It's like Deja Vu all over again...

"It's like deja vu all over again" A famous quote from Yogi Berra. What causes deja vu? I have personally experienced frequent déjà vu. The year after I graduated from high school, I distinctly remember a mind-blowing dream. It’s rare for me to remember my dreams due to the eccentricity and lack of flow. I still can vaguely see the great stone pillars and a lovely pond in the middle. I thought I walked through a gravesite, but yet the tombstones towered over my head. The scenery appeared in my dream like no place I had traveled to before. Despite the august site, I felt a somber undertone from the structures. The dream compelled me to draw a picture. Although I love creating artwork, I have never before or since drawn a picture of my dream.

A few weeks later I went to Washington DC for a week long program. On one site-seeing tour, I felt an incredible sense of déjà vu. The World War II monument greatly resembled the stone pillars from my dream. If I had never been to World War II monument before, then how could I have such a strong sense of familiarity? The feeling astounded me; I just knew they were the pillars from my dream. Pulling from my dream, I predicted that next I would see a road with many trees and there would be a small stone cupola just off the right shoulder. Miraculously, our bus left the site down that very road. Days after my trip finished I came across the pictures I had drawn from my dream. Though similar, they were just different enough for me to question what had happened in Washington DC. Following the incident I delve into a sea of divination attempting to understand the implications of my experience.

One of those divinations were oneiromancy or the art of dream interpretation. For many believers and parapsychologists, dreams possess an ability to see into the future. Many researchers believe in precognitive dreaming or prescience from a dream experience. In 1927, JW Dunne believed that precognitive dreams supported his complicated theory on a serial universe involving interconnected time frames. Dunne’s stated that people frequently lose the minute details of a dream. People’s weak minds only focus on the major details, therefore losing their precognitions. In 1932, Theodore Besterman investigated Dunne’s theory discovering that nearly half of his participants reported having precognitive dreams. The study was thrown out on grounds of being improvable and therefore based on evidence that is not falsifiable. It would seem as though the precognition of those students in the study may have been caused by other means. In essence the déjà vu feeling could be caused by the remembrance of prosaic objects from the past that also happen to appear in a “precognitive” dream. For so long, what I believed to be precognitive dreams were actually déjà vu experiences instead. I debated between whether I dreamt the situation or I remembered something from my implicit memory.

The issue came up in my first year seminar entitled Biology of the Mind. I assumed I wasn’t losing it when another student shared with the class a precognitive dream he once had. I’ve had countless déjà vu experiences since that day and each one I contributed to a precognitive dream. Most of my déjà vu experiences feel as if I remember something from a dream, but more often it feels like a memory connected to nothing. For example, when I remember something from my childhood I can always connect it to the faces of my friends, my grade in school or a family vacation. The occurrence of a déjà vu always brings a similar feeling of remembering, but it isn’t connected to anything in particular. It’s like a thought hanging freely in space.

I assumed that the déjà vu stemmed from a remembered dream stored somewhere deep in my unconscious. Mainly the feeling struck me in ordinary settings. My déjà vu experiences are elicited in mundane places because I encountered a similar situation before, and maybe even dreamt about that situation. Then when I remember the moment from the dream it’s really just a copy of an earlier time. This would explain why it’s never anything out of the ordinary that’s remembered. That’s what made the déjà vu in Washington so inimitable. One possibility is that the colossal structures of my dreams were purely imagined elements. It was just coincidence that the World War II monument greatly resembled the imagined object from my dream. Gestalt psychology explains the monument shared the same shape as the imagined element so I had a deja vu as a result, if that makes any sense (Brown 2004 168). I thought I had never seen anything like that before, so it may have been a shock to the system to perceive an imagined object appear in reality.

I never realized that I was experiencing déjà vu until recently; I just automatically assumed that I was remembering something from a dream. If it wasn’t precognitive dreams, then it would have to be taken from a long forgotten moment in my past. Why did I feel like I was seeing the structures again, if I had never been there before? Then I realized my family had a trip to our nation’s capital back in the late 1980s. It is possible that we visited the site back then and I had a vague recollection stored in my implicit memory. Looking back on it all now I think it may have been caused by memories of the previous trip. Perhaps a part of the déjà vu experience is caused by terse moments long forgotten due to childhood amnesia. Déjà vu does decrease with age, and it may be because our brain is slowly remembering the images forgotten from our toddler stages or have completely forgotten them all together by the time we're octagenerians. Childhood amnesia is a concoction of forgotten memories. Babies and toddlers see and do things that they can’t remember as adults. They have been places and said things that they don’t remember as adults. It’s possible, all those memories are stored somewhere and come pouring out in the first years of life and then decrease as one ages. In other words, we really have been there before, but we just don't remember. If I did have déjà vu as a child, I wouldn’t remember anyway.

Why would it suddenly appear in my dream after all those years? My anticipation for the Washington trip may have caused images from my family trip to appear in my dreams. In my implicit memory, all the moments of the trip were associated with the name “Washington DC”. In the weeks prior to the trip, my brain repeatedly heard the word “Washington” thereby rekindling the old memories that I had of the family trip. It's been proven that the stages of sleep work to help consolidate memory that's why it's important to get sleep before an important test. My dreams slowly pulled those forgotten concepts of “Washington DC” back to my conscious. In doing so, my brain tried to remember things associated with my experience in Washington DC, thus relaying those items in my dreams. The monument for the World War II veterans appeared in the dream, yet slightly distorted from its original appearance. My childhood perspective of the monument distorted my recollection of the monument in my dream. The perspective of a 3 year old would be different from that of a 17 year old. My parent’s probably discussed the purpose of the site as a “monument for the dead”. The negative emotion of the site stayed within my memory of it. This may explain why I saw it as a graveyard in my dream.

Eclectic theories describing anomalies such as déjà vu and precognition cannot be narrowed down to a single explanation. When someone does not understand something it’s easiest to blame it on something otherworldly. My old belief in the paranormal is what initiated my interest in psychology. I use to have a profound interest in the paranormal. I assumed because there were so many abnormalities in the universe that anything was possible. If so many people had these sightings then what else could be the explanation or for my own paranormal experiences. I saw an apparition once during a hypnopomic state or waking from a dream. My friends ameliorated my concerns when they told me stories of their personal sightings of ghosts.

As a child I knew people saw ghosts, but I didn’t know people could perceive hallucinations that their brain could create. The explanation doesn’t make much sense to a child. Children believe their dreams are an escape to a fairyland. I think it’s hard for some people to believe that their experiences stem from an interconnection of internal and external causes. I’d rather blame it all on external causes. It just so happens that these immeasurable explanations cannot be supported or denied. It’s best to keep an open mind on all topics and realize that the majority of life’s phenomena have several contributing factors.