What this is clearly about is a false memory of deja vu that recurs
again and again without necessarily disturbing the victim. Although
obviously disturbing, it is likely no more harmful than a nervous
tic. What is curious is that it was subtle enough to not be
recognized before.
I suspect that once a victim is aware of the condition he will
quickly learn to control the impulse as a minor annoyance and that
this is why it has never been established.
It also reminds us that deja vu is not to be trusted anyway, to say
nothing of our wonderful memories. Salman Rushdie has the right of
it in his quotation toward the end of this piece.
Déjà Vu, Again
and Again
By EVAN RATLIFF
Published: July 2,
2006
Pat Shapiro is a
vibrant woman of 77, with silver hair, animated blue eyes and a
certain air of elegance about her. She lives with her husband, Don,
in a white two-story Colonial in Dover, Mass., a picturesque town set
on the Charles River east of Boston. After 56 years of marriage, Pat
and Don have a playful repartee that borders on "Ozzie and
Harriet," and her still-sharp mind is on display in their
running banter. "Don, we haven't had an 'icebox' in years,"
she'll say, interrupting one of his winding stories. "It's
called a refrigerator."
Her short-term memory
isn't quite what it used to be, she says, but it's nothing that
impacts her life. "Her long-term memory is meticulous," Don
says. "She can remember details from our trips to Europe years
ago that I can't."
One day last December,
however, an odd thing happened to Pat Shapiro. She was sitting in a
car outside of a store with her daughter Susan, while another
daughter, Allison, shopped inside. From the front seat Pat noticed a
woman who seemed intensely familiar getting into a nearby car with a
baby. "I saw her last time I was here," Pat remarked. "That
baby did that exact same thing."
Looking up, Susan
thought the comment strange; it seemed odd even that her mother had
been to this store recently. Then Pat noticed another woman, smoking
and chatting on a cellphone. "There's that woman who was smoking
a cigarette, with the scarf on," she said.
This time, Susan
protested. "Ma, the chances of the other woman, who doesn't know
that woman, coming to the parking lot, smoking a cigarette —"
"No, they were
there last time," Pat insisted. She couldn't place when exactly
she'd been there before, but she felt positive she'd seen the women.
Allison returned, and
as they left, Pat noticed two nuns on the sidewalk. They, too, she
said, had certainly been there before.
"Mom, are you
O.K.?" Susan asked.
"I feel fine,"
Pat replied.
Worried, Susan called
her father later that day and asked if Pat had ever claimed to
recognize strange people or places. "Oh, it happens every once
in a while," he said. Susan asked if the episodes bothered him.
"Only when she is determined to make me think that something has
gone on that way," he said.
Later,
though, Pat admitted to Susan that she was having such experiences
frequently. As often as several times a day, in fact, she was struck
with what sounded to Susan like an intense sensation of déjà vu, a
familiarity with a place or situation that — logically, at least —
she couldn't have encountered before. She would claim to recognize
details of restaurants she'd never been to, and occasionally greeted
total strangers as if she'd met them before. To Pat, in such moments,
the familiarity didn't feel like déjà vu. It just felt like a
memory. Like reality.
Take a moment to
remember what happened during your day yesterday. Images and sounds
begin to flash through your mind: people you spoke to, places you
went, meals you ate. One scene cues up another, leading you on vivid
tangents as you cycle through the day. Now ask yourself: how do you
know that you are remembering those images as they happened, not
altering or inventing them? The question sounds inane at first; you
were there, after all. But what is it about those images that makes
them authentic to you? Try inserting a completely false memory into
your day, say that of running into a celebrity. You can picture it,
sure, but it doesn't feel real. Why not?
Memory, like most
systems we depend on continually, tends to fade into the background
when it's working properly. Only when it fails or misleads us do we
begin to ponder its mechanisms. The structure of memory has for
centuries been one of psychology's most intractable mysteries. To the
extent that science claimed to understand it at all, memory was seen
as a kind of filing cabinet in which recollections were neatly
stored, retrieved on demand and occasionally misplaced.
The research of the
last three decades, however, has shattered that metaphor. The
Canadian cognitive psychologist Endel Tulving struck a significant
blow in the 1970's, when he postulated a distinction between episodic
memories — our recollections about our own experiences — and
semantic ones, involving facts and concepts. Knowing the capital of
France is a semantic memory, for example; recalling your trip to
Paris, an episodic one. When we access episodic memories, Tulving
further observed, we don't just call up raw information. We actually
re-experience the events themselves, and that feeling of recollection
is part of what tells us that the memory is real. "Remembering,"
Tulving summarized in 1983, "is mental time travel, a sort of
reliving of something that happened in the past."
