Cheers to the Holidays: Deja Vu
I peered at the carton my mom had just removed from the grocery bag, leaving a huge wet stain on the brown paper where the carton had been.
It looked like a normal milk carton, except dressed up in festive shades of red and green. It was a rare occasion, indeed, when my mom brought home a store-bought treat, given my dad’s insistence on “homemade” everything–including all desserts, treats, snacks or, really, anything sweet.
But this wasn’t milk, my mom informed me. It was something I’d never heard of before, a novel beverage known as “eggnog.”
“Can I try some?” I asked, peering over the countertop as she poured herself a juice-glass full.
“We’ll see,” she said, likely recalling the homemade version’s alcohol content, clearly not suitable for ten year-olds.
“What does it taste like?” I asked.
It looked much thicker than regular milk as it slid out of the carton. Sort of like an albino version of the chocolate milk I was used to, with just a hint of yellow.
“I can’t really explain it,” she said, perusing the ingredient list. “It tastes like the holidays.” Finding no alcohol, she went on, “Okay, you can have some.”
Before she could even finish pouring some for me, I caught a whiff of nutmeg wafting off the glass. Immediately, I knew I would love it.
In reality, I had nothing to go on except a strange, vague feeling that I’d tasted it before. In fact, it felt as if my mother and I had had that exact conversation previously, and I knew exactly the drink I was about to sip. And love.
Ah, deja vu. Who among us hasn’t experienced it, at least once, in our lifetimes?
In case you’re one of the 20% of adults who’s never encountered the phenomenon, it’s an uncanny sensation that you’ve either experienced something before or heard something exactly the same way before, even though logically, you know you haven’t.
For instance, say you visit Paris for the first time and you have an overwhelming feeling you’ve been in this exact patisserie before, ordering this exact pain au chocolat. But you know you’ve never been in France (at least, not in this lifetime).
Maybe you’re in the throes of a heated argument with your spouse. You glance at the window and see a whorl of frost clinging to the glass, just as he says “You really shouldn’t feel that way.” It strikes you that you’ve had this exact conversation, at this exact place and time, before. (Okay, to be fair, in my relationship, it’s quite possible we actually did have that exact conversation, in that exact place, before).
I have to admit, I’m fascinated by the concept. After the eggnog episode, the younger me experienced deja vu fairly frequently, but in recent years, it's become less common. And that does make me sad.
What causes it? There are many (many!) theories. I’m not keen on the “split perception” explanation, which says you likely see something, first without paying much attention. So when your brain actually does notice the situation, it feels like it’s the second time round. You’re actually experiencing the same event at the same time, but imagine it’s happened before.
That’s all fine and good, but in my experience, deja vu more often feels as if you’ve experienced the event a long time ago. If it’s all happening at virtually the same moment, this explanation doesn’t feel valid.
Other theories involve errors in the brain’s memory processing (mistaking a short-term memory for a long-term memory, for instance) or a phenomenon similar to mini-seizures, so that parts of the brain involved in both short-term and long-term memory are active at the same time.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, deja vu is also a young person’s occurrence: it happens most between the ages of 15 and 25, decreasing as you age (another one of those benefits of aging, perhaps?).
These are all intriguing hypotheses. But there’s one theory I remember more than any of the others. It’s something my cousin G explained to me when I was around nine or ten. (Unless, of course, it isn’t really a memory. Maybe it never happened, and I *think* it’s a memory. One that feels so vivid, as if it just occurred right now . . . . Could it be–?!).
I adored my cousin. Almost 20 years my senior, he and his wife lived outside of Boston and visited Montreal often so they could spend time with her parents (my maternal aunt and uncle, whom I wrote about here).
On one visit, when I was around four, I fell off my friend’s tricycle. We’d been playing “pull Ricki with a rope on the back of a bicycle,” as my little vehicle sped behind my friend’s two-wheeler around our street. One extra-high curb later, and I bashed my chin directly on the concrete.
