something that I shouldn’t have been seeing, and didn’t really didn’t understand.

I think the fly on the wall would be a good way to describe my position in the dreams as it appeared as though I was looking down upon all the situations that were happening. I’ll tell you what I remember.

I saw a group of strange teenagers wearing interesting clothes in all sorts of random situations, some of their attire was like nothing I’d seen before, like characters out of a cartoon, but most of the action seemed to be centered around “some black guy” as I had named him in my waking hours.

Now this “black guy “was light skinned like me, and he was into some strange situations. I saw him get up and start to walk and then fall on the ground flat and then be helped up by some people that came rushing over, I remember being concerned for him as I than watched as these same people moved him into a bed that I thought might have been in a hospital at first because the bedding and room were all white. They watched over him lovingly as he lay there being taken care of.

I saw this same fellow him travel to a house that had purple carpet and he lay down on the floor and spread out his arms and legs as if he were making a snow angel and the people around him paid him no mind whatsoever, they acted as if there was nothing irregular happening at all. They just all stood around and talked to one another as this guy lay on the ground with arms and legs outstretched and a strange look on his face.

“Why was no one helping him?” I thought, “was he ok?” My young mind couldn’t reconcile the situations.
I then saw this guy meet an Asian fellow and talk with him at great lengths, I could only catch some of what they were speaking about as I was watching the situation from the outside, but even the dialogue that I did hear I didn’t understand as I had no reference points for any of these things that were happening.

These were experiences well beyond my years and I felt as though I were somehow spying on someone else's life but the whole thing felt so real and intense. It wasn’t like other dreams where the details are murky and fantastic things are happening as your moving through a fantasy world, this was not the world of the abstract, this was different, more authentic.

The first night it happened it was certainly a strange experience but then it happened again the next night, a continuation so to speak of the same weird story I began to get both worried and excited. Was this a thing that was going happen now? What was happening to me, why was I seeing these things, and what did they mean? Who were these strange strange people? It wasn’t until years later that I had my answer.

Skip to age 19 and I’m now in the San Francisco Bay are part of the raging rave scene at the time. I’d long since forgotten about those dreams and indeed many of the experiences of my youth and was onto to making some bad decisions with some lovely people. We’d go dancing every weekend and spent all night in warehouses having the time of our lives. It was around this time that I discovered ecstasy and started to take it pretty regularly and one of the experiences while on the drug that I began to have was déjà vu.

At first I thought it was just my imagination, but then it started to happen pretty regularly and intensely when I was under the influence so much so that I began to regard it as a legitimate phenomenon.
Even still the experiences did not last very long, just momentary epiphanies of awareness, nothing spectacular and in my mind nothing too out of the ordinary.

But then one day something happened.

So it turns out one morning I find myself with an excess of ecstasy pills, nothing to do and a fantastic plan to drop and make a day of it. Now I hadn’t tried these pills and I suspected that there might be something off about them just from the way they looked but I was at a stage in my life where I was down for the experimentation and I was home and safe so I thought what the hell. That morning I took a pill waited and nothing happened, I took another pill waited and still nothing, and like a novice I think I took a third and at that point I thought the pills must’ve been fake as hrs. had past and still nothing. Turns out there was just a delayed reaction in my body because as I believe the pills were mixed with something else, my guess was some sort of hallucinogenic like mescaline.

So after what I thought was a failed attempt to trip out I got a call from a friend who wanted me to come by her house so I asked my roommate to drop me off on his way. When I arrived at their house I let myself in and they were still in their bedroom so I just sat on their fold out bed in the living room and a strange feeling started to come over me, those mystery pills started to kick in big-time. Now I’d been high on E plenty of times before and the feeling that was coming on was not like that so I started to freak out a bit plus I didn’t want to have to explain to my friends how I just popped some mystery pills and was now losing my shit so my plan was when they exited their room I would just say I wasn’t feeling well and ask if I could just go lay down in their bed for a bit and try get my bearings while they did whatever. We good friends like that so I knew it wouldn’t have been a big deal.

So once they came out I mumbled something pretty much unintelligible about needing to lie down and they said that was perfectly fine so I stood up and started walking towards the bedroom and that’s when my equilibrium completely left me and I started falling towards the ground. Now it was mid fall that my déjà vu experience began, I was falling in what seemed lie slow motion and had an out of body feeling of both falling and seeing myself fall at the same time. Once I hit the ground my friends rushed to my side surprised and worried and lifted me up and took me to their bedroom which was all white and laid me on the bed with white bedding, it was then that what was happening crystallized for me.