Tulving and a group of
fellow cognitive scientists — aided by advances in neuroimaging
technology — began to tease apart the relationships between
recollection and consciousness. They showed episodic memories to be a
product of a complex network of signals, scattered across the brain
and then reassembled, ad hoc, when the moment arises. Some of those
signals, centered in an area of the brain's temporal lobes called the
hippocampus, are now thought to be vital in creating the recollective
experience that Tulving described.
Simultaneously,
psychologists began to demonstrate the myriad ways in which memories
can and do go wrong — not only when we forget, but also when we
incorporate distorted or false information. At the University of
California at Irvine, Elizabeth Loftus conducted an important
series of studies in the 1990's, in response to a wave of "recovered
memory" child-abuse cases, showing that false memories could be
induced in research subjects. In 1995, researchers at Washington
University in St. Louis demonstrated that people who were read a
list of words like bed, rest, awake, dream, wake and slumber, when
tested later, would often definitively remember hearing the word
sleep. Research into post-traumatic stress disorder found that PTSD
sufferers can be tortured by distorted memories of traumatic events.
All of this work converges today on an ominous question: How is it we
can be fooled by memories that are simply wrong? The answer lies not
necessarily in the content of our memories but in the experience of
reassembling and recalling them.
One way to try to
understand that experience is by examining memory's tricks and
illusions. "Memory doesn't just depend on a storehouse of
knowledge, like putting cherries in a bowl and pulling out a cherry
for each memory," says Morris Moscovitch, a prominent
episodic-memory researcher at the University of Toronto. "What
these unusual cases do is draw your attention to something that we
only get a hint of in real life. This is a philosophical conundrum
that has been struggled over for centuries: how is it that we
distinguish ongoing experience from memory, and waking experience
from dreams?"
Pat's daughter Susan
began to scour the Internet, looking for information about her
mother's repeated déjà vu episodes. She eventually came across the
work of Chris Moulin, a neuropsychologist at Leeds University, in
England. Moulin and several colleagues had published two scientific
papers describing something they called persistent "déjà vécu"
— literally translated, the feeling of having "already lived
through" something. The cases seemed to match Pat's condition,
and Susan sent Moulin an e-mail message asking for help.
Chris Moulin's office
is located on the top floor of the psychology department at Leeds, in
an oddly asymmetrical brick building at the center of campus. The
room is cramped but spare, with a small collection of books in one
corner, a pair of soccer cleats stashed under a chair and a set of
framed Tintin cartoons on the wall. Moulin is 32 years old, with red,
close-cropped hair, a matching beard and glasses and a penchant for
jeans and sneakers. Today he's one of only a handful of scientists
studying déjà vu-like illusions, but like most of us, he once
thought of déjà vu as just an occasional, odd event in his own
life. Translated literally from the French as "already seen,"
déjà vu can be, for some people, a strange and unsettling
experience; for others, thrilling or even spiritual. Occurring at
seemingly random times, lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes,
it often comes with a feeling of approaching premonition. Not only
does the situation feel familiar, but a vision of the future also
seems just beyond the searchlights of your conscious mind.
The accepted
scientific definition of déjà vu, put forth in 1983 by a
Seattle-based psychiatrist named Vernon Neppe, is "any
subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of the present
experience with an undefined past." Beyond the definition,
however, the scientific understanding of this "inappropriate
familiarity" remains murky. Religion and parapsychology have
offered their own explanations, citing déjà vu as evidence for
everything from clairvoyance to past lives. Because the phenomenon is
difficult if not impossible to reproduce in a laboratory, though,
researchers like Moulin have traditionally had limited means to
dispel the conventional wisdom. At the beginning of his career, he
says, "I didn't know anything about déjà vu, and it didn't
really interest me."
In December 2000,
Moulin was a postdoctoral student in neuroscience at the University
of Bristol, working at a memory clinic in a hospital nearby in Bath,
when he received a strange referral letter from a local doctor. It
described an 80-year-old Polish immigrant whose wife said that he was
suffering from "frequent sensations of déjà vu." The
doctor had suggested to the man — a former engineer identified by
his initials, A.K.P. — that he set up an initial appointment at the
memory clinic. A.K.P. responded that he had already gone and didn't
see the point of going back. The problem was, as the doctor knew, he
hadn't actually ever been there.
