Nobody in Fiction Ever Gets Déjà Vu – Discuss

A few nights ago, I was sitting on the couch petting my dog when an unsettling feeling crept over me. Almost everyone knows it. That strange sense that this moment has happened before. Déjà vu.

Now of course, you’re probably thinking, of course you experienced déjà vu while you were sitting on your couch petting your dog – that’s pretty much all you do every night. But you and I both know that déjà vu isn’t just the familiarity of doing something you always do. It’s that strange sensation of feeling like you remember something that is happening right now. Suddenly you recall not just an event, but a scene – your place in a room, your actions, your idle thoughts and maybe even your decisions what to do next. Perhaps you dreamt it years ago and forgot. Perhaps you foresaw it.

Déjà vu is a mysterious thing that happens to a large proportion of the population. I brought it up in conversation with a friend today and he told me he experiences it “constantly.” It’s a rare phenomenon that’s both common and somehow inexplicable — there is a general hypothesis about the memory centers of the brain going slightly haywire, but scientists continue to scratch their heads over the specifics.

The maddening thing about déjà vu – to me, anyway (besides the placement of those French accents in the word) – is how fleeting it is. It will come upon you, make you pause, feel like you’re remembering something, and then just as abruptly pass. The spell will be broken, as if you thinking about déjà vu was, of course, not part of the déjà vu. It almost never impacts your day in any significant way. You’re left in a brief haze of “Huh, that was weird,” and then move on.

After I thought about it for a few moments more, I realized… nobody in fiction ever gets déjà vu.

Now hold on, hold on, I say, banging my gavel. Order in the court. Before you go racing to the comments below (which are moderated anyway) to rattle off ten scenes from movies, books and TV where someone gets “déjà vu” let me specify and clarify what I’m talking about. If someone in fiction gets a bout of déjà vu, it’s usually some kind of plot-relevant psychic premonition, or a sign that reality has been altered and some weirdo sci-fi stuff is going on. Think of that famous scene in the Matrix where Neo sees a cat pass by twice, and he’s told that “déjà vu” just means the code of the Matrix has been rewritten. Otherwise, it’s often a figure of speech to indicate that something has literally happened to the character before.

Although I am not willing to rule out the notion that, perhaps, we live in a simulation and the déjà vu that you and I experience is related to that, let’s stipulate that that’s probably not the case as far as most of our favourite media is concerned. Likewise, it’s entirely possible that I actually do possess some low level of psychic powers and that’s why I experience it from time to time, but if that’s the case it certainly hasn’t done me any good up to this point in my life and is thus pretty much a neutral force.

But it’s exceedingly rare, perhaps totally unheard of, for a character in a work of fiction, like say, a frothy romcom about an irascible dentist who falls in love with a female sports reporter when they both find themselves at the singles table at a mutual acquaintance’s wedding, to pause what they are doing, remark as you or I would that they just had déjà vu, and then get on with their life.

Think about that. It wouldn’t make any sense. You, the reader or viewer, would keep expecting that to come back and mean something. Suddenly you’re thinking in terms of psychic premonitions and past lives, and other Unsolved Mysteries stuff, instead of the romcom you thought you were reading, and you would have the expectation that it would come back to influence the plot in some big way instead of just being this weird passing feeling many of us sometimes get. It would take you completely out of the world that the author had built.

It’s something that happens in your day-to-day life, but because it seems to have no explanation, it is omitted from fiction. Media tends to favour only details that advance the plot and develop the world in which they take place, as well as experiences that are in some way explicable (in the universe of the story) so even though déjà vu is definitely a thing that happens in this world, and presumably all the fictional worlds in all your favourite books and movies, it almost never happens to the characters, not the way it happens to you and me.

At this point, I permit you to prove me wrong – if you’ve ever seen this done, I would love to hear about it. Personally, I think it make for a great moment in a show like Seinfeld that occasionally stepped outside the box. “Jerry, I just had déjà vu!” “Kramer, what are you talking about?” “Kakakaka! …Nah, it’s gone. So, my coffee table book about coffee tables…”

What’s left is “déjà vu” in fiction being more or less a figure of speech. That feeling of repetition and familiarity that you can’t quite put your finger on. If I go to my high school reunion and I walk the halls where my old locker was, I could say, “Boy, it was like déjà vu” … key word being like, because in fact, it would literally just be a memory. I’m relying on everyone around me, or the reader, to know what I’m talking about from their own experience.

If, hypothetically, 200 years from now, the human brain has evolved so that we no longer experience déjà vu, and all they had to explain it was references in fiction, I think these hypothetical future-readers would be very confused as to what it actually was, because the phenomenon is not being represented genuinely. They would either think it just means literally recognizing something, or that people from our time literally had psychic powers.

And again, maybe we do… but it’s sure not doing me any good.

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