Déjà vu, Déjà vu: Part II
[The following blog series will be comprised of original short stories]
July 28, 2021
My déjà vu events happen pretty much every day now. Or maybe I should say that I’ve trained myself to become present to these moments which may well be normal occurrences that go unnoticed.
This notion has prompted some of my recent research. Is déjà vu experienced more frequently during certain time periods? And if so, are there multiple people who report it happening during these times?
Déjà vu research is spotty and mostly conducted by brain scientists who reject any possibility of glitches in time. These studies are useless to me. There were some studies in the early 20th century exploring interruptions in time, but from what I can tell, after about 1940 there’s virtually no physics research about déjà vu and no one in the quantum physics world doing active research. The only things available to me are in English or reports which have been translated into English.
The thing about trying to track déjà vu is that these experiences like wisps of smoke or fragments of fading dreams. They hardly ever get written down. Still, I did my best to chart time patterns of incidents which have been written down and put online. Before about 1920, people generally didn’t make note of the time of day or even month of déjà vu events, but there do seem to be certain years that I find more people reporting occurrences; particularly starting in the 1940s. What’s irrefutable is that there’s been a dramatic spike in people writing about déjà vu this year – 2021.
What’s also interesting is that events seem to happen more frequently for certain people, and here you’ve got to weed out the biases of brain scientists who suggest those with schizophrenia report déjà vu more often than others. One of the types of people who report it with regularity are those who travel a great deal. This adds to my hypothesis that déjà vu is somehow related to time.
The truth is that I suspect anyone who is willing to focus on it can become more aware of déjà vu. I’m continually scanning the horizon for the sense that a thing has happened before. For instance, when I wrote the above sentence, “The only things available to me are in English …” I knew I’d written this very journal entry before. And just to make sure I hadn’t written this sentence in an earlier entry, I looked back through this journal (sadly, a fairly quick read). It’s not in any of the other entries. I definitely recorded this page before.
Jess tells me I’m starting to get OCD about all this. Says it’s maybe something I’ve created to relieve my brain from the stress of 70-hour work weeks (P.S. I was pretty sure we’d had this conversation before, but I wasn’t about to tell her. She’s pretty sick of it). I admit, stress may be a factor, but my lack of sleep and excessive work has simply worn my consciousness thin allowing me to access my subconscious-self which is more in tune these things. At any rate, I probably should stop asking everyone about their déjà vu moments. It’s beginning to worry the people around me.
August 5, 2021
OK. I think I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough. I was talking to Sheila in the breakroom yesterday. She works in an analytics division digesting data from the Hubble telescope. Basically, she was complaining about some kind of anomaly in their calculations. I won’t bore future me with the details (whatever “future me” means, since I suspect we’re repeating the same segment of time over and over), but basically her team is finding that the distance of a particular star cluster a million light years away is off. This cluster appears further than it ought to be.
So here’s my theory. There’s a glitch in time, it may only be for those nearer to the glitch. Those of us by the glitch keep repeating the same segment of time while the rest of the universe continues expanding. So, when we look out at those things, they’ve moved on but we keep repeating the same period of time.
Think of it this way; Imagine listening to a vinyl album but there’s a scratch in it. Whenever the needle hits that spot the song jumps back. When the record gets to that spot again, the song skips back to that earlier spot. Now imagine a “scratch” in the space-time continuum located somewhere in our solar system. Each time the earth travels on its journey around the sun, it hits that same spot and time is disrupted. We’re cast back to an earlier time.
I think déjà vu is a scratch in time.
August 12, 2021
Talked to Sheila again today.
“How far off are those calculations you mentioned?” I asked her.
“What calculations.”
“The Hubble calculations. You know, the ones of that star cluster a million light years away?” I said.
“Well, what exactly do you mean by ‘how far off are the calculations?’” She replied.
“I mean, like how many earth years would have had to pass for that cluster to be where it is?”
She gave me a really weird look. I knew what she was thinking. Others have been talking about my déjà vu obsession. Someone probably told her that I’m researching interruptions in time, and now she thinks I’m crazy like the rest of them. She just stood there looking at me with that condescending glare.
“Listen,” I said. “If there were some sort of disruption in time, and we were experiencing a time loop in our section of the galaxy, but the rest of the universe kept expanding, then how many years might have passed for that cluster to be as far out as it is now?”
“Hypothetically, you mean. Because Rob, I’m not sure your theory quite works like you’re thinking it works.”
“Sure,” I said, “hypothetically.”
I wonder if Einstein or Copernicus were looked at by other scientists the way she looked at me.
“Of course, I couldn’t be precise.” She said, “But, I’d guess our calculations would put the star cluster we’re looking at somewhere between 500 and 2,000 years further away than it should be.”
“Wow.” I said.
“But, you know, Rob, it’s just an artifact in the data or a malfunction in the Hubble. That’s why we need you all to stay focused to get the James Webb telescope out there. Right?” She was talking to me like an eight-year-old, but I bit my tongue.
“I know, I know.” I said. “Just a theory I’m playing with.”
“Yeah, but your theory is a waste of time because the chances are very high that we’ve got an error either in the telescope or in our data set.”
I did my best to set my offense aside. Some people have a hard time considering options that appear crazy to them. The earth revolving around the sun was crazy just a few hundred years ago. We are so imprisoned by the concept that time is immutable.
I just smiled at Sheila and nodded, then went back to my cubicle.
So now there is physical proof that we have been stuck in a loop for hundreds of years. There’s a scratch in the vinyl record of time, and when the earth hits that particular position in space each year, we jump back. Until we get past this anomaly, this scratch in time, the human race will never progress beyond where we are now. The entire James Webb project, the launch of our telescope, will be futile because we’ll never move any further than some point in the future before we skip back to the past.
There’s a saying, “Anyone who doesn’t study history is doomed to repeat it.” Well anyone who doesn’t figure out how to free us from this time loop is doomed to repeat it.
This is depressing. I’ve got to take a break from thinking about this. Maybe I am getting a bit OCD.
September 30, 2021
We finished a major section of our work at the beginning of September, so a few of us in ground telemetry took vacation. I took three weeks off. Those first two days I must have slept about 20 hours. Jess took two weeks off and we used the miles I accumulated from the trip to French Guiana to go to Maine. It was so relaxing.
I’ve kept my mouth shut about the scratch in time stuff. Jess gets a pained look on her face when I talk about it, like she is half worried and half feeling pity. Like she thinks I’m coming unglued. Honestly, I’ve not had as many instances of déjà vu during this time off, but that’s because I’m giving myself a break from focusing and becoming present to déjà vu. But I can still sense it just beyond the range of my consciousness. If I gave myself half a moment of concentration I could detect the repeating cycle we’re stuck in. To think that we’ve been through all this before, hundreds, maybe thousands, of times is overwhelming. I actually didn’t mind taking a break from it all.
However, I’m back to work now and we’re less than three months from launch. My workload is going to start picking up again with launch tests coming up.
Nose to the grindstone!
Nose to the grindstone!
Wait, have I written that before?
Just kidding. If I don’t inject a bit of humor I really might go crazy.