Introduction
Over the years, there have been many attempts at explaining what causes déja experiences. There have also been several attempts at evoking déjà experiences in psychological laboratories and even in the hospital during open-brain surgery (to alleviate intractable epilepsy), but none (up till now) has been successful. It is a highly subjective experience and seems to occur randomly for most people. This makes it very difficult to study. For this reason, the explanations that follow must all be taken with "a grain of salt". You will see that what any particular theorist comes up with depends strongly on which scientific discipline or field he or she belongs to.
As one might imagine, such a baffling and prevalent phenomenon has received considerable critical attention. Theorists, both literary and scientific have come forward with an amazing array of explanations. Interest was particularly intense during the latter half of the previous century, paralleling the rise of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis as they became scientific disciplines. In France, there were four medical doctoral theses devoted to déjà vu: Bernhard-Leroy (1898), Tobolowska (1900), and Albes (1906), at the University of Paris, and Thibault (1899), at the University of Bordeaux.
Note 1: In most of the following, I shall speak of "déjà vu" for simplicity's sake (until I get to the section on reincarnation where it becomes necessary to distinguish between déjà vécu ("already lived through or experienced") and déjà visité ("already visited or have been to that place").
Note 2:It is quite probable that in speaking about "déjà vu" we are actually talking about a number of experiences which have all been lumped into that term. And it could thus well be the case that each explanation fits one or more forms of déjà experience without explaining all of them.
Note 3: There is quite a bit of overlap between what is presented on this page of explanations and what is available on the history page.
Sigmund Freud once noted (1914), there is a line which divides all explanations of déjà vu into two camps: either one really has experienced something for a second time (one's impression is true) or one has not (the impression is false). (Freud referred to believers and unbelievers.) Thus two categories are created and these can be further subdivided as follows:
False:
- Outside influences (e.g., demons) are fooling one
- One has experienced something very similar
- The organic apparatus has malfunctioned
- The psychological mind has played a trick
True:
- One has knowledge from a previous lifetime
- The universe repeats itself
- One has somehow gained access to the future
In the following we shall take a look at these explanations. The literature is enormous (over 800 books and scientific articles) and to keep this report to a reasonable size, it won't be possible to deal adequately or even mention them all. It is hoped, though, that what is provded here will provide enough information for those interested. If you who is reading this would like to contribute an explanation that is not included in the following, that will be very welcome.
Outside Influences
As is mentioned in the history section, déjà experiences were known and thought about already in antiquity. Ovid, 43 B.C. - 17 A.D., in Book XV of his Metamorphoses, has Pythagoras make a long speech in favor of vegetarianism and against the slaughter of animals. In it are found the following words:
"Our souls are deathless, and ever, when they have left their former seat, do they live in new abodes and dwell in the bodies that have received them. I myself (for I well remember it) at the time of the Trojan War was Euphorbus, son of Panthous, in whose breast once hung the heavy spear of Menelaus. Recently, in Juno's temple in Argos, Abas' city, I recognized the shield which I once wore on my left arm!" (lines 158 - 164)
Here is found one of the earliest references to a déjà vu-like episode. It more properly belongs within the section on reincarnation (see below), but I mention it here to show that in ancient times, this was the favored explanation for such experiences. I should mention that Plato also believed in the transmigration of souls.
Such a doctrine, though, was anathema to the early Christian theologians and thus St. Augustine (354 - 430 AD) felt himself called upon to offer an alternative theory. In chapter XV of book XII of On the Trinity is found the following argument:
"For we must not acquiesce in their story, who assert the Samian Pythagoras recollected some things … which he experienced when he was previously here in another body; and others tell yet of others, that they experienced something of the same sort in their minds: but it may be conjectured that these were untrue recollections, such as we commonly experience in sleep, when we fancy we remember, as though we had done it or seen it, what we never did or saw at all; and that the minds of these persons, even though awake; were affected in this way at the suggestion of malignant and deceitful spirits, whose care it is to confirm or to sow some false belief concerning the changes of souls, in order to deceive men."
