You’re probably heard the phrase deja vu, a French term for “already seen.” It is most commonly used to describe the sense of having already been to a place or experienced an interaction, but without being able to identify when or where.
But have you heard of the phrase deja entendu? It translates to “already heard” and, like deja vu, describes feeling a certain kind of familiarity around a sense perception or encounter — in this case, sound — without context or association. It’s recall, in a way, without recognition. Personally, I would describe it as a sense or a feeling without history or identity.
I’ve been researching the various dejas and vus for the last few years as I believe there is a strong connection between these types of experiences, and the way we experience memory and time inside dreams. As one example, consider the dream in which you meet up with someone who is very familiar, but whom you can’t exactly place. He seems “like” your Uncle John, but also not.
Further, there seems to be a link between deja vu-type experiences and neurological conditions such as temporal lobe epilepsy, and migraine with aura (something I “suffer” from and believe is linked somehow to my own precognitive dreaming.)
People seem to be moved by deja experiences in a way similar to the way they are moved by dreams. There very much seems to be an emotional component to both experiences. Both experiences, too, have a lot to do with remembering, forgetting, and trying to remember. A longing to remember, even.
One possible example of deja entendu I have experienced in a way that has left a deep emotional imprint on me is hearing a song I believe I must know because it feels hauntingly familiar, and yet I could not place it. Neither the composer nor the singer was someone I have heard of before. Save for the feeling of familiarity — which was painfully strong — I couldn’t say how or why I believed I knew the song. This type of deja entendu has happened to me powerfully at least three times in my life that I can remember. The three songs that activated in me the feeling of haunting familiarity were each without lyrics. One was classical. Two were Jazz. In all three cases, I felt an intense desire to try to figure out how I knew the song. In each of the three cases, I was never able to identify how or if I truly knew it, despite a lot of curiosity and research.
This type of deja experience has been depicted in a few films in which memory, time, and love were strong themes, such as Cloud Atlas and Somewhere in Time. (I’m sure there are others, but those two quickly come to mind.)
Deja entendu is different from really liking a song from the first moment you heard it, and wanting to play it again and again on repeat. This type of attraction to a song also has powerful effects on our psyche, memory, and experience of time, but it’s different. The feeling of deja entendu is accompanied by an immediate sense of knowing, of familiarity — and often a strong desire to remember.
Has this ever happened to you?
My theory about deja entendu (and loosely about all deja experiences) is that I feel like I know the song because I will one day know the song, and one day when I know this song, there will be some accompanying sentiment attached to the song for me; likely, an intense emotion like love, heartache, gratitude, or grief. The feeling reverberates “back in time,” activated by the music.
This theory, however, requires me to abandon the notion that time is linear and can only be experienced in one direction. I have written before that I believe our experience of time and of Self is actually quite more flexible than we have been taught, and that certain states of awareness and sleep may enable us to communicate with ourselves across time. I also believe that feeling plus music can lead to claircognizance, a knowing of something that has not yet happened, or clairsentience, a feeling of something you have not yet perceived with your five senses. I have experimented both while dreaming and awake with accessing information outside of this now moment (ie. from the future) and nonlocal to me.
I wrote the below essay last year as my first attempt to articulate this very personal, and somewhat difficult-to-describe, experience of hearing a familiar song you can’t place but sense you already know. I am sharing it here because I imagine some of you may have had similar experiences.
One of my main purposes in researching and writing about dreams, memory, and time is because I believe there is real healing power in the ability to experience love of ourselves and connection to ourselves and others across time (and perhaps even across lifetimes.) Dreams and music, in my opinion, are both portals of the type in which these connections may happen.
I’ll be writing more articles on this topic soon, and also be sharing with you some “consciousness technologies” I’ve been developing and testing out over the last few years. (I’ve shared some already on my Patreon.)
In the meantime, here is “The Ache From Familiar Songs You’ve Never Heard Before:”
By Jen Sonstein Maidenberg
This won’t be a piece on music theory or chord progressions, nor an exploration of the cognitive processes underlying music; although those very likely play a role in why we believe we’ve heard a song we’ve never heard before.
This is a piece about love. And time.
This is about how I have come to believe love, feelings, and music travel not just forward, but also backward in time.
It presents just a little intro to a larger, more-researched theory that’s been percolating in me really for decades even though I only became aware of it about nine years ago when my then seven-year-old daughter interrupted me folding laundry.
I was playing a song on YouTube I first heard when I was in college. Should I tell you the song yet? Or should I wait?
Let’s wait.
