My déjà vu experiences

14 Replies, 3957 Views

I'm not someone who's had strong or obvious paranormal experiences like many others here. Whatever has possibly been of that nature has been more run-of-the-mill everyday-life-psi: telephone telepathy, marked synchronicities, that type of thing. Maybe precognitive dreams according to that private group experiment some of us had at the the old forum.

The one thing that I used to get were déjà vu experiences that were very convincing in their intensity and that seemed to differ from what people usually define as déjà vu, which is usually a strong sense of being somewhere they've been before even if they haven't, or that sort of thing.

Mine occurred both in familiar and unfamiliar settings. And in terms of occurrence, I'd say they started pretty early in childhood and at least up and maybe through my thirties, although I'd estimate they started slowing down and/or stopped then (which were years I started taking psychotropic meds, so that may have been a factor). It didn't happen happen often, but at regular invervals - I'd estimate 2 or 3 times a year.

The experience would be: I'd be somewhere, doing whatever, maybe just walking down a particular street, and suddenly I'd have the overwhelming, very vertiginous and convincing impression that, for one thing, I'd lived the exact same moment before. Not just being in this particular place - but at this particular place, at this particular time, with the skies or whatever looking just as they were, everything in the environment exactly as it is, and not only that but including my very same thoughts and emotions I was having just before the impression started  - it felt that all were part of a micro ensemble that had previously occurred.

But then the second element, which was part of the vertiginous feeling, was that this hadn't just happened once before, but an infinite amount of times. As if somehow our lives already exist and are stored somewhere, and at that moment I break out and see or experience the matrix itself. Or that I was reliving the same life for a 1000th time and was suddenly getting a glimpse of that. The feeling was like an "eternal return".

And the thing is there was nothing special about those moments. The feelings-impressions would last 15, 20, maybe 30 seconds, I don't know, but not very long, and I'd try to stay with them or "grasp them" but they would then disappear. And afterwards I didn't put too much thought into it, I'd just go back to regular life.

I wonder if anybody here has experienced DV experiences along those lines.

I'm quite open to the fact that these may not be paranormal and have very banal explanations - a mind trick, or even something in the brain where data that is supposed to go through a "recording new information" part goes through instead, by error, through a "memory" part. I have no idea but the impression was extremely convincing and created an ecstatic, transcendent sort of feeling.

If I try to connect that to data about reincarnation, it obviously doesn't fit data suggesting that invididuals reincarnate as other individuals. But then it does fit some NDEs or strange spiritual experiences where people do experience or become aware that their lives are already written or performed in some way and then exist as stories that can be experienced by them again or others (I think of certain NDErs who relate that when they died, they would meet other beings, old soul companions, who would "enter" into their memories of their lives and relive that life vicariously, or similar things in OBE-astral journeying.)
[-] The following 7 users Like Ninshub's post:
  • stephenw, Hurmanetar, Raimo, tim, Typoz, Laird, Doug
Haven’t you written about these before? Big Grin
[-] The following 7 users Like Obiwan's post:
  • Hurmanetar, Doug, tim, Brian, Typoz, Laird, Ninshub
Don't play with what's left of my decrepit mind, Obi. Unsure
[-] The following 6 users Like Ninshub's post:
  • Hurmanetar, Obiwan, tim, Typoz, Laird, Doug
Thanks for sharing this.
(2018-09-29, 07:47 PM)Ninshub Wrote: The experience would be: I'd be somewhere, doing whatever, maybe just walking down a particular street, and suddenly I'd have the overwhelming, very vertiginous and convincing impression that, for one thing, I'd lived the exact same moment before. Not just being in this particular place - but at this particular place, at this particular time, with the skies or whatever looking just as they were, everything in the environment exactly as it is, and not only that but including my very same thoughts and emotions I was having just before the impression started  - it felt that all were part of a micro ensemble that had previously occurred.

Yes, I can relate to this. But not very often nowadays. I think it happened more during my childhood. Perhaps I usually let it pass without notice, but on one occasion I was doing something quite mundane, playing just outside our house, when I had an overwhelming feeling of having done that before. Everything, the objects and furniture around me, the position in which I was crouched down (playing with some toy), everything seemed like a memory. It stopped me in my tracks, I puzzled over it for a while.

I know I was quite young at the time, and it may have been later when I reasoned about it, or perhaps it was at the time. At any rate I realised that there was no other time or place where this could have occurred. Go back in time, the furniture changes, the buildings change, nothing stays fixed. The only exact match for what I was recalling was that moment itself.

I've heard quite ordinary brain-based explanations, for example that a signal might travel by two different paths, with one arriving slightly ahead of the other, so that the second signal, even though it represents 'now' already matches something from the past, the first signal. That may not be the exact theory, but something along those lines. Nevertheless it struck me as profound.

