(Comment also posted on the FORUM)
Sometimes the strangest things take place in my life ... things that really reinforce the whole itladian theory. But sometimes these events are so self-referential that it is as if fate (The Daemon?) is amusing itself by leaving clues all over the place.
The day before yesterday I was travelling through London en-route to a business meeting in Kent. I stopped off at Euston and walked down to Foyle's Bookshop in Tottenham Court Road (probably my favourite bookshop). Foyle's is always a great place to find the more obscure and specialist books. In the psychology section I found two or three books that I hoped to find together with another that I had never heard of It is called The Uncanny and was written by Nicholas Royle, professor of English at the University of Sussex. It was published in 2003. What attracted me to it was that it was a review of the implications of Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay "Das Unheimlich" - the Uncanny - in regard to contemporary thinking in literature, film, psychoanalysis etc. Although quite expensive I decided to add to the pile.
This morning, on my way to work, I began reading it. I Immediately spotted something that I had not seen when I picked it up two days before .... there was a chapter on Deja Vu. I decided to read this chapter first and what I read stunned me!
But a bit of background first. Way back in 2000 I wrote the first version of Is There Life After Death - The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When You Die (ITLAD). Some sections of this original version ended up being edited out of the version that appeared in the bookshops in 2007. However one section that did stay was a particular description of the frustrations (and circularity) that I found in trying to isolate a dictionary definition of paramnesia. On page 276 of ITLAD I describe this. I wrote:
'An attempt to gain a definition from elsewhere was also cyclical; if one looks up the word (deja vu) in the Oxford Concise English Dictionary one will find a reference but no definition. Indeed it refers directly to another entry; that entry being for deja vu! So it seems that having a deja vu is, by definition, an example of paramnesia, which is, by definition, an example of deja vu.'
My frustration is only thinly disguised. I clearly remember the irritation I felt on that day back in 2000 even now. However even at the time I thought it was odd that I felt it necessary to place this descriptive narrative in the book itself. There were lots of similar issues at the time but something (my Daemon?) insisted that this be recorded for posterity.
Why this was so became clear this morning when I read the following (page 173) observations by Royle with regard to the frustrations he encountered when trying to find a dictionary definition for deja vu:
'Both the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) and Chambers (Dictionary) see to it that "deja vu" be defined as 'an illusion' or 'illusory' and both delegate the authority for such a definition to the discipline of psychology and in particular to the psychological concept of paramnesia. Thus in Chambers we read: 'deja vu: a form of memory disorder paramnesia. If we then look in Chambers for a definition of 'paramnesia' we discover with seemingly unremarkable irony: ' a memory disorder in which words are remembered but not in their proper meaning .... the dictionary itself seems subject to some form of paramnesia'
Note the startlingly similarities between my last sentence and that of Royle.
Now could this be evidence of "Future Memory" on my part? That I 'remembered' reading this in 2008 during my last Life re-run was so taken by how Royle illustrates his frustrations with regard to the definitions of deja vu/paramnesia that during my next life (i.e. this one) I wrote it in my own book before I experienced it in this one?
Of course to be "significant" a coincidance has to be self-referential. How self-referential can be that both Royle and myself are writing about Deja Vu ... a phenomenon that implies "Future Memory" or precognition?
Really, really weird!
Sometimes the strangest things take place in my life ... things that really reinforce the whole itladian theory. But sometimes these events are so self-referential that it is as if fate (The Daemon?) is amusing itself by leaving clues all over the place.
The day before yesterday I was travelling through London en-route to a business meeting in Kent. I stopped off at Euston and walked down to Foyle's Bookshop in Tottenham Court Road (probably my favourite bookshop). Foyle's is always a great place to find the more obscure and specialist books. In the psychology section I found two or three books that I hoped to find together with another that I had never heard of It is called The Uncanny and was written by Nicholas Royle, professor of English at the University of Sussex. It was published in 2003. What attracted me to it was that it was a review of the implications of Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay "Das Unheimlich" - the Uncanny - in regard to contemporary thinking in literature, film, psychoanalysis etc. Although quite expensive I decided to add to the pile.
This morning, on my way to work, I began reading it. I Immediately spotted something that I had not seen when I picked it up two days before .... there was a chapter on Deja Vu. I decided to read this chapter first and what I read stunned me!
But a bit of background first. Way back in 2000 I wrote the first version of Is There Life After Death - The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When You Die (ITLAD). Some sections of this original version ended up being edited out of the version that appeared in the bookshops in 2007. However one section that did stay was a particular description of the frustrations (and circularity) that I found in trying to isolate a dictionary definition of paramnesia. On page 276 of ITLAD I describe this. I wrote:
'An attempt to gain a definition from elsewhere was also cyclical; if one looks up the word (deja vu) in the Oxford Concise English Dictionary one will find a reference but no definition. Indeed it refers directly to another entry; that entry being for deja vu! So it seems that having a deja vu is, by definition, an example of paramnesia, which is, by definition, an example of deja vu.'
My frustration is only thinly disguised. I clearly remember the irritation I felt on that day back in 2000 even now. However even at the time I thought it was odd that I felt it necessary to place this descriptive narrative in the book itself. There were lots of similar issues at the time but something (my Daemon?) insisted that this be recorded for posterity.
Why this was so became clear this morning when I read the following (page 173) observations by Royle with regard to the frustrations he encountered when trying to find a dictionary definition for deja vu:
'Both the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) and Chambers (Dictionary) see to it that "deja vu" be defined as 'an illusion' or 'illusory' and both delegate the authority for such a definition to the discipline of psychology and in particular to the psychological concept of paramnesia. Thus in Chambers we read: 'deja vu: a form of memory disorder paramnesia. If we then look in Chambers for a definition of 'paramnesia' we discover with seemingly unremarkable irony: ' a memory disorder in which words are remembered but not in their proper meaning .... the dictionary itself seems subject to some form of paramnesia'
Note the startlingly similarities between my last sentence and that of Royle.
Now could this be evidence of "Future Memory" on my part? That I 'remembered' reading this in 2008 during my last Life re-run was so taken by how Royle illustrates his frustrations with regard to the definitions of deja vu/paramnesia that during my next life (i.e. this one) I wrote it in my own book before I experienced it in this one?
Of course to be "significant" a coincidance has to be self-referential. How self-referential can be that both Royle and myself are writing about Deja Vu ... a phenomenon that implies "Future Memory" or precognition?
Really, really weird!
