When I was about seven years old I was playing an imagination game which gradually became unusually vivid and complex. In the fantasy I was delivering some kind of technical presentation depicting what looked like electron microscope images of small tube structures and I kept using the word 'microhydraulics' in my speech.

After a long time I snapped out of the fantasy and just sort of stood transfixed, introspecting on what I had just experienced. I realized it was far more immersive than my typical fantasies, even at the time, and I had the distinct sense that a lot of time had passed since I was actually aware of my surroundings. Further, I did not typically fantasize about giving technical presentations, I didn't know what the word 'microhydraulics' meant and I probably had never seen an image from an electron microscope..

Decades later I have earned my PhD in a topic concerning modeling of fluid flow through micro- and nanoscopic media. I have given many technical presentations on the topic. Many of these technical presentations have included SEM images of such microscale flow features. Occasionally I will use the word "microhydraulics" in these talks, even though it is not really proper technical jargon ... because no matter how old I get I can't shake the intuition that I was seeing my future in that childhood game.

Of course, it is a heck of a lot more likely that this weird childhood experience subtly affected my interests over the course of my life and led me to eventually study the field that I studied. However, if you were to actually look at my life story, it would look a lot more like a series of random coincidences which effectively chose my research area for me, so at this point I like to just playfully pretend that what I experienced was a glitch in the matrix.