Dejavu

HashSlinging

I hope someone knows what I'm talking about..

I'm always having dejavu, I'd day dream about something and a couple of months later I'd be in that situation. Its really freaky.

Am I going mad. Once I had a telephone conversation with a very close friend of mine and we ended the call said our goodbye's and before she hung up I told her to watch herself crossing the road, she was puzzelled about this but when she walked out the door of her busy city centre house a pedestrian 100 feet from her was knocked down by a speeding car... they were crossing the road.

Gordon

I'm sure there are many theories behind deja vu;
Your brain remembering what you want it to remember,
falsified memory,
reboot of system...,
seeing into the future... or past I suppose.

My personal view of how deja vu works in my life is that when I experience deja vu it is due to me having experienced very very similar situations before. Therefore I come to the conclusion that my life is taking on some repeated qualities. If I am not happy with the way these occurances are happening then I will do all I can to break the cycle and stop the repetition and make new occurances for me to experience.

Although, HashSlinging, what has your experience of telling someone to watch how they cross the road got to do with deja vu? Did you see them crossing the road some time ago and felt danger? Did you foresee this? Do you rarely tell people to mind how they cross the road or, mind how they go?

seamus

Why did you tell her to be careful crossing the road?

Peanut

I feel that deja-vu can be a type of unconcious clairvoyance.

Like it occupies a similar space to where the dreams you have that you can't remember are, in the sense that there is this huge collective area of "stuff" that you are usually not conciously aware of, but nonetheless exists, and is acessible either by meditation or re-entering a dream state during sleep, or maybe sometimes by daydreaming or other random factors.

I believe that when you experience deja-vu, sometimes it can just be a logical, mental recognition that you are in a similar situation as previously, but that also in another way it can sometimes feel like you are experiencing a type of platonic world of "situations" beyond the normal experience of space&time, and therefore events that may be likely occurances in the future may become "visible" because they may be separated in localised time&space, however they are not separated in "idea/situation" version of time&space.

Sorry about the waffle.

stevenmu

If you're going mad then I am too. I sometimes get a very strong deja-vu feeling where I can remember having seen/experienced things before, occasionally I've been able to remember it so clearly that I've known what comes next. Like you, I feel like it's something that I've daydreamed about. I believe that it's not really possible to see the future in much detail very far in advance because then you could change what is going to happen, but if you change what is going then you couldn't have seen what was going to happen, then you couldn't have changed it so it would happen etc .... Most of the experiences I've had that would be called clairvoyent or precognitive or whatever have either come as the event was happening, so I've no chance to change it, or have been blurry enough that I wouldn't be able to interfere. Still, I'm going to keep trying the lotto anyways, you never know

vibe666

happens to me a lot too. at least every week, sometimes more.

i occasionally see things that aren't there too, in my peripheral vision. just a shadow of a person standing somewhere most of the time, but when i look straight at them they aren't there.

like when you feel someone behind you without knowing they're there, but when you turn they aren't.

i've had lots of feelings like that since I was a little boy. my mum has been to many clairvoyants/mediums/psychics over the years and some of the better ones kept telling her I was something special, and would grow up with 'the gift', but it would only come to me properly when I was ready to accept it.

she even went to one who told her she'd had similar feelings about a little boy in someones family about 6 months before my mum saw her, and how strange it was to have the exact same feelings with someone else. turns out the other person was my aunt, and neither had any idea the other had gone to see this woman until afterwards.

freaky stuff.

I've never done anything about it though, and I don't know if I'd be ready to go and see a psychic/medium to see if they feel the same way as those others did years ago.

maybe I will one day, but tbh I'm in no rush.

Elessar

According to many opinions of mediums and books that I've read about the subject, this is what I've gathered:

Everything in your life is already there. There is a past, present and future of your life. Everything that can ever happen, is happening now/has already happened. On a subconscious/spiritual level, you already know everything that can happen, because everything that could ever happen, has already happened. In the grand scheme of things, there is nothing which exists which cannot be, because everything that exists "is", including every possible event in your past/present/future life. This is not to say that life is pre-destined, as that would defeat the purpose of living, but that your free will and choice allow you to choose whatever life you want, and anything in your life that you want, triggering an infinite no. of different paths. But subconsciously, you already know everything that could ever happen to you.

Deja-vu occurs as a bleed-through of this future information, often letting you know that you've done this before or/and you'll know what comes next. Research in the states has shown that people do perceive the future somewhat: in one experiment, researchers placed people in front of a computer screen and hooked them up to brain scanning equipment to examin their reactions to random pictures placed on the screen. The results showed that, when shown disgusting/disturbing images, the subject's somehow register a feeling of disgust a couple of miliseconds before a disturbing image is actually shown. It's as if the brain has a warning method of letting people know of uncomfortable things in advance of their arrival.

