The first time I remember having Deja Vu was when I was riding my bike around the little trailer park my dad lived in when I was a kid. I had just fallen and scraped my knee, and as I pushed my bike back to the house and lay it down in the grass, I had the most surreal feeling that I’d lived that exact scenario before. I had never experienced such a feeling, and I didn’t understand what was happening. My dad was not the type of person to ask these deep life questions to, so I held on to it until Sunday evening, when I would be returning to my mom’s house.
When she told me that it was something everyone experienced sometimes, she didn’t have any real answers as to why it happened. She mentioned a psychic, Sylvia Browne, and how she said, “Deja vu means you’re on the right path.” From that moment on, Deja vu comforted me. It was a reminder that everything was okay. As I got older and saw some of the more rational explanations for Deja vu, I could never buy it. It doesn’t make sense to me that Deja vu is just a result of our brain processing information faster than our consciousness. I don’t want to believe that it’s a simple malfunction of my brain. I want to believe that it means something, that it’s proof of something larger than myself. Plus, when you’re experiencing Deja vu, no amount of rationalization can make it feel any less real. It is so convincing that you’ve been there, done that, dreamed it, seen it SOMEWHERE. It’s not new.
When I was in Colorado, I took acid for the first time. I had no idea what to expect, and Zach’s attempts to prepare me were vague. “You just have to try it. You won’t get it until you do.” That trip was mild. I saw some visuals and patterns in the grass, in my afghan blanket, in my skin. I met a man named Tom at the park we were hanging out in. Tom told Zach and I that we were “radiating beauty.” That was before he knew we were tripping on acid. We sat with Tom and talked for hours. He was 60 years old. A homeless veteran, Tom spent much of his time at this park because there was practically a caravan of homeless people living in it. He rode his bike everywhere, carrying a bag full of tools in case anyone ever needed his help. His hair was white, shoulder length, and he had such a kind, genuine smile. At the end of our conversation, Tom said he had to go because there was a homeless shelter giving out dinner. He invited us along. Not quite hungry, but being wise enough not to turn down a free meal when we didn’t know when we’d get food again, Zach and I walked with Tom the 3 miles to the shelter.
The second time I tried acid was not as pleasant. Tucson, Arizona is one of the most interesting cities I’ve ever visited. Zach and I spent a few months there, hiding from winter weather. From October to February, we reveled in the warmth. We marveled at how much of a difference zero humidity could make. We met many traveling folks in Tucson. Dirty kids, we called them. Dirty Kids have a signature. They’re usually dirty. They wear layered, ragged clothes. They’ve got huge frame hiking backpacks. They usually travel in packs, and often have at least one dog with them. Sometimes they’ve got crystals wrapped in wire tied around their neck. You can often find them in cities, asking for spare change, cigarettes, leftovers. Hell, you might see one digging in the trash for some scraps. These dirty kids are homeless, but they see it as something more than that. Being a dirty kid becomes a lifestyle. You hop from town to town, sometimes literally train-hopping to do so. Others hitch hike, and still others live on buses or in vans. One thing ties them all together though, and that is their keen ability to find each other in each new city they reach.
February in Tucson is a big deal for dirty kids. It’s when the Crystal and Gem show comes to town. This is a huge opportunity to make money. 1) There are tourists everywhere to panhandle and 2) they can sell their wire-wrapped crystals at the gem show. Until February, Tucson had been relatively low-key. Zach and I had seniority of sorts among the traveling kids, because we’d stayed in one place long enough to know the best places to “spange” (ask for spare change.) When we found out new kids were in town, we’d find them and give them the lay of the land. We absolutely weren’t expecting the volume of dirty kids that showed up in February. Suddenly, they were on EVERY corner. Groups of five or more would be sitting on the sidewalks, their dogs sniffing passersby and making them uncomfortable. In a city that we used to comfortably make enough money to eat, drink, and smoke every day, suddenly money was drying up. Not only that, but the increased presence of these unsightly folks also increased the cop presence. They’d come by and give us tickets for sitting on the sidewalks. They’d threaten to put us in jail if we didn’t make ourselves scarce. They put fliers up in store windows, warning tourists not to give us money because we’d spend it on drugs and alcohol (which is true.)
It became clear that we would need to leave. Our spot was getting “blown up” so to speak. However, before we left, we met a group of dirty kids that we connected to more than others. I think one of them we’d actually met before at the Rainbow Gathering in Colorado. They’d just hopped off the train from San Francisco. They had an entire sheet of acid, and they wanted us to try some.
Having done acid once before, I thought I was an expert. The first time went so smoothly. It made life feel beautiful and full. I didn’t know the extent of what acid could do to one’s brain. So, Zach and I each happily took a tab from these kind folks.
It was fine, at first. Mild visuals followed me as Zach and I walked to 4th ave to make a bit of money. He was just biding his time until it really kicked in. Once we were feeling the affects more strongly, we journeyed to a park that was a bit secluded from the busy-ness of downtown. We sat with the group of dirty kids we’d met earlier that day. We had guitars out, and some of them were passing around a metal water bottle full of Steel Reserve. It happened slowly, but I was growing paranoid. The lighting felt off. I was getting anxious. It felt as if I’d smoked entirely too much weed. While I kept trying to brush off how I was feeling, I was getting more and more afraid. I worried that maybe the men who gave us the acid didn’t have good intentions. I mean, who just GIVES drugs away? What if it wasn’t acid at all? I’d heard of research chemicals, and while acid has no known overdose point, research chemicals do. I watched everyone around me, joking around, having a grand time. I realized that I was the only one freaking out, which made me freak out even more.
