Sometimes, it feels like some memories, habits, or even fears don’t quite belong to this life, as if we’re living a draft rewritten by something bigger. Is it just déjà vu, or could there be “edits” from other versions of ourselves? The idea of reincarnation usually sounds mystical, but what if it’s more like being re-drafted, not starting over, just arriving again with more (or less) memory? Curious to hear your thoughts:
Can identity survive “edits”?
Have you ever felt you were carrying memories that don’t feel fully your own?
Is self just a story that keeps getting revised?
Yes! I feel, and think about, what you're describing pretty often. My theory is that we're taking notice of the "quantum" way our subconscious operates and communicates with our conscious mind. The subconscious collects data, in all its forms, and curates a more or less cohesive world for us. But it has limits, especially when it comes to memory, so it tends to compress memories down to smaller and smaller packages of data until it reaches its smallest form (basically an image) or deletes the memory completely. I think the subconscious has a system for deciding which memories are integral to your self image (for continuity in your self-story), so there are tons of memories sitting in data banks as images. If they're accessed, the subconscious will recreate/approximate the memory using context from other fully compressed images of the same period of time. It's not the actual memory, but the subconscious is so good at piecing context clues together that it's able to reproduce a convincing recreation 99% of the time.
Some of us are highly internal people, who naturally develop and spend a lot of time in our rich inner worlds. We spend a lot of time introspecting, so some of us take notice of this background process. It's one of those "once you see it you can't unsee it" kind of things. So, all of that (possibly) being the case, I think the feeling you're describing is kind of a fever-dream/hazy quality/side-effect this process creates. It's not a perfect system, but it works well enough that most of us never notice it.