I ran, wailing, into the house, cradling my chin in my hands, blood dripping through my fingers, certain I was about to die. It was Cousin G who convinced my parents to take me to the Emergency so the gash could be stitched up (side note: six decades later, there still exists a wan, white scar on the bottom of my chin, a testimonial to that event).
I loved Cousin G’s slick black hair, his strange “Hah-vahd Yah-d” accent, the coveted treats he brought with him when he visited (like Twinkies and $100,000 Bars, unheard of in Canada at the time) and his calm, quiet voice, so different from the brusque or shrill intonations in my own family.
But what I loved most was the way he talked to me, a ten year-old, as if I were his intellectual equal. He’d sit, intently focused on whatever it was I had to say, attending only to me. He always asked questions, probing for more detailed answers, pondering and reflecting on what I shared, slowly nodding his head and looking off toward the unknown as he considered its merit.
One year, when Cousin G and his wife visited over the holidays, I sat in my aunt’s living room crafting a homemade comic book while the adults shared coffee and “Tunnel of Fudge” Bundt cake in the kitchen. Cousin G strolled over for a cigarette break (I know; nobody in those days considered whether second-hand smoke would affect others, not even children).
He inquired about what I was doing. I explained the story and characters, engaged in a series of repeated actions: Andy asked Brenda on a date; she said no; they separated. A few panels later, he asked again. She said no. And so on.
Maybe it was the repetitive plot in my comic, but somehow, the concept of deja vu was brought into the conversation. I shared my experiences and wondered aloud what might have caused the odd sensation.
At that, my cousin launched into a detailed explanation. Maybe he’d been reading about Schrodinger’s cat, but for whatever reason, he began to articulate, in minute detail, what’s known as the “Many-Worlds Interpretation” (MWI, also called the multiverse theory or parallel universe theory).
“So imagine we live in our universe, and the whole thing is enclosed in a huge glass tube that goes up into the sky, reaching forever,” he said, cupping his palms toward each other and extending his arms toward the ceiling.
I could envision the two of us in miniature, talking and floating in that tube.
“Okay, so next, you have to imagine there are millions of different versions of this universe, and they’re all in parallel tubes, all going up to the sky the same way. Nobody knows what’s going on in any other universe, because they’re all self-contained.”
My eyes widened as I glanced toward the ceiling, then back at his face.
“Well, sometimes, there’s something like a little crack, or leak, in one of those tubes. Then what’s inside might cross over into another tube’s reality. So what you experience as deja vu is just “you” from another universe and what you’re doing over there. You’re just getting a little glimpse of it.”
He lay his hands back in his lap, nodding as if to indicate the lesson was over.
For whatever reason, that conversation has stuck with me. I still remember it vividly. Perhaps part of why it’s remained so fresh in my memory is because of how my cousin made me feel. He spoke solemnly and with complete intentness, as if I were his contemporary. He never once made me feel as if he were explaining something to a child.
I’d say, in retrospect, that Cousin G embodied that oft-quoted sentiment from Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
In fact, that’s just how Cousin G spoke to everyone. As if they were the most important, most intelligent person in the world, as if no one else could intrude on the remarkable connection he was in the process of establishing with you.
When he died, after defying a prognosis of “three to six months” by living five more years, everyone who’d known him was devastated, as if they’d lost one of their most beloved friends or family members.
When one of his kids stopped in the local convenience store where Cousin G had purchased his daily Boston Globe over the years, the owner broke down in sobs, sharing how much my cousin had meant to him. His wife got phone calls from former clients, neighbors, families he’d coached, people he hadn’t seen for decades.
It’s been years since he died, but my memories remain vivid, emblazoned in my mind. And those thoughts make me wonder, What if deja vu could move in a forward motion as well? What if, instead of sensing that the present moment were a memory of events past, we could pull something from our past experience forward, so it felt as if it were happening right in the present moment? Sort of like vu encore.
Nothing could be more lovely than to have one of those cherished memories pop into the present, recurring as if it were happening right now. This time, I’d be sure to thank Cousin G for the explanation, and all the other sweet encounters over the years.
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