However, I know someone who had some sort of stroke or related medical occurrence which disturbed the physical workings of his brain, and he said he had experiences of deja vu literally all the time, even right there as he was speaking to me he was experiencing a form of deja vu. I dare say when it is so commonplace it may not seem so profound. On the other hand such experiences may be hard to describe unless one goes to a great deal of effort, so I may have been making assumptions about what he meant by the term.

Regarding the things other people say about deja vu, I've heard it said a number of times that these are indicative of a past life. I'm not sure I've had any of that kind. Except perhaps quite recently (well, a few months ago), I was watching an advert for beer, and there was a scene with a town square. That stopped me in my tracks, it triggered some sort of memory. But I don't say it definitely indicates anything - one town square may resemble another, it could have been a completely different place it brought to mind, maybe from earlier in this life, though I don't rule out a possible past-life significance.
[-] The following 5 users Like Typoz's post:
  • Hurmanetar, Raimo, Doug, tim, Ninshub
Interesting and validating to know you experienced something fairly similar.
[-] The following 3 users Like Ninshub's post:
  • tim, Hurmanetar, Typoz
(2018-09-30, 10:30 AM)Ninshub Wrote: Interesting and validating to know you experienced something fairly similar.

I've had this déjà vu many times both in recognising places that I've never been to before and maybe more importantly, situations with people. I'm certain I've been here before (as I've said) but I can't say that I'm satisfied that I've "done it" any better this time, whatever it is that I'm supposed to be doing (if we are supposed to be doing something in particular, maybe we're not)
(This post was last modified: 2018-09-30, 12:57 PM by tim.)
[-] The following 4 users Like tim's post:
  • Raimo, Ninshub, Typoz, Doug
I think that our life experiences can be broken down into chunks of arbitrary size and that experience is something objective that can be viewed from different angles... as stored in the computer and replayed.

As to what a Deja Vu experience actually is, maybe a combination of things... some of which include encountering the same or very similar story chunks again.

My earliest memory of a Deja Vu experience is still vivid to this day... I was in pre-shcool standing on the playground picking up handfuls of pea gravel and I turned around and looked up at the top of the slide to see a little girl coming down it and I had the very strong sense that this exact event had happened before, and at that moment I made the connection between what I was experiencing and the word "Deja Vu" and had the "aha" moment of understanding that is what the word meant. It was a totally inconsequential series of events, but the memory stuck.

I've had many other Deja Vu experiences some of which I was able to verify actually had happened before... for example: a few weeks ago I was at work on a Saturday (rare) and I had to log on to my drafter's computer to translate some DXF files for the CNC plasma (even more rare... maybe once or twice a year),  as I was sitting there doing this task with my headphones in listening to music (very rare... I usually listen to podcasts), my wife called and mentioned something about her boss was wanting to know whether or not we wanted to buy this tower for installing an antenna on our house (only happened twice). This exact same thing had happened several months earlier... I had just sat down at my drafter's computer headphones in on a Saturday to translate DXF files and my wife called and said her boss wanted to know if we had decided on whether we wanted the antenna...

Very mundane series of events, yes.... but all put together pretty rare coincidences which gave me a very strong feeling of Deja Vu, but after a few moments I was able to recall and realize that, yes this actually had happened before a few months ago. I immediately told my wife on the phone I was having Deja Vu, and she also remembered talking about this a few months back on a Saturday while I was at work.

So maybe my life is just stuck in a mundane loop... I don't know.

I've never had a deja vu experience that involved anything significant... always a collection of mundane details that just seemed extremely familiar.
[-] The following 4 users Like Hurmanetar's post:
  • tim, Typoz, Doug, Ninshub
I seem to recall reading an explanation for deja vu which amounted a kind of “double reading” of an occurrence. It went something like... the external senses detect the event which is then communicated to the brain but that due to  some kind of unusual delay in processing it, we perceive it as having happened twice: once when it hits the senses and again when it is processed by our consciousness (I accept I probably haven’t done the idea full justice).
Not sure what people think about that?
(This post was last modified: 2018-09-30, 10:01 PM by Obiwan.)
[-] The following 3 users Like Obiwan's post:
  • tim, Typoz, Hurmanetar
(2018-09-30, 10:00 PM)Obiwan Wrote: I seem to recall reading an explanation for deja vu which amounted a kind of “double reading” of an occurrence. It went something like... the external senses detect the event which is then communicated to the brain but that due to  some kind of unusual delay in processing it, we perceive it as having happened twice: once when it hits the senses and again when it is processed by our consciousness (I accept I probably haven’t done the idea full justice).
Not sure what people think about that?

When I have deja vu it generally feels as though the event/situation has happened some time before. That explanation sounds as though it should feel as though it's only just happened.
[-] The following 3 users Like Guest's post:
  • Obiwan, Typoz, Ninshub
Some experimental work designed to study deja vu came up on another thread:
https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-p...5#pid17845

  • View a Printable Version
Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)