Paranormal Story Archives
November 2001
– Page 10
Déjà Vu
or Future Memory
by Tom C.
In the mid- 1990s, I began attending college in CSU Bakersfield, California to earn my BA. The campus was being remodeled the first quarter I was there, and so some of the buildings were closed. One of my classes took place in the music building. The rooms here were auditorium-style, but narrow, maybe 20 feet wide, and two and a half times as long. On the first day, I found an aisle seat at the back of the room, near the door. This was my usual mode of operation, allowing me to exit the class as soon as it was over. This would be my seat for the rest of the quarter. I can’t remember the title of the class, but it essentially dealt with modern literature and philosophy. We read books by authors like Thomas Pynchon, and watched movies like Blade Runner. Discussions were usually in the postmodernist vein.
The next quarter I had another class in the same classroom, and being a creature of habit, chose the exact same seat.
Now, those are the unassailable facts. Something strange occurred in the second quarter, and what I am about to relate is only what I remember happening after the fact, although I'll put it in chronological order for the sake of clarity.
The close of the first quarter was followed by a vacation of about two or three weeks. In that time I remember having a dream about being in class at Bakersfield, in the same room, sitting in the same seat as the literature class. I new instinctively, in that dream sense, that this was a different class being taught by a different instructor. The instructor was writing on the board: "Jim likes to do homework…" and I was writing the sentence down when I had a flash of déjà vu. It was so powerful I, froze, goosebumps erupting across every inch of my skin. My heart raced. I thought, "This is exactly like the dream!" Then I woke up.
I told my girlfriend (now my wife) about the dream, and repeated the partial sentence that had triggered my feeling of déjà vu. This wasn’t the first time I’d ever experienced anything like this, but it was the first time the details were so clear. Usually, I have dreams where I experience a sensation of déjà vu, but after the day rolls on, I forget precisely what happened in the dream. These dreams are significant in that they don’t "feel" like dreams. Conversely, I have déjà vu experiences when I’m awake, and usually think something along the same lines as in the classroom experience: "Wait I've dreamed this already!"
So, apart from the clarity and the details, this was nothing new to me. Par for the course, really. The weeks rolled by and school started again. I went back to the old building, sat in the old chair, the dream having long since faded from my memory. The new class was titled “Structure of the English Language.” It was a grammar course, one in which we diagrammed innumerable sentences from the textbooks and from the board. One of these sentences was: "Jim likes to do homework, that is why he goes to college."
Same thing happened; the incredibly powerful sense that I had done this before, the goosebumps, the racing heart, and thinking, "This is just like the dream!" But this time I had proof; I had told my girlfriend about it!
I couldn’t wait to get home that day. When I finally saw my girlfriend, I told what had happened and I said, "Do you remember when I told you about that dream? When I told you the fragment that had been written of the board?"
Nope. She didn’t.
So now I'll never know. Did I really have precognitive episode while I was dreaming? Did my mind fly forward in time, to occupy a future self during a completely routine and meaningless moment in my life? Or did I have a dream about that classroom during vacation that was coincidentally similar to a real event that happened later? Did my girlfriend not remember me telling her about the dream because she forgot, or because that was part of the dream too, or maybe because my mind, so shocked by the power of the "memory," fabricated my recollection of the whole dream?
I’m not sure, but I’ll tell you this: the next time I have a déjà-dream of a teacher writing on the blackboard, I’m sure as hell going to write down his words!
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