As far as I know, this explanation of St. Augustine's, in his insistence on the demonic intent of exterior forces, is unique. A worthy successor, though, might be seen in some of the ideas that came out of the spiritualistic movement. Probably beginning with Swedenborg, in the 1700's, interest grew with the revelations of the Fox sisters (1848) from their contacts with spirits, and from the writings of A. J. Davis at about the same time. Certainly encouraged by the Theosophists under the leadership of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, the wave of excitement and interest in mediums, spirits, and séances swept America and Europe during the nineteenth century.
As a result, a group of scientifically interested men and women in England, most notably from Cambridge University, banded together to form the Society for Psychical Research in 1882. Their intent was to subject such manifestations to scientific scrutiny. Among the members of the governing council were Prof. Oliver J. Lodge, Lord Rayleigh, Prof. B. Stewart, and Prof. J. J. Thomson, all four outstanding and respected physicists. Corresponding members included Prof. William James and Prof. E. C. Pickering of Harvard, and Prof. Pierre Janet in France. Already in 1886, it had over 600 members. Similar societies were soon formed in the USA and in other European countries.
In 1895, F. W. H. Myers published two chapters of an intended book entitled The Subliminal Self in the society's Proceedings. The chapters were concerned with "The Relation of Supernormal Phenomena with Time", the first being concerned with retrocognition (supernormal knowledge of the past) and the second with precognition. He supplied many examples of both and also some remarks about deja vu (see the section on precognitive dreams). What concerns us here, though, is his belief in the activities of invisible spirits, more benign, however, than those of St. Augustine's. To quote Myers,
"... in some cases I think that there is actual evidence that the precognition comes from a disembodied intelligence ... "
And further,
" ... I ascribe some precognitions to the reasoned foresight of disembodied spirits, just as I ascribe some retrocognitions to their surviving memory. I have tried in an earlier paper to show ground for believing that some spirits have a continued knowledge of some earthly affairs; and if they have such knowledge, and can show us that they have it, they may presumably reveal to us also their not infallible inferences from what they know." (p. 340)
As we shall see in the section on precognitive dreams (below), Myers himself believed that déjà vu resulted from such dreams. It is not clear how agencies such as he mentioned could reveal the future with such photographic accuracy as that experienced in déjà vu. Thus I personally find it difficult to believe that the corresponding dreams could be "given" by outside entities, especially if they are supposed to be derived from "not infallible inferences". There are others, though, who are not so troubled (e.g., Thomas, 1946-9).
Something similar
Within this category of explanation are included a broad spectrum of déjà vu theories. The idea is basically simple: one has somehow had an experience that is similar to the present one and the feeling of recognition spreads to include the entire encounter. The source of the first experience could be within the outer world, i.e., in daily life; or it could come from within, in the form of dream or fantasy. There is thus an element of coincidence involved.
There is certainly no doubt that such a mechanism is often at work. People many times have the impression that they find familiar or even recognize a place, person, smell, or tune, only to find out later that it isn't possible. An error has been committed; something has been mistaken for something else or one has met with a case of mistaken identity.
Quite often, the explanation is right at hand. One knows immediately what he thought he was seeing. Other times, it may require a good bit of detective work to discover the reason for the mistaken impression, particularly if this has come from the unconscious. There has been a goodly number of psychoanalytic theorists, following Freud, who have taken this tack in their analysis of déjà vu experiences. Thus seen, it becomes a projection mechanism in which some aspect or figure from the inner world has been "seen" in the outer.
In the 1907 edition of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud wrote, "... the feeling of déjà vu corresponds to the recollection of an unconscious fantasy" (Standard Edition, p. 266). Later, in the 1910 edition, he went a bit further, quoting Ferenczi as saying that the déjà vu experiences of a patient of his "regularly proved to have originated from a forgotten (repressed) portion of a dream of the preceding night. It seems therefore that 'déjà vu' can derive not only from daydreams but from night-dreams as well" (p. 268). In 1917, he added a note saying that Grasset in 1904 had independently published a similar theory.
