Three Kids in a Trench Coat

Most people are familiar with the idea of déjà vu – that sense where you feel like you’ve seen something before, but in fact have not.

Well, or someone’s changed something in The Matrix.

There’s a term we’ve come across a lot less often – “jamais vu” – “never seen”. It’s sort of the opposite of déjà vu – feeling like something is completely new and alien to you, despite the fact that the something in question is your house, your spouse, your favourite mouse… (Harley sweetie, please give mommy back the keyboard… thank you x)

It’s a common thing to experience alongside depersonalisation / derealisation – that odd sense of, “familiar but strange” is a big part of what makes them unsettling. However, the thing about dissociation is that feeling of “I know I should recognise this but I don’t” is what happens some of the time.

Other times, you straight up get amnesia for a thing and don’t even register as being something you should recognise.

Like the book on chronic pain I’ve read three or four times in two years. And have just got halfway through, only to find a highlight from the last time I read it ‘for the first time’…

I asked my therapist the other week if he’s ever read the book (it’s The Way Out, by Alan Gordon – good book, just difficult material for us). He said, “No, but I know people who have”. He didn’t seem very encouraging about me reading it. We discussed some very specific sounding tips about how to approach the content. I thought it was all a bit weird.

He says that about things we do. “Some people keep a whiteboard and use it for rollcall…”, “Some people keep a journal and use it like this…”

Obviously those things could be true of other people. But in those situations, there’s almost always a moment later on (sometimes later that day, sometimes a month later…) where I realise, “Oh, shit – by ‘some people’, he meant me…”

Sometimes the advice sounds very specific & you intellectually know what you’re talking about should sound familiar but it just doesn’t. Jamais vu. Sometimes it feels familiar, but you can’t put your finger on why on earth that might be. Déjà vu. Sometimes it’s both. WTF – how can it be both?

Well, funny things happen when you dissociate a lot, and a lot of memories get coded weird. That’s my understanding, and it’s good enough for now (I went down a biiiig rabbit hole on this one, too – and that’s why I don’t remember reading The Haunted Self the first couple of times).

So anyway, I don’t think reading the book went very well last time – so no wonder my therapist wasn’t jumping for joy when I was like,

“So I’ve found this book…”

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The thing that’ll really bake your noodle is…

The Matrix Reloaded was good, actually.

I love the whole architect reveal about the repeating loop of the rise & fall of Zion, where each uprising believes it is the first… gods that always felt so familiar to me & I couldn’t put my finger on why.

Yes he’s a wordy bastard – and it fits his character perfectly. The Merovingian too – the computer programs in that series love to construct reality through words, codifying, signifying, quantifying – creating & restricting, controlling, through language. To quote Morpheus, “That sounds like the thinking of a machine to me.”

So yeah, The Matrix Reloaded is actually one of my favourite films – I know it’s not always a popular choice, but as a teenage Hong Kong cinema fan (the martial arts & HKBO gunplay in Reloaded is sensational) & avid reader of philosophy when the first two films released, along with how applicable a lot of the themes are to feeling disconnected from your life, your world, yourself (and trying to understand those, “amnestic loops” we sometimes find ourselves in…)…

…. I should re-watch The Matrix 1 & 2 (not 3, that one actually does suck).

“You’ve got the sight, kiddo – but none of us can see past the choices we don’t yet understand…”