Intrigued, Moulin
started visiting A.K.P. and his wife at home. "He was very witty
and articulate, able to look after himself," Moulin recalls. But
A.K.P.'s wife was frustrated by his déjà vu, and he experienced
other mental problems, including memory loss and confabulation, the
use of subconsciously invented stories to cover memory deficits. His
déjà vu episodes seemed to be "practically constant," as
Moulin and colleagues outlined in a 2005 paper in the journal
Neuropsychologia:
He refused to read the
newspaper or watch television because he said he had seen it before.
However, A.K.P. remained insightful about his difficulties: when he
said he had seen a program before and his wife asked him what
happened next, he replied, "How should I know, I have a memory
problem!" The sensation. . .was extremely prominent when he went
for a walk — A.K.P. complained that it was the same bird in the
same tree singing the same song.. . .When shopping, A.K.P. would say
that it was unnecessary to purchase certain items, because he had
bought the item the day before.
Searching the modern
scientific literature, Moulin found one case that echoed A.K.P.'s,
that of an 87-year-old woman, who, according to a brief journal
article from 2001, "reported that she was continuously reliving
the past and felt that a significant part of her daily experiences
had happened before." Moulin's mentor, Martin Conway, a pioneer
in the understanding of episodic memory, also recalled a paper by
the Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter in the mid-1990's.
Schacter had described B.G., a man in his 60's, who claimed to
recognize people and situations he'd never encountered.
Those cases persuaded
Moulin that A.K.P. was more than an anomaly, and the clinic began
sending him any patients with conditions that sounded similar. A
month later, a referral letter arrived for M.A., a 70-year-old woman
with what the doctor described as pervasive déjà vu. M.A. also
found newspapers and television overwhelmingly familiar, and had even
quit playing tennis, claiming that she knew the outcome of every
rally. Moulin quickly discovered that in contrast to ordinary déjà
vu experiences, in which the sensation instantly seems misplaced,
neither A.K.P. nor M.A. recognized that something odd was happening.
To them, the experiences simply felt like memories. "When we
have déjà vu, we don't act on it," Moulin says. "But
these people refused to watch television, they stopped reading the
newspaper." The patients were what cognitive scientists call
"anosagnosic" — unaware of their condition. They also
found situations to be more than just familiar; they believed that
they were really recalling them, so much so that they invented
memories to justify that belief. They were, to use Tulving's phrase,
time traveling to a reality that had never existed.
The history of déjà
vu is as much a literary tale as it is a scientific one. Writers and
poets have long proved more astute observers of it than scientists,
and mentions of déjà vu-like sensations date to St. Augustine, who
wrote of "falsae memoriae" in A.D. 400. Sir Walter Scott
described it as "a sense of pre-existence," and Dickens,
Tolstoy and Proust each explored it in prose.
Among scientists, déjà
vu has traveled under a variety of names, including "paramnesia"
and "phantasms of memory." The first flurry of research on
the topic occurred in France in the 1890's, when prominent
psychologists debated fine distinctions between various paramnesias.
At a scientific meeting in 1896, the neurologist F. L. Arnaud
proposed that scientists unify their descriptions under a single
term, "déjà vu." He also recounted the unusual case of
Louis, a 34-year-old who had recovered from cerebral malaria. Louis,
as the Cambridge psychiatrist German Berrios wrote in a summary of
Arnaud's work, "showed 'the first symptoms characteristic of
déjà vu' when he started claiming that he could recognize certain
newspaper articles that he said he had read previously." Louis
felt that he "recognized" nearly every experience, a
sensation he described as "I am living in two parallel years."
Arnaud even took Louis to a funeral (Louis Pasteur's, as it happened)
to see if he would claim to have remembered it. He did.
With the rise of
behaviorism in the 20th century, déjà vu research largely faded
into obscurity. Freud postulated that the sensation was caused by the
similarity of a present situation to a suppressed fantasy but
declared the phenomenon too confusing to investigate. What studies
have been done rely on questionnaires about past déjà vu
experiences. Such surveys show that between 30 and 90 percent of
people experience déjà vu at some point in their lifetime. Alan
Brown, a psychologist at Southern Methodist University and the author
of "The Déjà Vu Experience," the most comprehensive book
on the topic, pegs the proportion at about two-thirds of the
population.
