Jen Sonstein Maidenberg

Because the dreamers I meet often ask about deja experiences, I thought I would briefly share my current thoughts on the connection between remembering your dreams and deja vu.

In short, I believe dreams play a significant role in our experience of deja vu. In fact, it may be that unremembered dreams are one of the leading causes of our experience of deja vu. 

One conventional explanation for deja vu from neuroscience is that it is a neural misfiring or a memory processing error. This conclusion assumes that the deja vu feeling (the memory) is the error. What if the deja vu is not an error, but rather an unrecognized super-processing feat of memory?

Perhaps instead deja vu is a subconscious memory becoming conscious in a way that doesn’t make immediate sense and so therefore elicits a feeling of familiarity, but without enough recalled data or strongly enough recalled data to know why.

There is something called a preconscious perception: a thought or feeling that is not repressed but is forgotten until it’s cued by some kind of external reminder. They become conscious given the right trigger. What if deja vu is the triggering of a preconscious perception of a precognitive nature? (See James Carpenter’s work on preconscious perception and subliminal perception here.)

What if the the deja vu feeling is a memory of an almost-forgotten dream? Not just any old almost-forgotten dream, but an almost-forgotten precognitive dream.

If it is possible to dream of a future event (as I believe it is), then when you reach in time the event you dreamed of, you may slightly remember having “been there before,” even if you don’t vividly recall the dream, because you dreamt this already. (This actually gets its own name in the “deja experience” literature: it’s called deja reve.) 

In order to buy into what I am suggesting, one needs to be open enough to consider that we are able to perceive events that will occur in waking life some time in the future; basically, you need to believe in precognition. There are many reports of individuals dreaming of events days, years, or even decades in advance. Some people report such experiences in waking life, as well, especially during altered states of consciousness. Individuals who study and practice remote viewing are tapping into a similar state of consciousness that enables us to perceive at great distances in space and extended intervals in time.

I’ve heard more stories myself of precognition happening in the dream state versus waking life.

If we are dreaming every night multiple dreams, and some of those dreams are about the future, BUT we don’t know or remember that we dreamt or we didn’t write down our dreams, we will never know or remember we dreamed of a future event. 

Just because we don’t remember an experience — in waking life or dreams — doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. All too often we are experiencing without awareness. Many times, we are even deeply emotionally responding to a perception without conscious awareness of what we’re perceiving or feeling.

When we meet up with that event in the future in actuality, it will feel familiar but we won’t know why. This is not too different from returning to a place we visited once or twice in early childhood that we can’t necessarily recollect explicitly, but then confirm with someone else who was there (like a parent) that we once visited that place long ago as a very young child.

Is it possible that we have dreamt the future, recalled it ever so briefly in a sleepy state (but awake enough to imprint it), and then when we meet that event in the present, there is a low-level familiarity (an unconscious implicit memory of it)?

I very much think so. 

As my own abilities for recalling dreams have expanded and increased (leading to more remembered dreams, as well as clearer details of sense perceptions in dreams), I find that precognition happens a lot more than I realized when I first started researching my own precognitive dreams.

I’ve written about this many times: If you want to know if you dream the future, the first step is to work on recalling more dreams. Our memory processes are a little different while we are sleepy than while we are awake. It requires effort for us to remember our dreams, and it requires even more effort for us to remember a lot of dreams, in great detail, with attention on what’s happening in the dream from a sensory perspective. 

Deja vu is an internal, intuitive knowing that’s hard to necessarily prove or explain to others, but I don’t believe it’s a memory error. 

Not at all. 

I think there is a strong case to be made that the deja vu feeling is valid, and is linked to precognition, in general, and perhaps for certain individuals, precognitive dreaming, specifically.

The way to get some validation of this for yourself is to work at recalling and writing down your dreams, with a focus on sensed data in the dream. I write more about sensed experience vs. mental experience in dreams in other articles.