Dé·jà vu

 It is a French term for “already seen.” It is that strange feeling you get when you are in a situation, and feel like you've been in the exact same place before, but really haven't; or meet a person for the first time but seems that you have already met that person before, somewhere. Buddhists point to deja vu as proof that reincarnation is real. But our present crop of scientists and researchers admit that they still don't know what actually causes it.

I have had two deja vu experiences and, thankfully, I found down-to-earth explanations to both of them. My first experience was resolved almost immediately but it took more than a year for my second experience to make sense to me.

Scene 1. In June 2001, I was part of an entourage who drove to northern Michigan. I described the details of that trip on my other write-up titled ‘At The Great Lakes On The First Day Of Summer 2001.’ One of our destinations was the idyllic Mackinac Island in Lake Huron. Since the island has no public transportation (motorized vehicles are not allowed on the island), we just walked around. When we reached the entrance to the Grand Hotel, I was mesmerized looking at the long stairway---as if---I had been to this place before!

Scene 2. In summer of 2002, I was driving solo, going northwest along US Highway 101. At that time, this was the farthest that I have driven northward from Los Angeles. I was in the vicinity of Santa Barbara when, suddenly, I had a weird feeling as if I had passed through this part of the highway before---the mountain formation ahead of me looked so familiar. I could not explain it so I just filed it in my mental database under the category UNSOLVED MYSTERIES.

Going back to the first scene, I was at the foot of a long stairway that led to the entrance of the Grand Hotel. The place looked so familiar… Shirley aka Shinar must have noticed my bewildered look and asked me, "Kuya Shem, have you seen the movie, ‘Somewhere in Time ?’ That movie was shot in this island, specifically here in Grand Hotel.” Oh, I see. Every tidbit of my mental processes seemed to fall into their right places.  My favorite movie, that I saw three or four times was filmed here. The added information  heightened my interest to explore the island some more.

In 1983, we had a day of gallivanting around Metro Manila with  Roger Saldia and Sandra Querol and we ended up at the Manila Film Center watching the movie Somewhere in Time. That movie was unforgettable to me for a number of reasons:

§  I like the tune of the theme song and became one of my favorites ever since,

§  I have an intriguing curiosity on the idea of time travel as a theoretical possibility, and

§  Richard Collier (Christopher “Superman” Reeve) met the girl of his dreams, Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour) on the grounds of Grand Hotel on June 27, 1912, of which 43 years later to the day, I was born.

One case closed.

I was in staying in New Jersey in the autumn of 2003. One lazy Sunday, I decided to watch a movie from among my DVD collection. I picked up  an old movie, The Graduate. I first saw this movie in 1968 when I was still a high school freshman. I always remember that movie because it was Dustin Hoffman’s debut and every time I see Hoffman in later movies, I am always reminded of The Graduate.  It was also in that movie that I first heard Simon and Garfunkel’s song Sound of Silence. As the scene moved on to the time when Dustin’s character was traveling to San Francisco in his convertible, the same mountain formation in Santa Barbara that gave me a weird sense of déjà vu the year before, flashed on the screen. It was an ‘aha-moment’ for me. No wonder the mountain formation in Santa Barbara looked so familiar to me for I first saw it in this movie 35 years earlier!

As I look back through my two déjà vu experiences I cannot help but be amazed on the indelibility of the human mind. A momentary scene, a wisp of perfume, an innocent laughter, a casual touch---all these sensory information are processed and meticulously filed in the inner recesses of your subconscious only to surface when a similar information is encountered in another time or a different set of circumstances.