It started when I was young. I would feel a weird sense
that I had already experienced what I was experiencing. I would
go somewhere or see something for the first time and recognize
it like I had been there or seen it before. The first time it
happened, it scared me so badly I cried to my mother and asked
her why everything felt so weird. She told me that it was
normal. That it was a thing called Déjà vu, and that I didn’t
need to worry about it. At that age, I basically believed
anything my parents said, and even though it still scared me, I
trusted her. Of course, when my mom told me it was Déjà
vu, she didn’t actually know what it was or why it was so-called
normal. No one did. Déjà vu was a phenomenon of the brain
that science didn’t really understand. And beyond that, no one
else could have ever been in my head to really understand or know
what I was truly experiencing.
As a I grew older into my teenage years, it became even
more intense and increasingly difficult to ignore. A trigger, be
it a visual or an odor or a thought or an emotion or everything
all at once, would seem to cause the gears of everything to stop
turning, and it would feel as though time stopped and I became
stuck in a moment. Whenever this happened, it almost seemed as
if I could see things around me in time the same way I could see
things around me in physical space. It was as if to my left was
the past and to my right was the future and the present was
exactly and only where my body was. During these episodes, I not
only felt the sense that I had already experienced what I was
experiencing, but I also started to feel a sense that I had
already experienced what I was about to experience. As if the
moments in the future already happened and were right next to
me, just behind the walls of my regular perception. I tried to
just rationalize it away, convincing myself it was just some
strange, normal thing, but when I explained it to my friends and
family, they didn’t really understand. They said that they all
had their own unusual experiences of déjà vu but none of them
shared what I described. This scared me, but it quickly became
one of those things that was easier to deal with by not dealing
with it, so I didn’t. Then, when I was around 19 or 20, I was sitting
at the kitchen table in my parents’ house. I was
eating soup and watching tv when a déjà vu hit me. A sense
that I had already watched the episode of the show I was watching,
which I certainly had not, paired with a sense that
my brother and father were about to walk into the house from
the side door. Then, in the next moment, they did.
I told my brother and father what happened as they settled
into the kitchen. We agreed it was just a strange coincidence
and laughed it off together. It terrified me, though, and I
couldn’t sleep the next couple nights. Then it kept happening. I would have the sense
that I had already experienced was I was about to experience,
and sometimes it would seem to come true. Along with myself, my parents
and friends became incapable of ignoring it. My parents,
in fact, were rather disturbed by it in fact, and we decided
it was time to talk to a doctor.
To the best of my abilities, I explained to my doctor what
was happening. She essentially had no clue what was going on
beyond just general theories of déjà vu, which were of course
inconclusive and of no help. She found my situation to be
exceptionally abnormal. Déjà vu was common, she said, but the
intensity and frequency of my experiences were concerningly
unusual by her understanding. She decided it would be best if I
saw a neurologist. After a period of tests, evaluations, brain
scans and so on, the neurologist found nothing wrong with
my brain, and also struggled to diagnose me beyond just an unusual
case of déjà vu. However, he predicted that I might have some
sort of temporal lobe damage and was experiencing seizures
during the episodes of déjà vu. He referred me to an epileptologist,
a doctor specializing in epileptic seizures.
I explained to the epileptologist what I explained to
everyone. That when it came on, it felt like my relationship
with time didn’t exist. Not so much that time didn’t, but more
like time and I broke up for a few moments. I explained that
during these moments, it sometimes seemed like I knew what
someone was about to say a few seconds before they said it. Or
what commercial would come on TV next. Or if someone was going
to enter a room. And that sometimes it actually seemed to
happen. After more tests and evaluations, he basically
confirmed what the neurologist predicted and surmised
that I was having mini seizures, which were inciting vivid hallucinatory
déjà vus and causing me to see and connect things that
weren’t actually real. He said that the seizures were causing
a flurry of neurons to fire all at once throughout my brain, causing
my conscious understanding of things and unconscious processing
of things to get mixed up and fall out of sync. In other
words, I was perceiving things that weren’t happening
in the way or order that they were actually happening. The sense
that something had already happened or was going to happen was
a result of my perceptual experience occuring earlier or
later than my conscious comprehension of it. This made a
lot of sense and was a huge relief. However, the epileptologist
went on and said that there was nothing showing any evidence of
damage or alteration
in my brain on the EEG, CT or MRI brain scans, but said that
this didn’t rule out the diagnosis, and that normal brain scan
readings didn’t necessarily mean I had a normal brain, and that
the problem was likely just not physically manifesting itself.