I hadn’t heard the song in many, many years. During that time (when I was folding laundry), I had been immersing myself in old music for a book project I was working on. Mainly I was listening to mixed tapes from high school and college my then-boyfriend had made me, but this song wasn’t on any of those old mixed tapes.
It took me a little while to find the song on YouTube because I couldn’t remember its name. In fact, I wasn’t sure the song even had a name. What I could remember then of the song was the horns, and a verse from the arrangement. I knew it was a jazz song, and I knew the song had no lyrics.
I mostly remembered how the song haunted me back then. How when I first heard the song all those years ago, I had felt as if I had always known it. How in a way, it made me feel connected to God. I didn’t understand why I felt that way. I wasn’t even sure back then I believed in God.
Back then, in my freshman college dorm, I would listen to the song over and over again, rewinding the tape in my stereo, pressing play, rewind, play… trying to understand why I felt the way I felt … trying to remember.
But I hadn’t thought of the song or heard it in years until that day.
I should add that I decided to listen to the song while folding laundry on purpose, to evoke a feeling, to bring me back to a former time, away from the then-present time I was in. Things weren’t going so well in my marriage. My life was a bit of a mess. The music helped me temporarily escape. Folding laundry provided me with an excuse and a brainless activity that would allow me to sink into the reverie. I spent a lot of hours that year with headphones in my ears. This time, however, I played the song out loud on speaker.
Enter my daughter.
“I know that song,” she said to me.
“What? How do you this song?” I replied.
She said, “We learned it in Hebrew school.”
At that point, I was truly bewildered. This jazz song? She learned in Hebrew school? How could that be? (Add to this that we lived in Israel at the time and her “Hebrew school” was a tiny kibbutz group made up of all Israeli children, only a few American immigrants like my daughter.)
I paused the YouTube video. My daughter started singing in Hebrew, “Adonai, s’fatai tiftach, u’fi yagid t’hilatecha….”
She knew the melody exactly. She was, in fact, singing the introduction to the Amidah, the most sacred prayer in Judaism, to the tune of Mo’ Better Blues, written by Bill Lee and recorded by the Branford Marsalis Quarter and Terence Blanchard in 1990.
Unbelievable.
And yet, it was so.
Something clicked for me in the days after, when she and I would sing the song together: I had always known this song because one day I would gleefully sing it together with my seven-year-old daughter, during a very painful time in my life, and singing it together with her would fill me with much-needed awe…and love. It would give me hope that everything would eventually be okay again. That, perhaps, there were unseen forces in the universe, and those forces were good.
I knew from that moment that music traveled not just forward in time — referring here to the known correlation between music, emotion, and memory — but also back in time, from the future, via the same mechanisms.
Music and memory don’t operate in a linear fashion, I decided, but rather in a loop. This is why some songs haunt us; why they feel familiar even though we’ve never heard them before.
Of course, I understand that one can only come to this conclusion if one also possesses equally unconventional ideas about time.
Which I do.
In the almost decade since this interaction with my daughter and my still-unscientifically proven insight experience, I’ve had other occasions in which I’ve been deeply moved while listening to a song that had once been a song I didn’t know, but anyway seemed familiar to me.
This has strengthened my theory. I’m here today not to try to prove to you that it’s true, but simply to invite you to consider the theory for yourself.
Is it possible that the songs that have always sounded familiar to you have done so because one day they would end up being:
- the song you would rock your baby to sleep with?
- the song the deejay was playing when your future spouse entered the room?
- the song playing on the car radio when your heart was broken?
- the song the choir would sing at your friend’s funeral?
We know a lot about music and the brain. We know listening to music increases blood flow to parts of the brain that generate emotions. We know that certain music can trigger dopamine release. We know that even people with traumatic brain injuries who are memory deficient in other ways are able to recall melodies and sing them. (A few popular books to check out on this topic are Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks and This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin. Neither author claims music travels back in time from the future, but I have a hunch Sacks might have quietly harbored unconventional theories of his own. You can also read this recently published study on the effects of music in Maladaptive Daydreaming. The abstract alone is filled with interesting findings.)
What we know most of all about music and the brain is that there is a lot we don’t understand still. Same goes for time.
In the meantime, while we are all still figuring it out, I’m going to keep paying attention to how songs that haunted me from the moment I first heard them end up being songs that accompany particularly poignant interactions or encounters in my life. And I am going to keep playing songs that I always knew even before I knew them; and when I do, I will intentionally send love back in time, to the Me folding laundry, to the Me pressing play on the stereo, to all the Mes who need to feel it.
If you liked this essay, you might also like this related essay: “How Does the Radio Know the Song Playing in My Head Right Now?”
