My stomach grumbled, reminding me that it had yet to receive dessert.

I leaned back in my chair toward LEGO-Kong and opened a grey panel framed in clear-amber singles, remembering that I’d left a stack of Thin Mints inside it while playing Simon with Patton the other week. I retrieved them and pawed three or four into my mouth, then began my work in earnest. The upcoming search terms on my list:

dream transference

fugue states

drive-by hypnosis

wakeful inception

I scoffed. First at the list and then at myself. I’d searched them all a dozen times, returning to them every few months to check for anything new. It was a sad state. I had ventured beyond the realm of science and into a zone of pure speculation and fantasy. My evenings were a slow crawl along the perimeter of the dark web among self-identified warlocks and thaumaturges, the legitimately insane, and support communities for “space hamsters” who claim to have been probed by aliens – or who, in most cases, were looking to become probed. To each their own.

I spent a few minutes on the first search term, running through ten or so pages of hits, but it was the same old garbage I’d seen before. Sadly, most of the entries were from lonely people hoping to have an extra-normal experience rather than seeking answers for them. Sometimes I felt contempt for them. Other times I couldn’t explain why I was any different. Loneliness doesn’t discriminate.

I closed the tab and dropped my hands from the keyboard in disgust. Disgust at myself for getting to this point, scavenging the dregs of the web in the hope that I might stumble upon an answer, unable to quit until I did. It was like having a thorn in my brain. It had to stop. I had to make it stop. I pushed away some darker notions with a trio of cookies.

I opened a new tab and headed to a particularly marginal forum hoping to find something that might spark a new angle.

The site itself was pretty shady, allegedly focused on abnormal psychology only with no actual psychologists present. Plenty of abnormal opinions, though. I clicked through to a sub forum entitled Déjà Who?

Déjà Who? was the place devoted to the myriad phenomena involving the intersection of the present by past lives, future lives, other people’s lives, imaginary lives, or hallucinated lives. It was never so fruitful as it was entertaining.

Most of the thread titles were purple, meaning that no new posts had been made since I’d last checked the site a few weeks back. One, though, was blue. Right at the top. I went to the kitchen for more cookies. Returning to my seat, I tapped the link and lifted a cookie column from the package, tonguing one off the top for energy. The page rendered and the new post appeared. It was by a user called EarthrBro_99.

I am hoping to find someone who can help me understand... myself. It’s weird to say it out loud, or to type it, but here goes: I know things I shouldn’t know – I can’t figure out how I know them. They feel like memories, but they aren’t. Or they aren’t mine, anyway. My brain is just constantly serving up crazy facts that I never learned. It’s mainly this odd pairing of geology and history of burlesque. Yet, I don’t have any experience in either of these areas. Ask me anything about either topic and I can answer it without Googling. What is the chief amphibole mineral found in the Murphy Belt? Easy: anthophyllite. Burlesque was invented as a way of making fun of “high class” entertainment like opera. Comes from the Italian word burlesco, which means “a joke”. Who cares, right? Like I said, I have no idea how I know this! Oh, I also sometimes get a whiff of super detailed dog show competition knowledge. Did you know that in order to compete at the highest levels, a beagle must show a “cheerful” disposition while a poodle must appear to be “proud”? I own a fucking cat! Anyone?