I wanted more than anything to believe him, but I got the
sense that, even though he was an expert, he wasn’t really sure.
And when I asked how that would explain the fact that when I
would tell someone else that something was about to happen and
they would confirm my prediction when it happened, he sort of
didn’t have an answer and just brushed it off as a coincidence
or a part of the whole mental disorientation of the seizure. I
hoped he was right but struggled to fully believe he was. And
despite how similar they might seem, hoping and believing are
two completely different things. In response to the diagnosis, the epileptologist
prescribed me Dilantin, an anti-epileptic medication,
as well Lexapro, an anti-anxiety medication. The epileptic medication
didn’t stop the episodes from occurring and the anxiety
medication made me nauseous and numb. After about a month of
waiting and hoping the anti-epileptic medication would begin to work,
it never did. The doctor began to discuss some alternative methods
and the possibility of some procedures that might
help. However, the problem was we had to determine exactly what
and where something was wrong in my brain before we could procedurally
correct it.
While I continued tests and evaluations, the déjà vu
episodes continued. They seemed to get even more intense, and
weren’t merely brief, momentary sensations anymore, but
prolonged episodes in which I became nearly incapacitated.
Then, one day while I was at work, everything broke. It was
as if something had been building up inside me, and once it
became sufficiently heavy enough, it cracked the surface of
everything. It felt like I could see behind the curtains of
reality and saw all the things that went into creating the show
but would never otherwise see as a part of the audience. I saw
the choreography of all the particles dancing in and out of
nothing. I heard the music of all the quarks and electrons
vibrating in the background of every object. I saw the mask of
time and the set design of space. I saw the reason for the chaos
and the meaning of the meaninglessness. I saw the spotlight of
existence isolated on one small spot, center stage, and the
darkness of oblivion just one small step behind it.
Then I saw my whole life all at once, like if each frame of
a movie were laid out on a table and you could see the first and
last scene with a slight adjustment of the eyes. And just like
how a series of movie frames is only experienced as a movie in
time by playing it through a projector or DVD player or file
player and so on, I saw that I was the projector, DVD player and
file player of my life. And that the whole thing was all already
there, just like how a full movie is always on the film reel,
DVD disc, or file, no matter what part of it you are watching.
It was a strange, ineffable flurry of what I can only describe
as rapidly fast-forwarding and rewinding everything in my life.
And just like watching a movie fast-forwarded or rewound at 6x
speed, it was blurry and hard to process, but I could catch the
main ides of scenes as my unconscious mind worked to fill in the
blanks. Then, suddenly, I found myself at the end.
And at the end, I saw the end of everything. Not merely the
end of my life, but the end of everyone’s. I saw the earth moving
towards the sun. Or the sun towards the earth. I saw the world
burning as it degraded into some sort of chaos. I saw that
all of humanity was, during my lifetime, going to die in a
catastrophe of some random cosmic circumstance.
Then, as if the director of the show realized its mistake,
the curtains pulled back to their proper place, and I came back
to, into the most overwhelming state of panic, disorientation,
and paranoia. It took me about a week to even begin to recover,
and frankly, I never recovered at all. I worked
so hard to rationalize the experience. To convince myself
it was a dream. Or a psychotic episode. Or literally anything
else. After I
finally built up enough stamina, I told my parents and
girlfriend and doctor about it. I went through another round of brain scans
and tests, and still, nothing wrong was found. The doctor
essentially concluded the same original diagnosis and he and my
parents worked to convince me that it was just a severe epileptic
episode and was not real in the way that I felt it to be.
I was incapable of fully coming to terms with this. I
wasn’t sure what happened or what was real, but I struggled to
ignore the possibility of what it was or could’ve been. It’s
hard to see or feel something and be convinced by someone else
that you didn’t just because they didn’t. How could anyone know
what I experienced inside my head without having been there
themselves? And how could anyone else actually know whether I
was experiencing something real or not? Even if it was an
epileptic episode, I wondered if that was actually more real
than my normal sense of real. What if everything that was real,
day-to-day was only real according to the conditions of my
normal mind, but during these moments of all my brain neurons
firing at once, I experienced what was actually real. The
conditions of reality outside of myself, without all the filters
and lenses and perceptual parameters my brain worked to hold up
in every other moment. I tried talking this through with my
parents and girlfriend, and then the next time I saw my doctor,
he increased my medication, referred me to a psychologist, and
began to seriously consider the implementation of an electronic
brain stimulator to counter abnormal brain activity.
