That strange feeling...

An interesting comment by a kindly visitor to our blog, Kev (see the previous post), mentioning "eerie half forgotten memories of childhood like a person a place or a TV show, music. Things that were but also never were" (our emphasis) made us realise that such feelings have never been explicitly discussed here.

If you have such feelings yourself, there is a text that offers a tentative explanation of such feelings, fragments of dream-like memories, and fleeting shadows of a vision. As a matter of fact, the text has been the subject of an entry in this very blog, but it is likely that many have missed it.

It is a long text, and beautifully written, by Philip K. Dick. 

It is not science fiction (although it does mention it).
And it is not for readers afflicted with a short attention span.

But most of the people who are seriously interested in the topics discussed here probably are unlikely to suffer from it.

Here's the part that might be of interest to those harbouring the feelings described by Kev:

I submit to you that such alterations, the creation or selection of such so-called "alternate presents," is continually taking place. The very fact that we can conceptually deal with this notion -- that is, entertain it as an idea -- is a first step in discerning such processes themselves. But I doubt if we will ever be able in any real fashion to demonstrate, to scientifically prove, that such lateral change processes do occur. Probably all we would have to go on would be vestiges of memory, fleeting impressions, dreams, nebulous intuitions that somehow things had been different in some way -- and not long ago but now. We might reflexively reach for a light switch in the bathroom only to discover that it was -- always had been -- in another place entirely. We might reach for the air vent in our car where there was no air vent -- a reflex left over from a previous present, still active at a subcortical level. We might dream of people and places we had never seen as vividly as if we had seen them, actually known them. But we would not know what to make of this, assuming we took time to ponder it at all. One very pronounced impression would probably occur to us, to many of us, again and again, and always without explanation: the acute, absolute sensation that we had done once before what we were just about to do now, that we so to speak lived a particular moment or situation previously -- but in what sense could it be called "previously," since only the present, not the past, was evidently involved? We would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present, perhaps in precisely the same way, hearing the same words, saying the same words. . . I submit that these impressions are valid and significant, and I will even say this: Such an impression is a clue that at some past time point a variable was changed -- reprogrammed, as it were -- and that, because of this, an alternate world branched off, became actualized instead of the prior one, and that in fact, in literal fact, we are once more living this particular segment of linear time. A breaching, a tinkering, a change had been made, but not in our present -- had been made in our past. Evidently such an alteration would have a peculiar effect on those persons involved; they would, so to speak, be moved back one square or several squares on the board game that constitutes our reality. Conceivably this could happen any number of times, affecting any number of people, as alternative variables were reprogrammed. We would have to go live out each reprogramming along the subsequent linear time axis, but to the Programmer, whom we call God -- to him the results of the reprogramming would be apparent at once. We are within time and he is not. Thus, too, this might account for the sensation people get of having lived past lives. They may well have, but not in the past; previous lives, rather, in the present. In perhaps an unending repeated and repeated present, like a great clock dial in which grand clock hands sweep out the same circumference forever, with all of us carried along unknowingly, yet dimly suspecting.

Do not miss the rest of it.
Science fiction sometimes can come closer to science than to fiction.