Researchers suggest
that déjà vu isn't experienced until the age of 8 or 9 at the
earliest, indicating that the phenomenon may require a certain level
of brain development to either experience or describe. But once déjà
vu begins, it becomes more frequent through our teens and 20's, and
is more likely to happen when we are tired or stressed. Surveys show
that the episodes then decline with age, although scientists are
uncertain why — and the experience of Moulin's patients
demonstrates that sometimes the condition actually increases in old
age.
In his book, Brown
identifies as many as 30 plausible scientific explanations for the
phenomenon, divided into "dual processing," "neurological,"
"memory" and "double perception" theories.
Dual-processing explanations assert, essentially, that two normally
separate brain processes are activated at wrong times. Imagine two
heads of a tape player, one recording memory and the other playing it
back. If the brain begins playing back while it's recording, the
present might feel like a memory. Neurological explanations involve
small electrical signals gone awry. If two signals carry information
from the senses to the brain, the theory goes, a delay in the second
signal might cause it to feel like a memory.
So-called memory
explanations involve the brain's misunderstanding a similarity
between the present situation and an actual, true memory.
Encountering a chair that resembles one from your grandmother's
living room, for example, could trigger a feeling that a new place is
somehow familiar. Under "double perception" explanations,
finally, the brain is momentarily distracted after it has already
taken in part of a scene. When its attention returns to the scene
fractions of a second later, it suddenly feels like a memory.
There's no guarantee
that all déjà vu episodes have a single cause, and several of
Brown's categories overlap. He says that, as with a condition like a
stomachache, he "could easily be comfortable with four or five
mechanisms." The essential feature in any déjà vu theory,
though, is explaining the sensation. After all, déjà vu is much
more than just familiarity. "You probably came into my office
and thought, I've seen a desk lamp a bit like that," Moulin told
me. "But it doesn't give you anything like déjà vu. You just
think, Ah, yes, that's familiar. There's no startling sensation."
It was precisely that
startling sensation that A.K.P. and M.A. seemed to lack during their
déjà vu-like experiences. Moulin and Conway concluded that the
patients must not be experiencing ordinary sensations of déjà vu,
but what the researchers termed persistent déjà vécu. Their
hypothesis rested on the understanding, established in the wake of
Tulving's research, that episodic memories consist of two aspects:
the information content, or "memory trace," and an
accompanying experience of recollection. It's that experience, a
little bit of consciousness attached to a memory, that lets us know
that we are calling up something from the past. If someone
experienced that feeling constantly, without any memory trace
attached, they would feel — as Conway describes it — as if they
were "remembering the present." In other words, déjà
vécu.
Moulin set up a series
of experiments to test the theory. In one, A.K.P., M.A. and 19
control subjects were shown a series of photos, some of random people
and others of well-known celebrities. Later they were shown another
series, containing a mixture of the old photos and new ones, and
asked if each photo pictured either a famous person or someone they
had been shown before. In another, subjects were read a series of
words, followed by a mixture of those same words and new ones, and
then asked which they had heard previously. The results were what
Moulin had expected: compared with the control subjects, M.A. and
A.K.P.'s false-positive rates were off the charts. They nearly always
claimed to recognize faces and words they hadn't seen or heard. More
important, they claimed not only to find the pictures and words
familiar but also to actually remember seeing them. Often they even
confabulated stories to justify those recollections. A.K.P. claimed
that one random face was that of a local painter. "I know,"
he said, "because his tie is lower than it should be."
Brain scans of A.K.P.
and M.A. revealed abnormal levels of atrophy, or cell death, in their
temporal lobes. Moulin knew that epileptics whose seizures are
centered in their temporal lobes often experience a minutes-long
"dreamy state" similar to déjà vu prior to their
seizures. Moulin and Conway concluded that their patients' déjà
vécu was similarly located in the temporal lobes, in a "recollective
experience circuit" that regulates the process of remembering.
If the circuit was "continuously active," it would keep
feeding the brain that feeling of recollection, without any real
memory attached.
Could ordinary déjà
vu be a minor version of the same thing, a brief misfire in a
temporal-lobe circuit that sets off the feeling of remembering?
"Somebody like A.K.P. shows that there is this sensation that is
separate from memory," Moulin told me. "If his can go
chronically wrong, ours can go momentarily wrong."
