Deja Vu

When I was a senior in high school, I used to get deja vu a lot. I'm not talking about that creepy feeling that I've been there, done that. This is so much more intense. It is a physical sensation, a process with a predictable progression and cessation. It starts with the standard "wait this looks familiar" thoughts. Then my head feels like a camera that does one of those funky shots where they zoom way in something, back out very quickly, zoom in again then back out to normal. It will do that on 3 or 4 key elements in my sight or sound environment accompanied by screaming in my head listing the things that are the same and the things, if any, that are different. Then my chest tightens up. My stomach turns to ice and the cold radiates succinctly out to encompass my entire chest and abdomen. By back muscles tense and spasm, my stomach cramps like I've going to vomit and my head gets that hideous pressure like sneezing violently with severely clogged sinuses. The muscle spasms ease off but the pressure in my head swells and ebbs and swells and ebbs and swells and ebbs. Then everything relaxes like a wave rolling back off the beach into the ocean. Usually it leaves behind a headache, sometimes that headache is a full-blown migraine.

Like I said, I used to get this A LOT in high school. And it was always followed within an hour by a skull-crushing migraine. Then they eased off and I didn't get any for a couple of years. When I was pregnant with Kid-2, they returned with a vengeance, but they were peculiar because instead of a visual zoom on specific elements of interest, there was a hand motion that seemed to be associated with it, a thought and feeling of it being a toggle of some kind. It too was followed by the crippling migraines. Those lasted for about 3 months towards the end of my pregnancy (like months 6, 7, and 8). Then they disappeared again. Since then, I have gotten the deja vu rarely, but I have gotten it.

At one point during my research on migraines, I was reading about the aura preceding a migraine that a lot of people get. I had always thought the aura referred to seeing lights and such. But I found that these auras can be any sense: seeing lights or getting light-sensitive, hearing sounds like birds or bells or someone's voice, smells like lemons or flowers, feeling the touch of a specific fabric against your skin (that isn't there) or just a feeling pressure on your skin where there is none, or tasting something in your mouth like iron or strawberries. While visual auras are by far the most common before migraines, the others are well-documented also.

So I got to thinking about this deja vu I always got right before my migraines and I wondered if it was a kind of aura, like temporal instead of visual. It messes with my sense of time and space. It always made sense to me. So I kind of accepted that and moved on.

But now the deja vu is back, again with a vengeance. Daily, sometimes twice a day, it comes on stronger than it ever was in high school and in '97. And about the half the time a nasty migraine follows. But only half the time... And this time it is accompanied by major panic attacks, the kind with cold sweats and spazzing heart rhythms and hyperventilating and sometimes even crying.

So what is this? Where it is coming from? Why is affecting me this way? What should I do to make it stop? Why do I feel like it is somehow... I dunno, important?






Okay. I tried to find a song and a video to put with this but the only song I could come up with is Again and Again by The Bird and The Bee (off the Grey's Anatomy Season 3 Soundtrack) and the only videos I could worth watching were Grey's fanvids. Somehow that didn't fit the concept so I gave up... Let's try a couple of quotes instead:

We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time - of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances - of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remember it! --Dickens in David Copperfield - chapter 39


Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before. -- Steven Wright

This is like deja vu all over again. -- Yogi Berra