I used to think that the whole idea of hitting someone on the head to affect their memory was just a cartoon trope. I suppose I wasn’t clever enough to notice something in the fact that every time I cracked my head really bad I got wicked deja vu.

Eventually I hit my head so hard once (tripping over my own legs playing soccer at summer camp, srsly) that I got amnesia. Anterograde and retrograde, for 6 hours or so. And I was like “huh, it really does work like soap operas” - I couldn’t remember who or where I was, but I knew how to cross the street and speak English and call home using 1-800-COLLECT to save on collect calls.

Tonight I was at the dojo, landed a takedown bad and banged my head pretty hard even through the pads. I got the deja vu, and then I just got this absolute overwhelming rush of multiple specific memories, sensations and trains of thought, that felt intensely familiar. And I was trying to figure out what I had been doing that I was remembering this from, but when I tried to pin it down it made no sense - no, it made half sense, fever sense, enough to implicate human agency in arranging it but falling short of coming together to actually be anything logical - and then I realized where I recognized this stuff from. I had, in that instant, all at once, recalled *all* my dreams from last night, or maybe the last few nights.

All of this insight came while I was still in the middle of a fight.