Peter Cook put it his own way in a magazine column: “All of us at one time or another have had a sense of déjà vu, a feeling that this has happened before, that this has happened before, that this has happened before.” In Catch-22, Joseph Heller described déjà vu as “a weird, occult sensation of having experienced the identical situation before in some prior time or existence”. By trying to understand more about déjà vu, I’m hoping to make sure that I never lose my way on the path back to reality from that same ‘strange place’. And it’s hard for me not to worry whether the blurring of fact and fiction that I experience might one day engender a kind of mania. Many of the estimated 50 million people in the world with epilepsy experience long-term memory decline and psychiatric problems. I can find no pattern to explain when or why these episodes manifest themselves, only that they usually last for the length of a pulse before vanishing. Now it occurs with varying degrees of magnitude up to 10 times a day, whether as part of a seizure or not. I don’t remember déjà vu happening with any kind of regularity before the onset of my epilepsy. During my most intense seizures, and for a week or so afterwards, this feeling of precognition becomes so pervasive that I routinely struggle to discern the difference between lived events and dreams, between memories, hallucinations and the products of my imagination. “I feel,” said another, “in some strange place.”īy far the most significant trait of my aura is the striking sense of having lived through that precise moment before at some point in the past – even though I never have. “Old scenes revert,” one patient told him. Pioneering English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson was the first to define the epileptic aura, observing in 1898 that its hallmarks included vivid memory-like hallucinations, often alongside the feeling of déjà vu. My own aren’t nearly as exciting-sounding, being distinguished by sudden shifts in perspective, a rapidly increased heart rate, anxiety, and the occasional auditory hallucination. Some people experience synaesthesia, extreme euphoria and even orgasm at the onset of a seizure.
The nature of this aura differs greatly from patient to patient. They are usually preceded by something called an ‘aura’, a sort of minor foreshock lasting anything up to a couple of minutes before the main event begins. Seizures, or fits, occur after an unanticipated electrical discharge in the brain. He saw a newborn baby as a kind of empty ledger, one that is gradually filled as the child grows and accumulates knowledge and experience. One of the most fundamental doctrines of Western philosophy was established by Aristotle. What I was experiencing was an extreme form of a very common mental illusion: déjà vu. The problem was that it never actually happened. It was a pleasant and extremely vivid recollection.
I felt warm sunlight on the back of my neck and watched as birds wheeled and floated above me.
I could hear the sway of the wheat ears as a gentle breeze brushed through them. The people around me vanished and I found myself lying on a tartan picnic blanket amid a field of high golden wheat. I was lounging under a tree in a packed east London park when I experienced a sudden feeling of vertigo, followed immediately by an overwhelming and intense sense of familiarity. One drab afternoon a few years ago something very unusual happened to me.
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