Actually, Emminghaus in his General Psychopathology had already in 1878 written the following (my translation):
"... the entire situation can be held as being identical to an earlier apperception -- may it be an observed, dreamed, or only fantasized one -- only because maybe isolated pregnant parts of both presentation complexes have at least similarity with one another." (p. 131)
Moreover, Paul Radestock came to similar conclusions in his 1879 book, Sleep and Dreaming. More to the point, according to Sully (p. 259 - see next paragraph), he actually kept a dream diary and found correspondences between elements of his déjà vu experiences and some diary entries!
In 1881, the English doctor, James Sully, published a book entitled The Illusions. His tenth chapter was devoted to illusions of memory and there he presented a theory that déjà vu experiences could be based on dream memories. He conjectured that dreams were a transformation process in which impressions from daily life were joined in new combinations and thus it was easily possible that there would occasionally be correspondences with later events. He quoted from Paul Radestock's dream diary research and felt that this gave support to his theory. In the same paragraph, he made the interesting comment:
"One often says that science destroys all beautiful thoughts about nature and life; but while it destroys, it also creates them. Is it not an almost romantic idea that just as our waking life is represented in our dreams, so can our dream life send back some of its shadowy phantoms into our prosaic everyday life, and illuminate it with a reflection of its own magical beauty."
Other writers of that period with similar ideas include Buccola (l883), Osborne (l884), Scott (l892), Lapie (l894), Thibault, (1899), and Mere (1903).
The psychoanalysts, following Freud, have not been so interested in the mechanism involved in bringing the déjà vu about. They have rather wanted to know what part it plays within the psychic economy as a whole: what is its function, what is achieved with it? Freud himself added a passage to the 1909 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams in which he wrote:
"In some dreams of landscapes or other localities, emphasis is laid in the dream itself on a convinced feeling of having been there before. These places are invariably the genitals of the dreamer's mother; there is indeed no other place about which one can assert with such conviction that one has been there once before." (p. 399)
It should be noted, though, that the experience Freud here described differs from déjà vu in two important ways: one can just as well have the impression that one has been there several times before -- not just once; and, the focus is on a locality, not a situation. Although Freud in 1914 identified this experience with déjà vu, it would be better termed déjà visité, a point I shall return to later in section on reincarnation (below).
In 1904, Freud made a trip with his brother to Athens and visited the Acropolis. There he had an experience of derealization, as if what he was seeing was not real. He recounted this in a letter published in 1936 entitled "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis". There he distinguished derealization from the related phenomenon of depersonalization, in that with the former, a piece of outer reality feels strange, while with the latter, a piece of one's own self seems foreign and unfamiliar. He then went on to remark that in déjà vu "... we seek to accept something as belonging to our ego, just as in the derealization we are anxious to keep something out of us." (p. 245) He continues and says that the latter, then, is a defense mechanism. (A fascinating analysis of Freud's Acropolis experience was published by Slochower [1970].)
Subsequent psycho-analytic authors have also claimed that déjà vu can be considered as a defense mechanism, but they have differed as to what should constitute the antagonist. Bergler (1942) said that Freud and Ferenczi (1955) believed the ego used déjà vu experiences to avoid id impulses. He offered examples where it seemed that pangs of conscience (super-ego) were being defended against. Arlow (1959) thought it could involve repression and reassurance in the face of anxiety ("I've been through this before."), and an attempt at omnipotence ("I knew it all along."). Oberndorf (1941) has published similar ideas. Fenichel (1974) saw repressed memories as a possible source of the anxiety.
