Have you ever had déjà vu? Have you ever had déjà vu?
I was thinking about the experience of having déjà vu and what you would think had happened, if you had never had it before or heard it described. Would you not tell anyone, for fear of being thought crazy?
I’m also curious as to what age you experienced it first if you can remember.
You already did this poll.
Yeah, I vaguely remember it from last time.
I get vujà dé.
It’s that strange feeling that none of this has ever happened before.
Why would anybody think I’m crazy for feeling deja vu?
Anyway, I do remember one instance - I was likely about 12, 13 and I was riding my bike through my neighborhood when it hit. It was so powerful that I got off the bike and sat for a minute.
Experienced it a couple of times after that, but none so powerful that I remember.
Especially when 100% of respondents so far have experienced it.
I have experienced it a handful of times. I have no explanation for what it is or why it happens, but it’s pretty cool.
I probably get it 6 or 7 times a year.
Not that it comes up in conversation all that often, but I’ve only known one person who’s never had it.
I do find it quite spooky occasionally. I sometimes get déjà déjà vu too, where I feel like I’ve already had déjà vu about something (this is not a joke - it becomes recursive).
Of course – it’s almost certainly a little neurological slip-up. The brain is misfiling “current experience” under “memories”.
The interesting question is why everyone seems to experience the same brain mishap.
I meant more, if you had never had it before and hadn’t heard of it. Imagine having deja vu but not having a clue as to what it was.
I thought it was a momentary lack of synchronization between two portions of the brain that normally function simultaneously.
I have in fact experienced déjà vu, but not in maybe 20 years or so. I’m 48.
Does it go away as you get older, I wonder? Or maybe as you get older you have seen it all before. Hmmmm…
There a couple theories depending on whom you ask. That is the most common one.
Another is that the eyes may get unsynchronized; one eye sees something and it’s filed as a memory, the other sees the same thing a millisecond later and it’s “recognized” as a memory.
It is odd though that most people seem to have whatever kind of glitch or slip-up this is. Guess we still have a few thousand more years before the beta version of our brain is fixed up.
Several of the times I’ve had déjà vu, it seems like I’m just then remembering an extremely vivid dream. Which makes it sound more like a forgotten premonition than déjà vu.
No. The closest I’ve come to déjà vu is having a handful of dreams that accurately predicted some events would occur, but two of out the three events involved people doing something (a friend coming out; another friend hooking up with a guy I liked) I’m fairly sure that’s not really prescient, just subconscious observations. Dreaming that a band would have a concert at my college seven months before they did, though, was a bit odd.
But no, I’ve never had the feeling that I’ve been somewhere before that I hadn’t, or knew what was going to happen before it did that couldn’t be ruled out through reasonable expectations of outcomes.
Sometimes the matrix slips.
No- it’s a glitch in the matrix. It usually happens when they change something. I suggest you quickly call the operator and find an exit.
I get this, too.
Maybe you ARE. I am intrigued by this possibility, since I have had numerous episodes of deja vu or deja vu-like episodes in my life when I actually REMEMBERED having dreamed the scene the night or even a few nights before.
When I didn’t “remember” it (qualified because I know the brain can manufacture the illusion of memory) until during the experience, the sensation was deja vu.
However, there have been times when I felt deja vu and had no conscious memory of a dream but, in the moment, KNEW what was GOING to happen as the episode played out…turning to look at the plate falling that I KNEW, a moment before, was going to fall, or already knowing what someone was going to say, to the word, just before they did. In that sense NOT like a “brain fart”, since had I had a pad of paper and a pen and could write quickly enough, I could have written down these “predictions” just before they came true. 
The times when I had remembered the dream beforehand, as upon waking, (NOT qualified because it was an actual memory, no different from what I ate for breakfast that morning) that creepy sensation wasn’t present (a whole OTHER creepy sensation was, the “OMG, I dreamed this!” :eek:)
As a kid, I used to get those episodes frequently…just stupid random stuff, like walking down a street, seeing a dog run up ahead, a bird call from a tree or bending down to drink from the water fountain, seeing a group of kids pass by and say something I’d heard them say already…you know, just the EVERY detail is exactly the same, as if a tape is being re-played; deja vu. Often I would then “remember” having dreamed it before.
Other times, as I said, I’d recognize something immediately, having already consciously recalled the dream snippet before re-experiencing it.
The most extreme and significant example of this was when I dreamed one night that my husband collapsed on our kitchen floor and I knelt by his left side, while another figure, a male I didn’t recognize in the dream but “saw” as a Dr. maybe, knelt on his right side. The dream freaked me out, woke me UP at 4 am, but then, I was 8 mths pregnant and wrote it off that morning as hormones/stress.
Later that morning, a friend who was in the process of moving out of town stopped by for coffee. We were sitting around the kitchen table and my husband stood up to get more coffee…and collapsed, exactly as he had in my dream. I instictively jumped up and knelt by his left side and the friend (a man) knelt beside him on his right. It didn’t hit me until we were all in “position” that it was exactly what I’d dreamed several hours before.
Anyway, not trying to hijack the thread, but I think it is possible that the 2 phenomenons (precognition and deja vu) could, at least in some instances, be connected. When we don’t consciously recall the precognition/dream, we experience the sensation of deja vu, that inexplicable feeling that we are experiencing something AGAIN that we couldn’t possibly have.
BTW, it seems, not from this thread but in general, that the term deja vu is often used to desribe some vague feeling that something is familiar, as if, “I have this feeling that I’ve been here before”, when the actual phenomenon is so much more…immediate and intense, is the sensation of literally having experienced a series of moments in all their rich detail before.
And this is interesting, too:
“In psychology, jamais vu (pronounced /ˈʒɑːmeɪ ˈvuː/; from the French, meaning “never seen”) is the phenomenon of experiencing a situation that one recognises but that nonetheless seems very unfamiliar.”
I’ve experienced this as well, though much less frequently.