Never Seen
Throughout the years, I’ve noticed a small degree of this in my life. And about a week ago, something a bit more… interesting happened.
I was driving down a road I travel almost every day, and suddenly the scene lost all familiarity. I didn’t know where I had been, where I was going, where I was, or anything. It passed after about 20 seconds, but left me worried somewhat.
Could it have been a harbinger of things to come?
I surely do hope not. But with the way things are going for some people around me, who knows.
The Opposite of Déjà Vu Exists And It's Even Stranger
Try this: write your own name on a scrap of paper. Now write it again. And again – ten, twenty, thirty times in a row, as fast as you can manage.
Somewhere around the middle of that list, there's a decent chance something strange will happen.
The letters will start to look off.
The word will stop reading like a word at all – more like a string of marks someone is making you copy out for reasons you can no longer quite recall.
For a second or two, your own name might feel like it belongs to somebody else.
That flicker of weird unreality has a name, and it's the mirror image of a much more famous one.
We all know déjà vu – the eerie conviction that a brand-new moment has happened before.
The opposite of déjà vu gets far less attention: a familiar face, word, or place suddenly striking you as wrong, alien, or unreal, even though you know perfectly well it isn't.
Psychologists call it jamais vu – literally, "never seen."
It shows up in strange, small ways.
