Personal: Time as a flat circle and déja vus

I used to have déja vus.
Over the space of a couple years, between 13 and 16, I guess, while growing up, these déja vus came accompanied with a sense of horrific and terrifying doom.
These days I only occasionaly have déja vus and then when I do, they pass pretty unremarkably.

But back then, they made me feel as if the world was going to end, or as if I had done all this before and it was all heading somewhere horrible.
During these times I moved through a waking nightmare.
Moving through the world, being dreadfully aware of everything I was doing, all my actions playing themselves out over and over again. without me being able to break the pattern.
It became a desperate game, laden with meaning, trying to anticipate where the déja vu would go.
These periods would last anywhere up to a minute and they would occur frequently, especially when I was sleep deprived.

A time of emotion close to terror. A horrible feeling accompanying every action.
I would desperately try to break the pattern of these actions, and instead; they would start to stack up.
So I would try and break their pattern by doing something a 'past self' wouldn't have done. and frequently this would only perpetuate and enhance the feeling.
It felt as if, in past lives, I had tried these same things already.

Naturally this would only terrify me even more, until after a while I would end up just sitting still, rigid in shock and horror, mostly passive, filled with a sense of doom, until it all went away.
Of course, all of this can be ascribed to growing up, to a changing body. hormones and sleep deprivation, together raging through a body under the control of a mind ill-equipped to fit into a world geared to maximum efficieny.

But still, you can never really know.

So when in True Detective, Rust Cohle starts to talk about his 'Time is a flat circle' theory. I sat up and sat waiting with bated breath.

"Someone once told me that time is a flat circle. Where everything we've ever done or will do we're gonna do over and over and over again"

"Ever heard of the M-brane theory detectives? It's like, in this universe, we process time linearly. Forward. But outside of our space-time, from what would be a fourth-dimensional perspective, time wouldn't exist. And from that vantage, could we attain it, we'd see, our space-time would look flattened. Like a single sculpture of matter in a superposition of every place it ever occupied. Our sentience just cycling through our lives like carts on a track.

See, everything outside our dimension, that's eternity. Eternity looking down on us.

Now, to us, it's a sphere. But to them, it's a circle."

"In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow, nothing can become, nothing changes.

So death created time to grow the things that it would kill. And you are reborn, but into the same life, you've always been born into.

Well how many times have we had this conversation, detectives?

Well who knows, when you can't remember your lives you can't change your lives. And that is the terrible and secret fate of all life.

You're trapped by that nightmare you keep waking up into."

"Again and again and again.
Forever."

Now, apparently this theory is based on Nietzsche's philosophising and I don't actually know If I believe anything of the flat circle view of the universe. But it's something that gives an explanation to something that really scared the shit out of me in the past.

A glimpse into the workings of the universe, hinged on, based on, seemingly backed up by the experiences that I myself had. A meta explanation for life. a reason, though not a purpose. In fact the opposite of purpose. A taking away of meaning. Utterly bleak nihilism. But not exactly.
There was still meaning and purpose given to moments of sheer existential dread. a tantalizing hint into the workings of reality. And it's here where the search for meaning becomes meaningful in itself.

 And for me the key is that the déja vus would end. There came moments when I would 'beat' the 're-living'; where I would do something new, that I hadn't done before and thus end up breaking the pattern.

Small victories.

Time as a flat circle.

An absurd notion, yes, of course.
Yes, Yes, but... also: Maybe.

Either way, it's one of the reasons why True Detective hits so close to home for me. It gives a meaning, to something I myself have experienced and it puts it into a grand, albeit horrific, narrative.
Purpose, out of a placing of the self that is me. Though it does place it into a bleak and uncaring, looping existence.

But hey, the Déja Vu ended, when I did something different either out of action or inaction. So, even though it's a drop in the ocean I still changed something. And though we might be placed in the same life and go through the same motions, sometimes things change. And maybe that small change could signal a big one. But then there would also have to be a final purpose and that's something that is very hard to credit.

You know, for all my shitting on King, he did do something very right.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.