Two more men joined our group, but one of them in particular caught my eye. In my state, this man looked like a monkey, almost. He had a bald head and MUTTON CHOPS. He kept talking louder than everyone else, and I’d focus on him. Suddenly I felt like he was a joker and that he was somehow in the control center of my brain. HE was responsible for my bad trip! He was conducting it. I had to get away from him. I told Zach I was freaking out, and that we needed to go back to my car. He was clearly disappointed, since he was having such a good time, but he thankfully agreed to walk me back to my car.
I don’t think I would’ve made it if he hadn’t.
My car couldn’t have been more than a mile or two away, but it felt like it was on an entirely different planet. Or I was on an entirely different planet. We walked out of the park, and into downtown. The streets were buzzing with pedestrians, buskers. Bars were blasting music and cars were traversing the thick traffic. I was vaguely aware of my own body, and when I was it was to make sure I was still holding on to my dog’s, Pancake’s, leash. I took in the world around me in complete wonder. I had never experienced anything quite like it. The only way I know to explain it is that it seemed like everything was melting. Suddenly, there was a shift. I looked at a man that was walking toward us and I noticed his shirt was bloody and tattered. Then I noticed that one of his legs was totally severed and he was walking on the bone. Shocked, I looked away, just to find another person walking towards me, clothes tattered and bloodied. I desperately looked around and searched for someone normal to no avail. They’d all been transformed into zombies.
“Everyone are zombies!” I told Zach. He pulled me to the side of a building so that we’d get out of the flow of pedestrian traffic, and he grabbed my shoulders, making me look him in the eyes.
“Am I a zombie?” he asked.
He wasn’t, at first, but as soon as the word came out of his mouth, I saw his skin turn a yellow color. Sores appeared on his face. Somehow, I wasn’t terrified. I was in awe.
“Yes,” I told him. He abruptly turned me around to look at the building. The wall was white, but it was swirling. It was then that I remembered.
I was on acid.
Somehow, as everything was transpiring, I forgot that I had taken drugs. I forgot that what I was experiencing was a direct result of the chemicals interacting with my brain. Relief washed over me as I realized there was nothing wrong with me. Unfortunately, the realization didn’t last long. I was soon spiraling back into my brain, getting lost and forgetting. Every so often, I’d “wake up” again, realization returning, but as soon as I’d realized, I’d sink back into it. It went on like this for quite some time.
In hindsight, and from hearing other experiences, this was likely happening because I was fighting the acid. I had the mission of returning to my car, so I couldn’t fully give in to it. As a result, I was anxiously trying to make the trip go away. I was convinced I was going insane, that the trip was going to last forever.
That’s where the Deja vu came in. In the moments where I was lucid, I was watching the world around me. Tucson was a very familiar city to me, I’d obviously seen it all before. But because it was so familiar, it also felt like I’d done what I was doing 1000 times before. We walked through the 4th ave tunnel, and there sat a dirty kid where dirty kids always sat. The dirty kid asked, like he had asked many times before, if we had any weed.
“No, sorry,” Zach told him.
Oh my god, I thought. I’m stuck in a loop. I had experienced this before! This exact memory already existed in my mind!
I became acutely aware of time and its endless nature. Of its cyclical nature. I realized that everything that was happening had already happened. And it would keep happening forever. For some, maybe this is a comforting thought. To me, Deja vu had always been a comfort. “You’re on the right path.”
But in that moment, that endless, terrifying moment, I was trapped. I was destined to repeat life after life in exactly the same manner. I would spend the rest of my life stuck in that horrible realization that I can’t control my life because fate was already sealed. It had already been decided for me.
Finally, I made it back to my car. Being in a relatively safe place helped ease my mind. Zach turned on some music and it became alive in my mind. It distracted me from the thoughts about the loops, the thought loops. I gradually came down from the acid trip. The visuals remained for hours, but the brain spiraling seemed to be done. I was finally myself again. I couldn’t have been happier to realize that I was not indeed insane. That the rumors I’d heard as a kid were not true (one drop of acid will make you legally insane for the rest of your life!) That my mind was still in tact, and miraculously my body was as well. I tried to explain to Zach the intensity of what I’d just experienced. He could only laugh. As experienced as I’d convinced myself I was, Zach was truly a psychedelic veteran. He’d tried acid countless times, and he even took research chemicals voluntarily sometimes. He knew quite intimately the things I was explaining.
As I was fully sobered up, I drove my car to the closest Circle K to buy my nightly fountain soda. Then I parked in a place safe to sleep, smoked some weed, cuddled up with my little dirty kid family of three. The Deja vu that had once been a comfort, a gentle hand on the small of my back guiding me into a smooth future, had been warped. Its snarled hands grasped my reality and tossed it about, shaking lose any beliefs I held that I’d had life figured out. It laughed at me, laughed at my naivete. Despite the fact it was no longer comforting, the Deja vu was still guiding me. Telling me: You are not on the right path.
Sarah Wallace
March 30, 2021 — 12:54 am
I remember you recounting the story to me when we were chatting… What an experience, so hard to convey the feeling to ones who haven’t tripped, but you do a good job of it. Nice post 🙂
beryan282
April 9, 2021 — 3:40 am
Thank you, Sarah! It definitely is frustrating that I often hear people explaining what tripping is like with an nonexplanation like “you just have to do it!” But there is a lot of truth that you cannot fully convey a trip in words. I’m glad you feel I did a good job at explaining my experiences 🙂