Question: What is deja vu? Is it paranormal? Have you experienced it? Can we cause it to happen, and if so, would there be any benefits?
Answer: Deja vu is the feeling that you have witnessed or experienced a new situation previously. In other words, your “now” feels like it has already happened. I like to think of deja vu as remembering the future. Deja vu is a memory of something that hasn’t happened yet. Or a memory of something that is happening right now.
When you experience deja vu, it feels like you know what’s going to happen a second or a few seconds from now. It usually lasts 5-10 seconds. While you are having the experience, it feels like you have either had the exact same experience before, or you know exactly what is about to happen.
I’ve had deja vu experiences hundreds of times in my life. While it’s happening, I know exactly how the next 5-10 seconds of my life is going to go, from the actions and speech of the person in front of me, to the realization that I’m having a deja vu experience itself!
My current theory on deja vu is this. Time doesn’t really exist. So if we can remember the past, why can’t we just as easily remember the future? Put another way… If I can access experiences on one end of the time stream, why can’t I access them on the other? When deja vu happens, I feel like the future and present are intersecting. Your future awareness is stacked on top of your present awareness, creating a strong feeling of knowing what’s going to happen right before it happens.
Don’t confuse deja vu with feeling like you have done something before when you really have done that thing before. Then you’re just experiencing something you have already experienced in your past. True deja vu is the uncanny feeling that you have experienced something that you know you have not yet experienced. For example, if I fly to a city I’ve never visited before and have a deja vu experience, then I can’t possibly be remembering a real past event.
Is there anything paranormal about deja vu? I would say no. It’s more of an awareness experience. It’s something that I think probably happens to most people at least once in their life. It’s just an intersection of what we think of as the past, present, and future all converging for a few moments. It may technically fall under the heading of precognition, but really, how useful is it to know what’s going to happen as it’s happening? It’s not like you can act on that information quickly enough to benefit you.
Can we cause deja vu to happen? I’ve never been able to but I haven’t really tried. I don’t see a real benefit to knowing something is going to happen as it is happening. Now, if I could develop the ability to see a scene from my future and have a day or two warning, that might be useful. 😉
I guess that to me, deja vu is like a mini precognitive experience that doesn’t have much value in everyday living. It’s lovely to experience though. When I have a deja vu I sometimes feel like my past and present have caught up to a significant moment on my life path and the deja vu is there to say, “You strayed off your path a little but now you’re back. Congratulations! Now let’s continue…” And continue I do. 🙂
