Exploring Three Types of Déjà Vu

The term ‘deja vu’ has been around quite a while, now, and, in the last few years has become practically a buzz-word, being often found in books, newspaper accounts and magazine articles concerned with a wide variety of topics (I have amassed quite a collection, should anyone wish to see them). The problem is, though, that while many see fit to employ it in their writing and conversation, just exactly what is meant by the words ‘deja vu’ is pretty vague. Many, based on their own experience, believe it must refer to what they encountered and/or felt, while others, having never had such experiences, have a very foggy notion of what is meant, if at all. As such, it has become a sort of catch-all label for any number of hard-to-explain, sometimes upsetting occurrences of unexpected recognition, in which the person involved has trouble identifying an antecedent for the events and/or places which seem so strangely and intensely familiar.

In addition, the term ‘deja vu’ has become encrusted, over the years, with a number of unfortunate associations, ranging from reincarnation to temporal lobe epilepsy, which hinder further research. A book has recently appeared which has temporal lobe epilepsy as its main focus (LaPlante,1993). In it, the author mentions deja vu as being a symptom of psychomotor epilepsy, a contention that also persisted for a long time in most medical and psychiatric textbooks and which would seem to be based on this and other remarks by Dr. Jackson. The book quotes a neuropsychologist named Paul Spiers who told students at a lecture that if they had had deja vu experiences, they were epileptics! This sort of nonsense continues at least in part because, up till now, our terms have been so poorly defined and this has hampered making adequate surveys which distinguish between the various d?j? phenomena.

These ‘explanations’—along with others, such as delayed intra-hemisphere transmission over the corpus callosum (e.g., Wigan, 1844; Efron 1963; Comfort, 1977; Weinaud et al., 1994), not to mention an astonishing array of psychoanalytical theories (an excellent survey is provided in. Brown, 2004)—lead people to believe that all that one needs to know about such experiences is already known and that there is nothing of interest still to be done. I believe the time has come, therefore, for our terminology, especially in educated discourse, to become more differentiated. In fact, if I had my way, we would get rid of ‘deja vu’ altogether as over-worked and entitled to a well-deserved rest.

To this end, I would like to draw attention to three forms of ‘déjà’ experience: déjà vécu, déjà senti, and deja visit?. Each one will be defined as we go along, and the use of all three, when discussing the experiences they refer to, will be argued. Upon reflection, readers may come up with other, better terms for these experiences or propose terms for other, related experiences which are not the same as the ones described in the following. Since French scientists and thinkers were the first to investigate these phenomena (Funkhouser, 1983a), it seems fitting to retain French names for these intriguing experiences.

Déjà vécu(‘already experienced’ or ‘already lived through’)

A fairly well-known quote from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens can be used to introduce what is meant by déjà vécu:

“We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time—of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances—of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remember it!” (chapter 39)

This describes the feeling that many people know as deja vu (if they know a name for it). A number of surveys have shown that about two-thirds of the American adult population claim to have had such or similar experiences (e.g., Fox, 1992). Moreover, surveys have indicated that such experiences tend to occur more frequently and possibly more intensely when the respondents were young, say between ages 15 to 25 (e.g., MacCready & Greeley, 1976). In addition, such experiences are frequently, if not always, connected with very banal events. They are so striking, though, that they are often clearly remembered for years following their occurrence. Anyone having had such experiences knows that they normally involve more sense modalities than just sight.

As in the Dickens quotation, they can easily involve hearing, tasting, touch and/or proprioceptive perceptions as well. This is why referring to such experiences as simply deja vu is inadequate.

Another feature of déjà vécu that most would agree with is the amazing detail involved. When you are in the midst of such an occurrence, you are conscious that everything conforms with your ‘memory’ of it. This is why explanations which suggest that the person has read about or experienced something similar in the past cannot be valid. Moreover, this is why explanations based on reincarnation and past lives can also be ruled out. A typical déjà vécu experience can easily involve clothing or even a PC, but styles of clothing change practically every year and it is rather unlikely that someone had a PC on his or her desk in a previous life (this objection to the reincarnation explanation was pointed out already in 1845 by von Feuchtersleben)! If incidences of déjà vécu can be taken as being real, our notions of causality may have to be revised in some ways. It does not seem to be difficult, though, for modern physicists to entertain notions of time loops (Deutsch & Lockwood, 1994), tachyons (particles that can travel backwards in time – Chester, 1978) and multiple universes (DeWitt & Graham, 1973).

That our unconscious would then be able to avail itself of such anomalies and present us with precognitive knowledge via visions and dreams (Funkhouser, 1983b; Rybach & Sweitzer, 1988) is then not so farfetched as it might seem at first glance.

