When you relate to a stranger feeling “we are members of the same tribe” is it mystical? An overlapping series of events and past life experiences? Perhaps a dream we recall? A person we have seen before? A place we have been?
This intuitive experience is both common and a special opportunity that is exciting and unnerving too. We feel a sense of momentary exhilaration, a knowing. Déjà vu comes from the French, “already seen.” I wondered if this was only a phenomenon of modern times?
In Charles Dickens’ 1850 novel, David Copperfield he writes; “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 remembered it.”
Fast forward to 1979 for the words sung by Dionne Warwick, “Come to me; Feel Like I’m Home; In a Place I Used to Know; Long Ago; Déjà Vu”. There’s a Katy Perry song in 2017 with the words; “Running On A Loop; Déjà Vu, déjà vu.”
While the experience goes back century’s people were reluctant to describe it for fear of being judged abnormal and crazy. Its mystical image was clarified around 1900 when terms like false memory and paramnesia were objected to and Déjà Vu was felt to be more accurate and to the point. After getting past this sensation as being a neurological disorder or a glitch of memory new theories emerged.
Colorado State University psychologist Anne M. Cleary wrote that there are two kinds of recognition memory; recollection and familiarity. When the event has been previously experienced such as seeing the same person on the street that’s recollection based. If we see a familiar face but can’t remember when it happened she believes that is familiarity-based recognition. We are sure we identify with the situation but aren’t sure why. Canadian researcher Stefan Kohler’s small study of déjà vu suggested to him this process was the brain’s way of checking our memory system to reduce misremembering and keeping the brain healthy. Freud wrote that in déjà vu we seek to accept something as belonging to our ego. C. G. Jung described experiences of déjà vu as meaningful coincidences, taking another point of view.
After months of researching the latest theories on energy fields it occurred to me that there were at least two other possibilities for when an event is very familiar but we don’t know where or when it happened.
The first intriguing connection of “past lives” relates to descriptions of people, places and events told under hypnosis.
This regression to one’s past is often done as a psychotherapeutic process. Through hypnosis the goal is to resolve past events believed to be interfering with a person’s emotional wellness. It seems that hints of earlier clues and experiences might be a connection to déjà vu in our present life. We don’t have to accept reincarnation to consider this possibility.
The second connection to déjà vu really stretched my acceptance window. With our growing knowledge of smaller and smaller particles we learn more about vibrations and frequencies. Spa music, lots of Beatle songs and ancient chants have frequencies that our cells respond to. Certain levels of waves, whether sound or energy, are known to affect healing, emotion and creativity. But unlike the expanded senses of other species and when we ingest hallucinogenic substances, we normally are conscious of only a relatively limited range of frequencies in our three-dimensional world. Much like AM and FM radio stations. They are not clear unless tuned to receive a specific signal. If we could, through meditation or chemistry, bridge into higher vibration levels we might discover that many universes exist parallel to each other. Such experiences would likely be retained in our subconscious and could be activated and seem familiar as a déjà vu sensation.
There are over forty theories explaining déjà vu. Einstein suggested that there is no such thing as “time”, a human creation to help us keep order and communicate. What if the past, present, and future are occurring simultaneously? Maybe déjà vu slips us into a greater state of consciousness so we can sense more than one experience at the same time. It’s a marvelous mystery we can all enjoy!
