What happens to the “then ME” when I time travel?

The flip-side

As I continue to think about and chronicle the experiences I write about on this site, one of the biggest questions I have is this one:

When I travel to another time in my life, I’m “replacing” the consciousness in the body of that time with another. Our consciousness changes from second to second, if not microsecond to microsecond (or nanosecond to nanosecond, if you will). The “me” that drops into 1976, 1983 or 2000 is different than the one that was “there” before. So what happens to the one displaced?

I think I got a bit of that answer today, when I’m certain that I had a TT event while driving, and it has to do with deja vu, the (usually) brief feeling that you’ve “been here before.” Since waking up this morning, I’ve had feelings of familiarity every few minutes. Maybe two distinct deja vu episodes, once while shaving and the second while pulling out of my driveway and heading to work.

About 10 minutes into the drive, I was taking a different route to the office, after deciding to grab a bagel on the way. As I drove through an interesection (on the green) in Kearny Mesa, my attention was drawn directly to a white Nissan Altima waiting to merge into traffic. I slowed down and made a snap decision to turn into the parking lot the Altima was attempting to leave, I slowed, and as activated my turn signal, I saw the woman driving the car seem to disappear as she bent down to apparently retrieve something from the floor of the passenger side of her car. Her foot must have slipped off the brake an onto the accelerator, because just as I was turning into the parking lot, her car lurched forward into traffic, narrowly missing a car that had just gone past in the lane to left of me. Startled, I glanced in my driver door mirror and saw her head pop back up in the rear window, and her car jerk to the right. She came very close to missing a pickup truck in the far right hand lane, but didn’t. She clipped the left rear of the pickup truck, spinning it to the left. Her car, now slowed by the impact, skidded a bit and then hit the far curb, bringing it to a stop. I pulled my car into a parking space and jogged to the sidewalk on my side of the road, wanting to make sure no one was injured. The pickup truck driver had gotten out, and was stalking toward the woman in the Nissan, who was sitting very still in her car.

I stood there for a couple minutes while the two drivers exchanged information and calmly talked. The pickup truck driver had calmed almost immediately after he looked in the Nissan’s window and saw an obviously distraught woman. It didn’t hurt that a SDPD police cruiser pulled up within two minutes of the accident, either.

As I walked back to my car, I realized that I had no reason at all to turn where I had, and that I was extremely lucky to have avoided the accident, since if I hadn’t turned in when I did, I probably would have broad-sided the Nissan. I also realized that I hadn’t been wearing my seatbelt, something I almost always do. Immediately sensing what had happened, I started searching my memory and have to admit that, thought it may just be imagination, I could see the Nissan pulling out in front of me and feel the memory of tensing before the impact. But that never happened.

Or did it?

Did the accident that I can see in my mind actually happen in another time stream and did I come to this one to make sure it didn’t happen here? If that’s the case, is the deja vu I’ve been experiencing, especially the intense episode immediately surrounding the accident I witnessed, an artifact of the process of my “then me” consciousness overlaying my “current me” consciousness? If that’s the case, then given the number of people who experience deja vu, there’s a lot of travelling going on all the time.

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