Deja senti (‘already felt’)

I would like to turn now to a phenomenon that is often confused with déjà vécu. To introduce it, I would like to quote from an 1888 paper by Dr. John Hughlings Jackson, one of the foremost pioneers of modern neurology. In the words of one of his patients, a medical doctor suffering from what has come to be known as temporal lobe or psychomotor epilepsy, he wrote:

“What is occupying the attention is what has occupied it before, and indeed has been familiar, but has been for a time forgotten, and now is recovered with a slight sense of satisfaction as if it had been sought for… At the same time, or… more accurately in immediate sequence, I am dimly aware that the recollection is fictitious and my state abnormal. The recollection is always started by another person’s voice, or by my own verbalized thought, or by what I am reading and mentally verbalize; and I think that during the abnormal state I generally verbalize some such phrase of simple recognition as ‘Oh yes—I see’, ‘Of course—I remember’, &c., but a minute or two later I can recollect neither the words nor the verbalized thought which gave rise to the recollection. I only find strongly that they resemble what I have felt before under similar abnormal conditions.”

This state, which sometimes appears in the aura of temporal lobe epilepsy attacks, Jackson termed ‘reminiscence’ and I believe could be best termed deja senti. Three features are evident from this description, however, that distinguish it from déjà vécu:

it is primarily or even exclusively a mental happening;
there are no precognitive aspects in which the person feels he or she knows in advance what will be said or done; and
it seldom or never remains in the afflicted person’s memory afterwards.

Deja visit? (‘already visited’)

There is another phenomenon which is also often confused with déjà vécu. It seems to occur more rarely and is an experience in which a person visits a new locality and nevertheless feels it to be familiar. He or she seems to know their way around. C. G. Jung published an interesting account of it in his paper on synchronicity (Jung, 1966).

To distinguish it from déjà vécu, it is important to ask whether it was purely the place and location of inanimate buildings and/or objects that were familiar, or did the situation that the person was in also
play a role. Deja visit? has to do with geography, with the three spatial dimensions of height, width and depth, while déjà vécu has to do more with temporal occurrences and processes. Deja visit? can be explained in several ways. It may be that the person once read a detailed account of the place and has subsequently forgotten it. This happened to Nathaniel Hawthorne on a visit he made to the ruins of a castle in England (Hawthorne, 1863). He ‘recognized’ the place but didn’t know how or why. Only later was he able to trace it to a piece written two hundred years earlier by Alexander Pope about it. The incident of deja visit? described by Sir Walter Scott in his 1815 book, Guy Mannering, is also based on this hypothesis. Reincarnation might also offer a way of explaining some instances of deja visit?.

A third possibility is so-called ‘out-of-the-body’ experiences (see Chap. 8, Chari) in which a person is apparently able to travel abroad, leaving his or her body behind. It is possible that mixed versions of these three forms of ‘deja’ experience may occur. There are also several other phenomena which resemble these in various ways, but space does not permit going into them here. Those wishing to know more and explore the various aspects of deja phenomena more deeply are referred to the excellent overviews in Neppe (1983) and Brown (2004).

References

Brown AS (2004) The deja vu experience. New York: Psychology Press, chapter 11.
Chester M (1978) Particles: An Introduction to Particle Physics. MacMillan, New York.
Comfort A (1977) Homuncular identity-sense as a deja vu phenomenon. British Journal of Medical Psychology 50:313-315.
Dewitt B.S., Graham N (1973) The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. A Fundamental Exposition. Princeton University Press.
Efron R (1963) Temporal perception, aphasia and deja vu. Brain 86 :403-424.
Funkhouser AT (1983a) A historical review of deja vu. Parapsychological Journal of South Africa 4(1):11-24.
Funkhouser AT (1983b) The dream theory of deja vu. Parapsychological Journal of South Africa 4(2) 107-123.
Fox JW (1992) The structure, stability, and social antecedents of reported paranormal experiences. Sociological Analysis 53(4):417-431.
Hawthorne N (1863) Our Old Home. Houghton Mifflin & Co., Boston.
Jackson J.H. (1888) ‘A particular variety of epilepsy “intellectual aura”, one case with symptoms of organic brain disease’. Brain 11:179-207.
Jung CG (1966) On synchronicity. Collected Works, Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, Vol. 8, par. 973.
LaPlante E (1993) Seized. New York: Harper Collins.
Lockwood M (March, 1994)’The quantum physics of time travel’. Scientific American, 270: 50-56.
McCready WC, Greeley AM (1976) The Ultimate Values of the American Population. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Neppe V (1983) The Psychology of D?j? Vu. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.
Ryback D, Sweitzer L (1988) Dreams That Come True, Ballantine Books, New York.
Scott, W (1815) Guy Mannering or The Astrologer. J. Ballantyne & co. Edinburgh. Chap. 41.
Von Feuchtersleben E Freiherr (1845) Lehrbuch der ?rztlichen Seelenkunde [Textbook of Medical Psychology] Vienna: C. Gerold Verlag, pp. 255-256.
Weinaud ME, Hermann B, Wyler AR, Carter LP, Oommen KJ, Labiner D, Ahern
G, Herring A (1994) Long-term subdural strip electrocorticographic monitoring of ictal deja vu. Epilepsia 35:1054-1059.

This article originally appeared in the Scientific and Medical Network Review, 57:20 – 22, 1995 and is republished here with permission. APA Reference

Funkhouser, Arthur (1996). Three types of deja vu. [Online]. Network. [1996, March 15].

Déjà vécu(‘already experienced’ or ‘already lived through’)

Deja senti (‘already felt’)

Deja visit? (‘already visited’)

References

Kerry Nenn

Psychology