Knowledge of your future could also explain why some people know of disasters ahead of their arrival, like if someone has a "bad feeling" about a plane journey for example and later the plane crashes.

Zillah

Vibe, I don't want to criticise, but what did any of that have to do with De Ja Vu?

SprostonGreen

Elessar, is that book "Conversations with God" that you're talking about?

Elessar

SprostonGreen wrote:

Elessar, is that book "Conversations with God" that you're talking about?

Hi SprostonGreen,

I've read many books which have helped me come to my own conclusions about God/the afterlife and stuff like Deja-vu. Conversations with God is one of them. I've read all three and have to say it's a fascinating read. I believe many of the points in those books are correct as I've read many others which are totally independent of each other, and CWG, and they all point to the same conclusions. I've also read numerous reports of Near Death Experiences which explain the same things. So I put two and two together and have to say that the CWG books are an excellent reference.

Have you read them yourself?

SprostonGreen

Elessar, I've read the first book, and intend to read the next two. I really enjoyed it, its an eye-opener. My mate told me about the third book. And when you said There is a past, present and future of your life. Everything that can ever happen, is happening now/has already happened. That reminded me of what he said.

Makes sense in the whole Deja Vu context.

simu

There's a pretty cool article here on déja vu: http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i46/46a01201.htm

Here's some approaches to figuring out how the hell it happens:

... Scientific theories of déjà vu fall into four broad families. The first are theories of "dual processing." The late neuropsychiatrist Pierre Gloor conducted experiments in the 1990s strongly suggesting that memory involves distinct systems of "retrieval" and "familiarity." In a 1997 paper, he speculated that déjà vu occurs at rare moments when our familiarity system is activated but our retrieval system is not. Other scholars argue that the retrieval system is not shut off entirely but simply fires out of sync, evoking the fatigue theory of a century earlier.

In the second category are more purely neurological explanations. One such theory holds that déjà vu experiences are caused by small, brief seizures, akin to those caused by epilepsy. That idea is buttressed by the fact that people with epilepsy often report having déjà vu just before going into full-blown seizures. Researchers have also found that déjà vu can be elicited by electrically stimulating certain regions of the brain. In a 2002 paper, the Austrian physician Josef Spatt, who works with epilepsy patients, argued that déjà vu is caused by brief, inappropriate firing in the parahippocampal cortex, which is known to be associated with the ability to detect familiarity.

Mr. Brown's third category consists of memory theories. These propose that déjà vu is triggered by something we have actually seen or imagined before, either in waking life, in literature or film, or in a dream. Some of these theories hold that a single element, perhaps familiar from some other context, is enough to spark a déjà vu experience. (Suppose, for example, that the chairs in Stanton Harcourt's kitchen were identical in color and shape to Hawthorne's decorously neat grandmother's, but that he didn't recognize them in this new context.) At the other end of the scale are gestalt theories, which suggest that we sometimes falsely recognize a general visual or audio pattern. (Suppose that the Stanton Harcourt kitchen looked similar, in broad visual outline, to a long-forgotten church that Hawthorne had once attended.)

In the final box are "double perception" theories of déjà vu, which descend from Allin's 1896 suggestion that a brief interruption in our normal process of perception might make something appear falsely familiar. In 1989, in one of the first laboratory studies that tried to induce something like déjà vu, the cognitive psychologists Larry L. Jacoby and Kevin Whitehouse, of Washington University in St. Louis, showed their subjects a long list of words on a screen. The subjects then returned a day or a week later and were shown another long list of words, half of which had also been on the first list. They were asked to identify which words they had seen during the first round.

The experimenters found that if they flashed a word at extremely quick, subliminal speeds (20 milliseconds) shortly before its "official" appearance on the screen during the second round, their subjects were very likely to incorrectly say that it had appeared on the first list. Those results lent at least indirect support to the notion that if we attend to something half-consciously and then give it our full attention, it can appear falsely familiar.

The study is one of many that demonstrate the potential pitfalls of everyday memory and cognition, says Mr. Jacoby. "At our core, I think all of us are naïve realists. We believe the world is as it presents itself," he says. "All of these experiments are a little unsettling if you're a naïve realist." He hopes that this line of research will point toward new ways to repair the mental abilities of elderly people with impaired memories. "If we highlight the distinction between memory as expressed in performance and memory as we subjectively experience it," he says, we might be able to train elderly people to avoid common errors.