After hearing Pat
Shapiro's story from Susan, I visited the Shapiros at their home in
Dover. Pat warmly ushered me inside, and we sat in the couple's
formal living room. She told me that her déjà vécu-like
experiences started in the last two years, coming and going with no
apparent pattern. Once, a nurse had come to the house to conduct a
physical for insurance purposes. "The first thing I said,"
Pat told me, "was: 'So nice to see you! I haven't seen you in a
long time!' " She laughed — as she did following a half-dozen
other such tales — recalling that only later did she realize she'd
never met the woman before. Generally, she said, such episodes didn't
bother her.
I heard markedly
similar accounts from a college counselor in Glasgow, Scotland, named
Pam. Two years ago, Pam's 82-year-old mother began saying that the
BBC was repeating television programs. She even called a repairman to
examine her set. Soon she was complaining about the newspaper and
eventually all kinds of situations. The week before I met with Pam at
her office in Glasgow, she and her mother had been sitting in a cafe
when a child began crying. "Mum said, 'She's always here, and
always crying,' " Pam said. "I let it go, because I know
it's not the case, and we go to the same place every week."
Like Pat, Pam's mother
is in otherwise good health. "It's sad and frustrating, because
I can't do anything for her," Pam said. "The only thing
that I can do is research it and tell her that she is not the only
one." Like Pat's daughter Susan, Pam found Moulin's papers and
corresponded with him. Both women said that talking to their mothers
about the research seemed to reduce both mother's and daughter's
anxiety.
Moulin regularly
receives e-mail messages from people experiencing something like déjà
vécu, or from their relatives. The stories themselves begin to take
on a familiar ring: the woman who turned in her library card because
she felt she'd read everything on the shelves, the man on his first
trip to Paris who felt he'd been to every part of the city. Moulin
says there may be many other persistent déjà vécu sufferers,
afraid to tell their doctors for fear of sounding crazy. The Bath
clinic alone has found six new patients for a continuing study.
When it comes to
linking those patients to run-of-the-mill déjà vu, however,
Moulin's work is not without objections from the small community of
researchers with an enduring interest in the subject. The
psychiatrist Vernon Neppe, founder of the Pacific Neuropsychiatric
Institute, says that he believes that Moulin's patients are not
actually experiencing déjà vécu, claiming that they don't conform
with the definition of déjà vu, of which déjà vécu is a subset.
"The Moulin research is difficult because there is so much
confabulation," he told me. "It's a different type of
inappropriate familiarity."
Moulin says that he
now regrets initially using the term déjà vu to describe the
patients, as opposed to déjà vécu, the "ongoing" and
"chronic" sensation. Still, he says, "That's what
people come to their doctor and say: their husband or wife has got
permanent déjà vu." Firmly establishing the experience of
recollection that his patients exhibit, he says, will provide the
theoretical underpinning for explanations of déjà vu — regardless
of whether it is a real fragment of memory or a purely neurological
glitch that sets it off.
Another objection
comes from Art Funkhouser, a psychologist based in Switzerland who
conducts déjà vu research and from whom Moulin and Conway borrowed
the term déjà vécu. Funkhouser, who is currently analyzing data
from a thousand respondents to an online déjà vu questionnaire, has
complained to Moulin that using the word "chronic" will
stigmatize déjà vu as a disease rather than a quirk of the human
mind. "The people he is dealing with are being affected by
various forms of dementia," he says. "I just wish that he
would be a bit careful in how he talks about it, so that he doesn't
give the impression that anybody who has this must be sick."
Moulin and Conway say
that the sensation of memory that déjà vécu so aptly illustrates
is just one of many "cognitive feelings," sensations that
help us prioritize and act on our own thoughts. When those feelings
go awry, they produce strange sensations. His latest experiments are
designed to induce jamais vu — translated literally as "never
seen" — the feeling that something familiar seems alien. Or
take the aha! moment, a feeling you get upon solving a complicated
problem. Aha! moments, which a team of researchers recently traced to
activity in the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain, help us
recognize a flash of insight. When we get the same feeling of insight
without actually solving anything, we experience what's called
presque vu, or "almost seen" — a misplaced sensation that
everything makes sense. "I remember having it for cleaning my
teeth," Moulin recalls, "thinking, Ah, yes, at the end of
every day I clean my teeth! That just seems to have import. Like all
life is cleaning teeth."
