Have we been here before? Are we going through the motions time after time, with a memory lapse each time, mostly, and cursed to repeat the same cycle over and over? There have been a few articles already around this idea and if we have fractured cell memory, competing against the present with ‘memories’ of the past.
And I think of a television series and a film representation of it, where something from before lingers and stays with us. They say it could be genetic memory, and some say it could be reincarnation, or a collective memory bank we have access to called the Akashic record.
Westworld – slightly different from the usual premise of doing it over, or feeling like you have done it before, with different ‘worlds’ to experience as a tourist. But it’s the mechanised inhabitants that make it interesting, as they don’t know what they are and go through the same ‘life’ again and again, being used and at the whim and mercy of ‘real people’ who want to live out their fantasies. This was a film originally, which I haven’t seen, but watched the remake series that was on nearly a decade ago.
Oblivion – mentioned in Simulated, Again and Again as each time he expires it’s an instant return to the same time, and form and has to repeat the same events over and over but with his memory intact each time.
“Déjà vu is the phenomenon of feeling as though one has lived through the present situation before. It is an illusion of memory whereby—despite a strong sense of recollection—the time, place, and context of the “previous” experience are uncertain or impossible” – from Wikipedia.
But the definition makes me think of it being and feeling more like a premonition rather than a memory, and that it is perhaps the brain trying to give it reasoning and find context it’s familiar with. So it decides to go with it being a long lost memory, rather than exploring the idea of it being an extra sensory perception occurring. Not everyone is even familiar with it or has experiences it, and many may have but didn’t recognise it for what it was, not that we do know what that is. It’s just an idea, that we can ‘see’ more than with just our known senses, but that it has been conditioned out of us over the centuries and we no longer understand what we are capable of. Either way, it’s an odd thing that can be most unsettling when experiencing it, so much so that it lingers and becomes its own memory. And I can’t help but wonder, is it a memory of what has already been? Or a heads-up on what is to come…
(c) K Wicks
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