As soon as I got my driver’s license, I discovered that getting behind the wheel was very therapeutic whenever I got depressed. For some reason, it seemed that I would tend to take these random drives around this time of year. Back then, I would go up into the San Gabriel Mountains, and out to the Antelope Valley. I never really had a destination in particular, but the winding, desolate roads would somehow soothe my soul. It was then when I also learned the particular advantage of driving a car with a diesel engine, which was that if you were inadvertently submerged, the engine wouldn’t die like with a gasoline engine, a fact that may have been fortunate because I had to ford a rushing mountain stream on one of those drives.

One of my more epic journeys was the four-day road trip from Chicago to L.A., which I ended up doing twice. But I’ve done the I-5 run from L.A. to the Bay and back quite a few times, and the I-5 run from S.D. to L.A. and back has become pretty routine. But I didn’t rediscover the aspect of discovery and exploration until this past summer, when my mind was running in whirling circles, and I felt like I never had any time to think.

In August, because of my parents’ predilection for Native American casinos, I found myself wandering around the vicinity of Mt. Palomar. In a fit of complete insanity, I drove out to the Anza-Borrego desert at midnight, ending up on the western shore of the Salton Sea, and then driving to L.A. from there. That may have been the last time I took a random drive to nowhere.

Today, though, I was feeling the need. There’s this sense of needing to get out of here. Not necessarily the physical “here”, but definitely the metaphysical “here” where I’ve managed to imprison myself. So I drove down the Silver Strand, wandered randomly around Imperial Beach, then out to Otay Mesa, up to Spring Valley, through the hills to El Cajon, then back again. I’m not really sure I managed to figure anything out, and it’s certainly not good for the environment, but there is something about the open road that has always called out to me.

One kind of recurring dream that I’ve been having is about places that seem familiar, but don’t actually exist in real life. One of the places I’ve repeatedly dreamt about is this city that reminds me of Pasadena, except that it has a full-on subway and light-rail system that rivals NYC’s system, and that it’s the actual metropolitan center, and not just some suburb. I’ve dreamt about it enough times that I’ve even managed to draw rough maps of it.

More recently, I’ve been dreaming of places that remind me of San Diego, except with major differences in topology, in particular, a fantastical propinquity to the Colorado River. In my dream version of this city, the PCH runs all the way down from L.A. instead of ending in southern Orange County, and the 805 bridge over Mission Valley is a massive structure resembling the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

In some of these dreams, I dream of structures that I’ve never seen in real life, but which I later discover actually exist. For example, there is this old-looking dam which you can see from the new California 125/California 54 interchange that once figured in my dreams before I actually saw it in real life.

Which got me to wondering again about the nature of Time.

Some modern cosmologies posit that free-will doesn’t exist, that all of time already exists, and that conscious perception of the passage of time is really just an illusion. The future is already there, and like the Oracle in the Matrix suggests, you’ve already made your decisions, the only thing left is to try and figure out why you made them.

While there are fantastic ways to funnel information from the future to the presence, such as wormholes and tachyon beams, its possible that since the future already exists, information somehow leaks through our four-dimensional manifestations in space-time.

Which may be what déjà vu actually is, although this is certainly not the mainstream mechanism that most neuroscientists posit.

My most recent experience of déjà vu or perhaps precognition was the other day when I got in the car to drive to the hospital. For some reason I was singing this song from some band that I would be embarrassed to admit to knowing (it may have been Savage Garden or something similarly cringe-worthy) and when I turned on the radio in the car, there it was playing. (Now why was my car radio tuned to a station that would play something like Savage Garden? I’d rather not pursue that line of inquiry.)

Perhaps there was a car that had passed before I had gotten in my car that had its windows open tuned to the same station that my radio was, and I had just picked it up subconsciously (But who would be bumping Savage Garden, for God’s sake?) I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for it.

The thing that I realized, though, is that even if precognition really existed, I bet it would be pretty useless except in very specific cases. I bet most visions of the future are about mundane things whose significance is impossible to determine until the event actually occurs, and all you’ll really be able to say is, “Oh wow, I saw that already!” Getting a vision of the future would be a lot like hearing a few lines from a conversation in which you have no idea who the referents are. When the future actually happens, you might be able to piece things together, but I’m almost certain that that brief glimpse of the future would not enable you to prevent some kind of catastrophe. Maybe precognition might even be widespread, but only crazy people admit to having it because everyone else is afraid of sounding crazy.