Do you ever wonder why we experience déjà vu? Why we have such vivid dreams and sometimes they feel so familiar? What if they are the experiences of our variants from other timelines? As crazy as that sounds, it’s technically not far fetched… I mean Marvel has basically laid out the structure for that possibility…
Honestly, as a thought experiment, it’s a fascinating one—and the interesting part is that you can build a surprisingly coherent philosophical/science-fiction framework around it.
The key distinction is: there’s no scientific evidence that déjà vu or dreams are experiences leaking over from alternate timelines. But the idea isn’t completely disconnected from concepts that physicists and philosophers have actually wrestled with.
The weird part: déjà vu
Déjà vu is usually explained as a quirk of memory and familiarity—your brain generates the sensation “I have experienced this before” without being able to retrieve an actual memory.
But imagine, purely hypothetically, that there are branching timelines.
You encounter a situation in Timeline A. Somewhere else, a variant of you encounters something sufficiently similar in Timeline B. If somehow information could cross between branches—even incredibly subtly—you might experience familiarity without context.
You wouldn’t remember what happened. You’d simply get that bizarre: I’ve been here before.
And that’s exactly what makes the idea so seductive.
Dreams get even more interesting
Dreams already operate in a strange space. Your brain can construct people, places, conversations and entire narratives that you’ve never consciously experienced.
And occasionally you dream something incredibly specific—a house, a conversation, a street you’ve never seen—and then months or years later encounter something that feels eerily identical.
The conventional explanation is that our brains are extraordinarily good at pattern construction and retrospective matching. We have millions of memories and associations operating below conscious awareness.
But what if some dreams aren’t predictions or creations, but fragments?
Not visions of the future.
Experiences from another version of you.
That’s a much cooler premise.
And this is where Marvel actually gives us a useful fictional framework. Marvel’s multiverse isn’t scientifically established, obviously, but it takes a real philosophical/scientific question and turns it into narrative machinery: the basic idea is that multiple versions of reality can exist simultaneously, with different versions of the same person making different choices.
Marvel then adds something interesting: variants can sometimes experience consequences or knowledge originating outside their own reality.
That’s where this gets really intriguing. Because suppose consciousness isn’t entirely isolated between variants. You wouldn’t necessarily get full-blown telepathy between universes. It could be something much weaker—something like statistical bleed-through.
A feeling.
A fragment of a dream.
An inexplicable familiarity.
A sudden emotional response to a person you’ve never met.
A place you’ve never visited that somehow feels like home.
A song you’ve never heard that produces an intense sense of recognition.
Most of the time, you’d dismiss it. But occasionally you’d encounter something so specific that you’d think: “How the hell did I know this?”
And that is where the science-fiction premise gets really good.
There’s also a philosophical rabbit hole underneath this.
If infinite—or even an enormous number of—universes exist, then there could theoretically be versions of you who made almost every conceivable choice.
There’s a you who took the other job.
A you who married someone else.
A you who moved away.
A you who never became a writer.
A you who did.
A you who is living an almost identical life but made one tiny decision differently twenty years ago.
And if consciousness somehow has a connection across those branches… maybe déjà vu isn’t remembering your past. Maybe it’s remembering yourself.
That’s not established physics.
But as a premise?
That’s the kind of idea that could make a very good story.
Hhhmmmm…
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