A Glitch in the Matrix

By Cynthia Sue Larson

Neo: Whoa, déjà vu.
Trinity: What did you just say?
Neo: Nothing, I just had a little déjà vu.
Trinity: What did you see?
Cypher: What happened?
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it, was it the same cat?
Neo: Might have been, I’m not sure.
Morpheus: Switch, Apoc.
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: Déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.                                –dialogue from the movie, The Matrix

The phrase “a glitch in the Matrix” originated in the movie, The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, in which the characters Neo and Trinity discussed what Neo called a “déjà vu” when he saw a black cat walk past in an adjacent hallway… and then a short time later, saw another cat walk past in exactly the same way. In the movie The Matrix, the main characters discover that physical reality is not nearly so solid as most people assume–and that there is an underlying Matrix (that appears to operate much like computer code running in a gigantic simulation) responsible for creating everything around us.

Have you had a Déjà Vu experience? 

While the term déjà vu literally translates from the French to “already seen,” this kind of experience of witnessing a repeating sequence of events is not the type of déjà vu that people typically experience. Most déjà vu experiences do not happen hot on each other’s heels, but instead more typically occur some time after one first has an impression of a certain sequence of unfolding events. Such an impression might come from having previously dreamt about what is now unfolding… or possibly from an earlier daydream or other mental impression.

Groundhog Day Effect

Rapid-fire repeating sequences of events like the black cat “glitch in the Matrix” in which an event has no sooner unfolded to some degree than it unfolds all over again are referenced in Reality Shifts: When Consciousness Changes the Physical World as “the Groundhog Day Effect,” with a nod to another wonderful reality shifting film, Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, in which the main character wakes up each morning to find… he’s living the exact same day over and over again.

I’ve witnessed two of these repeating-events types of reality shifts; once at a conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico where a woman walked through the hotel lobby exactly the same way twice in a row, and on another occasion at a friend’s house when someone asked for and received a business card… and then asked the same woman for a business card again. What I found so remarkable about these repeating events is that the dress, mannerisms, facial appearances, mood, and all other details occurred exactly the same way twice in a row… as if a scene in a movie was selected to play all over again.

The interesting observation in The Matrix that such repeating sequences of events indicate that there’s been a glitch in the Matrix due to a change having just been made, leads us to wonder why we’d ever notice reality behaving in such a discontinuous manner.  One possible explanation could be that if we are living in a multiverse as physicist Hugh Everett III proposes in his Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, we might occasionally expect to see such glitches when moving from one universe of possibility to another. If the universe moves in accordance with physicist John Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of quantum physics, each path forward in reality is made based on a kind of “handshake” between a point in future spacetime and one the past, and possibly sometimes we’d see evidence of a couple of different reality selections, one after another.

Many Types of “Glitches in the Matrix”

There are many types of reality shifts in addition to repeating sequences of events–involving situations where things appear, disappear, transport and transform… and changes in the way we experience time. Such reality shifts are often recognized to be incidents of mind-matter interaction (MMI), and are sometimes considered to be quantum jumps–and the explanation for why they are occurring can be found when viewing them as all being examples of quantum behavior on the macroscopic scale. While such things as quantum entanglement, superposition of states, quantum teleportation, and quantum “particles” blipping into and out of physical material form are all perfectly normal at the quantum level of microscopic reality… we also witness many of these same characteristics on the macroscopic scale.

How Do You Shift Reality?

Would you like to find out more about your “glitch in the Matrix” experiences? Please take a few minutes to answer twenty questions on this How Do You Shift Reality? survey

Thank you for reading this article! Chances are good that if you read and enjoyed this post, you’ll also enjoy my books, especially the one I wrote about mind-matter interaction that is chock-full of “glitch in the Matrix” goodness: Reality Shifts: When Consciousness Changes the Physical World