I spent some amount of the following year or so trying to
talk with officials and scientists and cosmologists and whoever
else might be able to look into the possibility of issues with
the sun or celestial patterns or any other potential signs of
problems. No one took me seriously. I seemed crazy and I knew
it. I gave up and receded into isolation. The biggest problem was that in the moments
of the déjà vus or premonitions or whatever it was, even if
it seemed like I could tell that something was going to happen,
I never knew exactly when or if I was right. Even in that
major episode, I had no traction on what was real and when
and where things might occur. There were no dates or certainties
in the world of déjà vus and premonitions. And so, I lived in fear,
not only about whether my premonition of the world’s end
was true, but when it might occur, if it was.
As I got older, I continued to experience intense déjà vu,
premonitory breaches of everything like that first one. They
were all essentially the same. Despite their continuation,
nothing was ever found physically wrong with my brain. Far worse
and more terrifying, some of the senses and visuals I had during
them began to come true and my life appeared to in fact be
relatively synced up with whatever it was. I began to realize
more and more that it was likely something beyond seizures. In
this, I began to feel the imminence of the end of the world, as
if it were already there. An inescapable cycle between sadness
for what would soon be lost and an anxiety about when.
My relationship with my girlfriend fell apart as I found
myself struggling to love her with the knowledge that I would
soon lose her with the rest of the world. Knowing that
everything was going to end made everything slippery and
transient, impossible to commit to or care about. I stopped
caring about my job and my goals and aspirations. I couldn’t
find motivation to do much of anything knowing that whatever I
did, whoever I cared about, and whatever I became interested in,
I would lose. The dysphoria between me and the rest of the world
further isolated and saddened me. Everyone was going about
everything as normal. Chasing moments and things, attaching to
stuff, committing to stuff, trying to solve stuff. Taking
everything so seriously. But no one knew or cared to know that
it was all about to end forever. I drank heavily and ruminated miserably about
approaching events in my life, always on the edge, thinking
the end of the world was around the next corner. I exerted
whatever efforts I had towards trying to master the déjà
vu and premonition experience. Now that I found myself recurringly
sensing what was
going to happen in the future, I found myself desperate to try
to do something about it. I thought that if I could slow down or
control the déjà vu/premonition experience, I could find a
solution to the impending end of everything and escape it.
Nothing worked. Then, many years later, it began to happen.
A massive rogue planet floated into our solar system, destabilized
earth’s orbit, and pushed us towards the sun. I was
right. Or, whatever the premonition was, was right.
As scientists began to understand what was happening,
experts predicted about 2 to 3 months before a collision with
the sun, if we didn’t collide with Venus or Mercury first. The
earth had about two to three weeks before everything was so hot
the surface would melt. This was initially faced with worldwide
denial and skepticism. Then, as the size of the sun began to
increase, the world slowly began to realize. The doom of the entire species and its entire
heritage of species. The closing chapter. The final scene,
with no credits. This realization was followed by mass hysteria
and chaos. An entire species consciously aware of its impending
death with nowhere to go, revealed its truest colors.
The leaders of the world broke down. Mass suicides.
Pillaging and far, far worse. Violence and evil came out of the
kindest and most ordinary of people. With no consequence,
humanity did what it always wanted. When this happened, and my final premonition
came true, I was 87 years old. Just 9 years under the life
expectancy of my generation. I essentially had lived a full
life, at least in terms of years.
In the approaching final moments. As the light increased
and the darkness approached, I sat alone in a chair on my porch
and watched the sun grow. I drank whiskey as I reflected on how
unfathomably real, yet science-fiction the situation was. In
this moment, I realized that the whole time, I knew that the
world was going to end, and I had a choice that came with that
awareness. I had the choice to live in spite of my foresight or
live in fear of it. And I chose the wrong one. How foolish was I
to know that the world would soon end, and I didn’t spend every
possible moment enraptured by it and in complete delight over
the fact that it had not yet. The catastrophe wasn’t the end of
the world, but how lived before it ended. I essentially wasted my whole life worrying
about whether or not I would live a full life, which caused
me to live a very shallow one. I was, in the most ironic way
possible, sad about losing the world and not being alive, while
I was alive, and the world was still there. Like never wearing
your favorite pair of shoes because you’re afraid you’re going
to get them dirty, I
ruined the thing that I feared losing with the fear of losing
it. And then, just like I knew I would the whole time, I lost
it.