I’m another.
It’s yet to recurse more than once, at least. I’d actually begin to doubt my sanity if it went too deep.
Citizens. There is nothing to be paranoid about. Everything is perfectly fine. You have never had this feeling before. Should you worry again, please report to your nearest {unintelligible} Center for mandatory rehabilitation. Have a very safe day. The Straight Dope is your friend.
I … have a vague feeling that I have heard that message before.
Strange.
I’ve never had deja vu before, so it’s hard for me to imagine. I mean, if you were riding through your neighborhood, why wouldn’t you remember riding through it before?
All the time!!
I started getting it frequently around age 11-12. It comes and goes, but some days it feels like I’ve done almost everything before. It’s extremely annoying.
What you “remember” in a déjà vu is everything* about the situation. Your own thoughts, the color, speed, timing of a passing car, the exact sounds of children playing, etc. You don’t remember exactly where you have experienced it before (since, well - you haven’t really experienced it before), it is like your sensory inputs and thoughts pass through your brain’s main storage area(s) before reaching the concious mind. That way it feels like you are pulling everything out of your memory the instant it happens…
In the fourth grade, my class was performing some song for the school’s Christmas concert, and my job was to play the blocks (wooden blocks with a metal bar attached, played with a pair of mallets. Kind of like a glockenspiel or a set of vibes, but completely portable because they were not fixed in a frame. We’d rehearsed it several times. It was easy since I played piano and they were sort of like a piano for idiots, if you played the piano keys with a mallet). The blocks were kept in a case in the music room most of the time, but were set up on a table on the stage in the gym during our rehearsals.
The night before the concert I had a very specific and unusually vivid dream. I dreamed that next day, when our class marched up on stage, that table would be empty. No blocks, no mallets. My teacher would be mortified and have no idea where the blocks were. And I would say “Look behind the piano” (an upright piano which I could not see behind–and not a place where these blocks had ever been stored before). And the blocks would be there, we would rapidly set them up and everything would be okay.
Next morning, I couldn’t get this dream out of my head. Then, when we walked up on stage to do our part of the Christmas performance, exactly what I had dreamed took place. Believe me, it was eerie.
I guess the dream is what they call precognition or clairvoyance. But the feeling while the teacher stood there being baffled, and I told her to look behind the piano, and the blocks were discovered and set up was exactly described by deja vu. I had the oddest, almost automated feeling of watching myself in a movie and I felt like I had already done this before.
I’ve never had another experience like this.
This happens to me pretty often, too.
But yeah, I don’t see why anyone would be afraid to say that they’ve had deja vu. If I ever experience it I, almost by reflex, say “woah, deja vu”.
… yes, just like Neo.
My former boyfriends mom (who was very new-agey blah blah blah) used to say that when you had an episode of deja vu, that it meant you were on the right path in your life. I started noticing it early on, around 8, 9 or 10.
Sometimes late at night I get a sense of Dejah Thoris.
The feeling that I’ve met this naked woman before.
Don’t know if anyone has posted a good reason that deja vu occurs.
My theory.
I think it’s a live version of a dream. What I mean is, you have a dream… say driving your car or riding your bike down a specific road you are familiar with. That dream doesn’t really upset your sleep enough to wake you, so it sits in your subconscious. When you actually drive down that road or ride your bike, all of a sudden that dream’s footprint comes to the forefront of your memory and you have the deja vu feeling we are all familiar with.
Possible?
I can see you having something happen in reality that is similar to a dream you had, but with deja vu everything just feels way too familiar. I’ve dreamed that I’ve been to the Sydney Opera House, but I doubt that if I go there I will think “Wait a second . . . I’ve seen that person go by on his bike before, and that bird is going to land right about . . . now!”
I still vote for some funky brain mix-up over precognition or a past life though.