Jamais Vu – Never seen before!

“It is not the first time I felt all this, it is like Jamais Vu. I felt it all zillion times but every single time it feels new.” 
― Shreya Gupta

Many times you tell your story to someone and when you repeat it the next time, the person is completely unaware and unfamiliar with it.

The opposite of déjà vu, instead of feeling extra familiar, the thing seems totally unfamiliar. In this case, there is too little connection between long-term memory and perceptions from the present. When a person is in this state, nothing they experience seems to have anything to do with the past. One might be talking to a known person and suddenly the same person seems totally unfamiliar. Their sense of knowing the person and knowing how to relate to them simply vanishes. The detail which one has seen thousand times becomes engaging.

Story time! A man is lying on a grass. A breeze is stirring through a half-opened window, swaying the lace curtains. The sound of someone practicing an instrument can be heard through the window along with the noises of kids playing a ball game. There is a smell of muffins cooking in the next room. Imagine that the young man knows his mother will wake him after a half hour or so. He is expecting then to greet his father who is coming home from a trip. How can we describe the feeling that young man has? It is tinged with melancholy, sleepiness, hunger, perhaps, anticipation, and other even vaguer emotions—feelings that have no name. But that exact overall feeling, indescribable though it may be, is memorable.

Now imagine that same man the same story, but this time he is waiting to meet his fiancé. Suddenly, he is overcome by a sense of déjà vu. The place seems strange but the feeling is familiar. He experiences the sense of familiarity and explains it to himself as emanating from the place itself. The sudden return of a very exact memory—usually, an unconscious memory -- accounts for the feeling of déjà vu. Such a feeling occurs rarely in our lives because the exact sensation people have moment by moment is hardly ever exactly the same in the next moment. Our lives are myriad complex sensations made up of different smells, sights, thoughts, memories, very particular physical feelings.  They are so very many of these very distinctive feelings; they must recur exactly very rarely. 

Imagine this same not-so-young man coming home suddenly. It is evening. There is no one to greet him. His mother has died. His father has not been home for a year, and so the house is unheated. There is a distant sound of neighbors arguing. Suddenly he has a feeling of jamais vu.

He has a complicated, jumbled feeling, perhaps part disappointment, perhaps a kind of emptiness and loneliness, perhaps much more than that. He never felt just this way before in his home. His home seems suddenly to be a different place than the one he grew up in. But the place is the same. The furniture is the same. They are in the same place. Yet, everything feels unfamiliar. It is only because his accustomed feelings are not there.

Have you ever gone through such unfamiliar and strange thoughts? Definitely yes! What’s your story?