Trivial as they may
sound, such cognitive feelings often guide our behavior, and glitches
in them can have profound consequences. In his 2001 book, "The
Seven Sins of Memory," the Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter
explores the phenomenon of "misattributed memory," in which
you remember some aspect of an event correctly but mistakenly recall
the origin of the memory. Misattributions, says Schacter, "have
been involved in a number of cases of wrongful conviction of
individuals based on eyewitness testimony." The same subjective
feeling of memory that led A.K.P. to believe his déjà vécu was
real can trick eyewitnesses into believing flawed identifications, or
fool research subjects into believing induced memories.
Conway also studies
PTSD, in which patients are tortured by traumatic memories that may
be laced with distortions that can serve to compound feelings of
guilt and helplessness. Accident victims might distinctly remember a
moment in which they could have turned the car just to the left and
avoided a collision, even if such a moment never occurred. "The
recollective experience is the glue that sticks this all together,"
Moulin says. "People don't think they are making up these
images. They think they are remembering them." Cognitive
therapists, by understanding the recollective experience evidenced by
déjà vécu, may be able to help persuade such patients that many of
their negative images aren't real. The same is true for
obsessive-compulsive disorder. "In order to cure those people,
you have to train them about their memory," Moulin says. "They
keep going back and checking the door, for instance, because they
don't remember well enough having locked it. You have to say: 'Well,
your memory isn't like that. It's just not that good.' " In
other words, there's a limit to what you can expect from your memory.
All of which naturally
raises the question: Why are humans cursed with such imperfect
memories? "Human cognition is incredibly, incredibly
complicated," Conway says, "and you are bound to get
glitches along the way. The question really is, How costly are those
glitches? In terms of survival, having experiences of déjà vu now
and again probably isn't such a big deal. But if you have a déjà vu
all the time, then, like A.K.P., you can't operate effectively in the
world."
Such small glitches
might even have proved evolutionarily valuable, giving us insight
into our own minds. "One of the things about déjà vu in your
daily life," Conway says, "is it does leave you wondering
for about three weeks afterward what happened." Ordinary déjà
vu is so striking precisely because our intellect is fighting against
the feeling of recollection. "It's an immutable feeling,"
Moulin says, "but it's not immune to reason."
Salman Rushdie once
observed that memory has its "own special kind" of truth.
"It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes,
glorifies and vilifies also," he wrote in "Midnight's
Children," "but in the end it creates its own reality, its
heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane
human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."
To what extent persistent déjà vécu itself constitutes a challenge
to a person's sanity, or even counts as a disorder, seems to vary.
A.K.P. and M.A.
eventually withdrew from the world, stopped watching television or
even leaving their homes. But they also suffered from other
age-related cognitive disorders. Moulin is still seeking an effective
treatment for such patients, as both anti-Alzheimer's and
antipsychotic drugs have shown no effect. But he suspects that the
condition could be helped by therapeutic techniques. Preparing déjà
vécu patients for novel situations they are about to encounter, he
says, could actually help reduce the feeling that they've already
experienced them.
Ordinary déjà vu, of
course, isn't a disease, and even déjà vécu-like conditions seem
to vary in severity.
"I think the
persistent or continuous déjà vu that Moulin is looking at is found
in people with normal function who are not disturbed or out of
mainstream," Alan Brown says.
Pat Shapiro, to all
appearances, is such a person. She lives a rich life, her mind
intact, and she claims to be mostly unbothered by her condition. Her
daughter Susan worries that the episodes tire her mother out, as she
tries to puzzle out when she has been somewhere or met someone in the
past. Mostly, the family tries to laugh about the incidents. "We're
lucky that she can have a sense of humor about it," Susan says.
One afternoon in
Dover, in the midst of relating her déjà vu experiences, Pat
Shapiro paused and took off her glasses, looking at me intently. "I
have to say, you look so much like my grandson," she said. "He
has a little bit longer hair, but you look so similar. When I saw you
get out of the car I just thought, Oh!"
"But wait,"
I asked, "couldn't that have just been a déjà vu?"
"No, it was just
that you looked so much like him," she said. My face must have
betrayed a hint of skepticism, and she quickly moved on.
Don came in a few
minutes later, and soon he, too, paused. "I have to tell you one
other thing," he said. "You look so much like our grandson,
it's amazing." I looked at Pat, who smiled knowingly. Later, at
Susan's house, she showed me a photo of the grandson in question. It
was like seeing an image of myself, from a time that never happened.
Evan
Ratliff is a writer in San Francisco and the co-author of "Safe:
The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World." This
is his first article for the magazine.
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