While reading this column I realized that Cecil doesn’t believe in the possibility that people COULD have deja vu. Actual things that they know they have seen before, or have done before. I am one of those people. Many times I have dreampt something. Something as insignificant as sitting at the computer typing up a paper, and paying somewhat attention to what is shown that I’m typing on the screen. Then a few days, or even months later, I’ll be typing up that paper I saw in my dream, or having an online conversation through AIM with a friend, with the exact words, the exact smilies everything on the screen. Or having the same conversation with someone I love, my mother or fiance’. This happens to me all the time. So why dismiss the possibility of people able to glipse breifly into the future? It happens while I sleep, so perhaps it’s my sub concious.
For example of a Deja Vu I recently had…
About a year ago I dreampt that I was sitting on the edge of my mom’s couch, gripping my back in pain, and trying to massage it out. Looking down at my belly for an unknown reason at the time, I noticed it was much larger than it usually is, and realized, that I’m pregnant. (At the time I had the dream I was 18). I look up at the TV to see a show with characters I’ve never seen before come back on the station ABC.
Last week, I was sitting on the edge of my mom’s couch rubbing the sting out of my back, because I’m 37 weeks pregnant. I feel the baby kick, 'causing me to look down at my belly, then I look up at the TV which has the TV show “Lost” coming back on ABC. I immediately knew that I had seen this before, but couldn’t have because this is my first time being pregnant.
I am completely serious about this, and have never nor will I ever lie about something like this.
*slight edit to my post, which I didn’t realize that typing too fast I accidentally wrote “I have nor will I ever lie about something like this” I meant to type, “I have NOT nor will I ever lie…” :smack: but we all make mistakes right? *
With all due respect, how do you know that this has happened to you? Have you ever had such a dream, written it down, and then later compared the written notes to the actual event? It sounds like all you have is memories, and as Cecil pointed out, memory is a malleable thing. So, you’re having a conversation, and you have a memory of having had that conversation in a dream years before. How do you know that the memory actually comes from years before? It’s quite possible that a memory sprang into your head right at that instant of events which didn’t actually happen.
Yes actually I do. I do write down my dreams, ever since I realized that these type of things happen to me. I’ve got about four notebooks filled with dreams over the past two years. If I had a scanner, I’d offer to show you a few of them… but I don’t have the money to afford one.
Another Deja Vu experiencer chiming in, with a medical twist. I’ll have often the
feeling that what I’m doing or experiencing is eerily familiar, as though I had dreamt, or lived it before. These feelings are rather scarier than normal, for me, because they’ve immediately preceeded epileptic seizures. But not for a year and half with the new meds, bless the wood sprites of seizure prevention. (knock knock).
So, are these just ‘complex partial seizures’ that don’t always flash over into grand mal, or are some of us living our lives non-sequentially, jumping about Chronistically, keeping only tatters of memory when we suddenly skip forward, or back?
To address the OP, I don’t think you are describing “The déjà vu phenomenon.” Cecil writes:
emphasis mine
That you are able to recall the previous event, and that you knew when you were having the dream that there was something unusual about it means that you weren’t experiencing déjà vu.
As for recalling previous posts, I might suggest déjà signalé. The french have already played too big a part in this though… maybe fijado ya or già inviato
For what it is worth, the general connotation of Deja vu is a fleeting recognition of a previously unknown memory.
To dream something then to later have it come true would fall into the premonition category.
I too am a writer and believe in reincarnation, but putting that aside, who on this earth really has the ability to judge the existence or not of Deja vu or premonitions…
Open your dream diary, writergirl and compare the entry to the exact details of what happened subsequently. Did you really wrote all those details down, or if there is a more convincing neuropsychological explanation? Without the relevant information, my guess is that as you simply experienced deja vu. This occurs when the parahippocampal gyrus, which judges “familiarity”, briefly treats the incoming sensory input as incredibly familiar (sometimes triggering epilepsy). To explain this malfunction, we think “Wow! I must have dreamed this exact thing!”.
These experiences can be incredibly convincing, to the extent that we say to ourselves “if I’d written that dream down exactly, I could prove I could see the future!”. But the absolutely essential point is that we didn’t write it down (or, at least, whatever dream we correlate it with which we did write down is far more vague than the subsequent event). This is why I’d be very interested to see exactly what you did write down: I suspect the actual entry might surprise you as well.
I’m surprised no one has referenced Georfe Carlin’s “Vuja de”…the feeling that none of this has ever happened before!
Jokes aside I too would be interested in writergirl making a very close and critical inspection of her dream journals and compare them with what actually happened. A journal entry of, “I was talking with George on AIM” is not specific enough. The actual content of that dream communication however would be of great interest. As mentioned however this falls more into precognition than deja vu if writergirl is actually pulling this off.
I remember an article ages ago in Omni magazine on how to control your own dreams and among the first steps in this was to make yourself realize you were dreaming in the first place (while actually still dreaming). One way they proposed was to get in the habit of reading various things at random during your normal day, looking away for 30 seconds or so and then re-reading what you just read. Supposedly if this is made a habut you will eventually find yourself doing the same thing in a dream but the trick is that in a dream when you re-read something it will not be that same as what you read before thus promting your mind to recognize the dream as a dream which you can then exert some control over. The point of all of this is interest in what writergirl is writing in her dreams and if that can be extracted back into the real world or if a dream conversation (be it AIM or whatever) is as malleable as the Omni article suggested.
As a side note I told my girlfriend at the time about this article and she thought it was interesting enough to try. Some time later she called me mildly miffed that she finally had a dream where she remembered to go read something but in her dream she could not find a single thing to read…anywhere. Not a cereal box, soda bottle, book, magazine or whatever. She said she spent an entire dream session running around looking fro something to read and was thwarted making for a not very fun dream which of course was my fault.
Luckily, Cecil covered the idea, sans George Carlin:
I cannot read in my dreams. Whenever I look at reading material, it looks like my eyes are unfocused; some letters and some squiggles and some fuzzy what’s’it’s. That does make me realize I’m dreaming sometimes, but I usually wake up or my dream stalls.
As someone who remembers dreams very vividly, I have had this type of thing happen to me several times. I don’t necessarily think that it is deja vu, premonition, or what ever you want to call it. I always just kind of called it chance. These occurances usually are only seconds long and I figure with all the time that I have dreamed, and all the dreams that I have had there is a pretty good chance that at one point in one of these dreams I was sitting down writing a paper for a certain class and I didn’t know the definition of some word, or something like that.
writergirl said that her dream occured about a year before the incident happened. How many dreams have you had since then that didn’t come to pass?
