Déjà vu all over again.

Meditation on déjà vu.

I’m a rock-ribbed rationalist and don’t believe in any hocus pocus. That said, I experienced a spell of psychic activity in my childhood and early teens. Said experiences peaked at around age 14, then dropped off.  Take my word, these experiences were very real. I could call coin-tosses for runs of 20, 30 or more. I’d pluck numbers and names out of the air, etc. Most significantly: I experienced constant, intense déjà vu experiences. These were clearly scenarios that I had dreamed. In some cases, I related the dreams before they happened. (I once dreamed of a statue of a pirate hoisting a sword in a fountain. I assumed this was obvious Freudian symbolism, and related the dream for laughs. Then I wound up going to a theme park called Pirate's World -- which had an actual/factual statue of a pirate hoisting a sword in a fountain.) Dreams would come true, not in some vague sense, but in a frame-by-frame sense, with maddening specificity, like seeing a rerun on TV. All this can be parsed and explained away. Fine. But let’s, for the sake of argument, assert that precognitive dreams are real. If so, the implications are exceedingly disturbing. How could they be real? What possible explanations could there be?

A) The space/time continuum is a 4-dimensional matrix in which every possible moment – past, present or future – already exists. In the act of precognition, the mind is somehow skipping ahead to the next reel. Jolly-good. But this implies the future is fixed.

B) The mind is an incredibly powerful super computer. Your subconscious can take a stew of random data and figure out what the world is going to be a year from now in a place you’ve never been.

C) Reality is an illusion. The mind foresees reality because the mind creates reality. (This applies to either a non-physical phenomenological experience or telekinetic control of physical reality. It amounts to the same thing.) 

D) Beings (good or evil) with knowledge of the future are feeding that knowledge into a receptive human mind. Yours, kid. Hey. I got a great idea. Your dog's gonna get run over by a car. We'll show you exactly what happens, but you won't know until it happens, and then you'll know you've seen it all before, and there won't be a damn thing you can do about it.

Do any of these sound like fun?