déjà vu: between recognition and forgetting

 Lately, I’ve been dreaming while awake. 

In the past few months, as I’ve been working through my journey of healing, I’ve found myself experiencing déjà vu more frequently and vividly than ever. These aren’t just fleeting moments of recognition - they linger, stretch, unfold like a sequence of images I don’t recall taking but somehow already know. It can last for a really long time too, it’s cinematic, immersive, and deeply visual. As someone who looks for meaning in everything I do and experience, I have to say, these moments make me feel as though my life is finally aligning with a path that was always waiting for me.

Each moment of déjà vu is a quiet confirmation: You are exactly where you need to be. 

Fate is something I’ve always been intrigued by, though my previous mindset of negativity kept me locked in cycles of believing it to be true only when something bad happened. I'd been living in a years-long, depressive 'woe is me' state of mind - believing that when something bad happened, it happened because that was my fate and I deserved it. I never let myself draw that same conclusion when good things happened. In recent months, as I move through this journey of healing, I feel tethered to something more positive and exciting - something beyond logic, something that feels like my story unfolding in real time.

Because I think in images, it’s impossible not to consider how déjà vu might translate to photography. These moments feel like double exposures on my mind - overlapping time, space, memory, and intuition in a way that feels similar to how photographs can hold layers of meaning. It's got me thinking: can déjà vu be captured? Can it be made tangible, or does it exist only in the space between recognition and forgetting?

Even unknowingly, for a long time, I’ve been creating images that feel linked to this experience. Though right now, they exist only as sketches - bits and pieces of a larger idea still forming. The images are fragments of recognition, visual echoes of something I’ve seen before, or maybe even something I’ve always been meant to see. Some feel like glimpses through a window into a parallel version of my life; others, like places I have visited in a dream and am only now remembering. These photographs exist in an in-between space, much like déjà vu itself somewhere between the familiar and the unknown.

It is with hindsight that I can see that a lot of my every day, sometimes 'throw away' images can be compared to this idea of an in-between space. They were made not with any clear link to the 'main' projects I was working on at the time but I felt compelled to take them. Something, something, surrealist automatic writing type response... subconscious... etc. I don’t know yet what they will become, but I feel that they belong to this unfolding inquiry into fate, memory, and the way we move through time.

Maybe déjà vu is a glimpse of what was always meant to be. Or maybe it’s just the mind playing tricks. Either way, I’m going to follow where it leads me, and hope that this is the beginning of where my work will go next. It feels really exciting to be able to find meaning in the images that, at the time, I didn't know why I was taking them. Maybe they are or were past, future, present déjà vu. For now, I’ll keep collecting these moments, trusting they will eventually reveal what they’re trying to say.

What I want to know is - have any of you ever experienced déjà vu in a way that felt really profound? Did it change the way you see your own path? Thoughts in my DMs please!