This was the scene when that “weird black guy” fell on the ground and people came rushing over to him and then they picked them up helped him to the bed and stayed by his side making sure he was okay. I was “weird black guy”, and these people that were nursing and helping me were my friends being ever so kind and understanding of my predicament.

So from that point on I had déjà vu for about five hours in which I was experiencing each of the scenes that I had saw when I was eight years old.

After an hour or so once I regained my ability to walk a girlfriend of mine picked me up and took me over to a friend’s house and the whole ride I had experienced before, every conversation I had heard before, every scene I had seen before. When we entered this friend’s house I looked down and I had never really paid much attention to their purple shag carpet. It was 70’s style and lush and thick and felt fantastic and me being on ecstasy and all I thought it would feel great if I just laid right down and sprawl out and made a snow angel on the carpet so that’s what I did. I lay there as my trippy looking raver friends stood around talking without a care in the world. We were dressed in baggy pants and bright colors, all the clothing I found so strange when I viewed it as a child in the 80’s.

Later I knew was going to meet someone new and the Asian fellow from my dream turned out to be a Filipino guy I was introduced to for the first time. I leave his name out as I’m sure he’s an upright outstanding citizen at this point but I knew him before I met him and had watched myself spend time with him. He listened to my story as I tried to explain this and I pretty much sounded like a crazy person talking about how I seen him before when I was a child. He took it all with great stride and grace and was very kind to me. After this I think there was about an hour more of intense déjà vu and then the sensation started to fade.

Now the week following this experience I was pretty shaken up. In my inebriated state I really hadn’t considered the logic of it all but now the reality of my experience was bright and looming. How could I go in a cosmic loop like that? What the hell did it mean? How could I be the seer of something and then the experiencer of that same thing at the same time, but in different times? I felt as though my mind would short circuit each time I tried to wrap my head around it; it just didn’t compute.

I grew up in a conservative Christian household and I just didn’t have any point of reference for this type of experience in my life. I felt very much that I was at a crossroads and that I had three choices: I could go into denial and just pretend the whole thing hadn’t really happened, I could go crazy (which felt like a very real possibility as my entire concept of reality now had a big crack in it), or I could expand my world view and open to different possibilities that I hadn’t up to that point considered. I decided on the latter and that began my spiritual search looking for answers that had not yet been given to me, I had to view the world through different eyes.

Now I realize experience was brought on through drug use, and that some people may regard this as being a prime situation for me to not have had a firm understanding of what was actually happening at the time, but I also understand that throughout history profound spiritual experiences have resulted from the ingestion of hallucinogenic substances and that I had experienced something, although accidentally, that for me was absolutely real.

So I have in my seeking developed a definition for the experience of déjà vu that I’d like to share with you and maybe you will find some truth in it.

Our physical experience of time is linear, we move from birth to death, from point A to point B making our daily choices and moving from situation to situation in our very own “choose your own adventure” book.
Now surrounding this linear time line is what we call “Eternity”, where time does not exist. In eternity everything that has happened, is happening and will happen are all there existing simultaneously, it is outside of the constrains of time, it is timelessness.

Now we as humans, being multifaceted beings, have the ability to tap into eternity and have some experience there, but for most of us we eventually have to bring that experience with us back into our linear timeline in which case we often forget what has happened.

We usually access this timeless dimension in our dream state and we often have little recall of what we have seen and experienced but every once in a while, as we move into the actual experience in our waking lives we “remember” …this is true “déjà vu”.

This timeless state can also be accessed through mediation or any activity that transfers our full attention from our body and mind to our spirit, which exists outside of time. It is often said that the spirit is eternal.

Fate Vs Free Will

What about fate vs free will you might ask? If everything that is happening is predetermined to happen then do our actions really have any meaning?

With the understanding that linear time is wrapped up in eternity I don’t really see a conflict between fate and free will as they are both just two side of the same coin.

Looking from our 3rd dimensional physical perspective we make choices daily and those choices influence our experiences but looking through the lense of eternity all of it is already done and we are just moving towards our destiny. None of it is written and all of it is written depending on just our perspective.

So that’s how a boy of 8yrs old could see his life at age 20 and still realize that he is the captain of his own ship, moving towards that which he already has.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story and if you have a cool experience with déjà vu let’s hear it.