Déjà vu

This evening, I had a telescopic episode of déjà vu. First I had the déjà vu, and then I thought, hang on, I've had this particular déjà vu several times before. It seemed to be a gap in my memory, and I probed it like I was a kid probing the space left by a recently departed tooth with my tongue. An impression came to me that at some point, I had tried very hard to cram a particular fact into my brain, and though the fact itself has long since departed, the scar remains. It feels like certain things may be triggering some kind of subconcious panic routine in my brain which starts frantically opening drawers and throwing papers all over the floor in desperate search for this one missing piece of information.

Even stranger is that I have a strong, but almost certainly unreliable, memory of the time and place I first tried to impress this fact on my memory, and a fairy significant part of my brain is reporting that it is not an important fact, but a small piece of detailed astrophysics (either including a reference or a numerical value, something like that) which I have no hope of recalling and which is unlikely to be of very much use to me if I did. However, the damage seems to have been done in my grey matter, and I don't seem able to let go of it. Thinking too much is evidently dangerous...