Not quite as glamorous as the idea that there's some part of your brain that has access to the past, present and future all at once, I'll grant!

I get déja vu quite a bit. Another similar thing I get is dreams coming true. I'd have a dream, I'd remember that dream the way most people remember some of their dreams and then one day, maybe months later, I'd find myself in that dream, that's to say there would be a large number of shared features between my dream and the thoughts I would be having that day and I'd get an eerie feeling of familiarity. It only happens on days that I'm really tired though (and not very often - I'm not completely mad!) so I'm guessing you have different levels of various neurotransmitters in your brain on days of great tiredness such that it triggers this kind of feeling or causes the brain to map the present with memories from dreams. Of course, that's just off the top of my head! Does anyone else experience this sort of thing?

pyramid man

well Deja Vù signifies a glitch in the matrix.

But seriously I have the same thing except that my preminitions happen couple of days before.

Really wierd

HashSlinging

Gordon wrote:

Although, HashSlinging, what has your experience of telling someone to watch how they cross the road got to do with deja vu? Did you see them crossing the road some time ago and felt danger? Did you foresee this? Do you rarely tell people to mind how they cross the road or, mind how they go?

I think I mixed up de ja vu with clairvoyance. When it happens its freaky
Glad to see Im not :rolleyes: **alone with this anyway.



**toffee crisp floating in the air.

stevenmu

I was watching K-Pax last night, at the end of it there was something about how the universe starts off with a big bang, expands and eventually contracts, collapses into one singularity and then big bangs again. In each iteration everything happens exactly the same as the previous time, so everything that will happen has already happened before. From a scientific point of view this is pretty plausible, the repeating big bang idea is generally accepted as possible (current mathematical models say the universe will expand forever but it's accepted that not enough is know for the models to be totally accurate). It also seems pretty feasible, to me anyway, that a reverse of the forces which have caused all matter to end up wherever it is now would cause it to return to it's original configuration which would make the next big bang exactly the same as the previous one and all matter would again expand out in exactly the same way. You could then imagine that whatever it is that gives us sentience almost remember parts of what happened on previous iterations, causing deja-vu.

HashSlinging

makes sense really, but what is pushing the universe out to make it expand. where is this energy coming from.

I think its like an hour glass, matter goes through a narrow space causing everything to collide and become dense mass like goo but solid, then gets ejected out the other side thus causing the space on one side to collapse, while the other side expands. and this continues infinity.

Webmonkey

interesting stuff...I used to experience dejavu a lot before but now i don't?, this post just reminded me that it has being months since my last experience. Is it something to do with our lifestyle or something, I think it is at school that i experience it most, perhaps its stress or something?

stevenmu

HashSlinging wrote:

makes sense really, but what is pushing the universe out to make it expand. where is this energy coming from.

The way I think of it is that as more and more matter gets sucked into black holes, they get bigger and bigger and start to attract each other, and then merge and get bigger still, eventually you end up with a few giant black holes racing towards a single point. When they all end up together, the amount of mass at one location causes space-time to flip inside out. I'd guess then that either the 'flipping' of space time causes all the matter to shoot outwards or else the moment carried into the final singularity by the matter carries it outward on the other side.

Webmonkey wrote:

I used to experience dejavu a lot before but now i don't?

I used to experience it a lot more than I do now too. I haven't slept much the last few years for various reasons so it could be in part down to that. I also work a lot more with computers and strong electromagnetic fields are more common so maybe it's something to do with that either.

Peanut

Webmonkey wrote:

interesting stuff...I used to experience dejavu a lot before but now i don't?, this post just reminded me that it has being months since my last experience. Is it something to do with our lifestyle or something, I think it is at school that i experience it most, perhaps its stress or something?

Yeah Monkey I believe lifestyle can have a big influence on it.
I think it's directly related to daydreaming, like the first poster mentioned, so if you're bored in a class in school you are more likely to enter a hypnagogic-like state and your mind will be free to wander, unrestricted by thoughts brought on by the order of the day.

Similarly, I would think that if you are working, or concentrating on something for most of the day, or just otherwise occupied and have "stuff" to do, you might be less likely to venture towards the "daydreaming" state of mind, and therefore less able to bring those unconcious thoughts back into concious awareness (which is almost certainly what happens as part of deja-vu, regardless of the other theories).

I would also believe that if you were to practice some form of meditation that you could improve your awareness of the communication between these different states of mind, and would therefore be more relaxed with deja-vu (if it's a problem), or just be more comfortable about knowing what it is... (haven't tried this..really should..)