Marcowitz (1952) wrote that déjà vu was the expression of a wish for a second chance, to back in the same situation again. Pacella (1975) , going further, saw it as an attempted return, not to mother's genitals (and womb) as in Freud, but contact with her face, basing his theory on recent work concerning infantile development. He believes many déjà vu episodes are triggered by seeing another person's face. Finally Schneck (1961) insists that most probably no one explanation will do, that the underlying psychological "causes" are as varied as the individuals involved.
I have no great quarrel with most of these thoughts. I find the last one especially appealing. I do find Freud's idea that there is a symbolic return to the mother's genitals a bit far-fetched, and I cannot remember a déjà vu experience that was set off by visual contact with someone's face. It may be worth noting that there is a marked difference in attitude between those theorists who have experienced déjà vu themselves (e.g., Pötzl, 1926), and those who have not (e.g., Arlow, 1959, who speaks of "attacks" of déjà vu).
Further, I do not think that cases of mistaken identity, erroneous recognition, and false familiarity should be lumped together with déjà vu. Whereas the notion of partial similarity might well explain the former, what makes the latter experience so intense is the detailed agreement of all particulars and the frequent conviction that one knows the situational unfoldment before it occurs. The utter banality and everydayness of most déjà vu feelings also make it difficult to believe that complicated psychological defense mechanisms are at work in every case.
Malfunctions of the Brain
Probably the earliest published medical-scientific thinking on the topic of déjà vu is to be found in the 1844 book by the English doctor, Sir Arthur Wigan, on The Duality of the Mind. In 1817, he attended the funeral of Princess Charlotte at Windsor. He had had little sleep the night before and had eaten nothing during the day preceding the midnight interment (all inns and eating establishments were closed in mourning). After four hours of standing in St. Georges Chapel, he said he was very near fainting. Suddenly, as the coffin was being lowered into its place of final rest, he
"feIt not merely an impression, but a conviction [italics his], that I had seen the whole scene before on some former occasion, and had heard even the very words addressed to myself by Sir George Naylor." (p. 87)
From his experience, he derived the hypothesis that such experiences only occur when one is tired, so that one of the hemispheres of the brain is more or less inattentive to what is going on, or even asleep. Then something causes it to wake up, but it digests its information about the situation after the other, awake hemisphere has already acknowledged it. This produces the feeling of having known about it before. The time interval , he said, "may seem to have been many years" (p. 85), since we have nothing upon which to base our judgment of the elapsed time.
There have been several other authors with the same or similar ideas (e.g., Horwicz, Huppert, Jenssen, Wiedemeister, and Maudsley). One of the most recent revivals borrows electrical engineering language to speak of "the introduction of a delay network on apart of the input side" (Comfort, 1977. See also Efron, 1963). This theory did not, however, meet with general acceptance. It was criticized already by Sander in 1874 and more thoroughly by Kraepelin (1887) and Bonne (in 1907).
Another hypothesis in which the working of the brain is implicated is the long and well-known association of déjà vu with epilepsy (more specifically: psychomotor or temporal lobe epilepsy). This chapter in the history of déjà vu began in 1870 in a short, two paragraph paper in "The Practitioner" in which a young medical doctor using the pseudonym "Quaerens" wrote that he had often had déjà vu experiences as a boy, but that these had become "more intense and more frequent than usual" just preceding his first epileptic attack. He mentions that the latter had been triggered in a time of overwork, which would indicate that fatigue was also involved as a factor (see next sectionr), as with Wigan. He said that on two occasions, an incident of déjà vu was followed the next day by an epileptic seizure. Thus the surmise was at hand that there might be some connection between the two and that déjà vu could be indicative of an epileptic disposition.
Ten years (and some fifteen seizures) later, he became a patient of Dr. John Hughlings Jackson, probably the leading neurologist of his day, certainly in matters dealing with epilepsy. It was Jackson who coined the term "dreamy state" which, according to Bingley (1958), "is practically identical with the modern concept of psychomotor seizure" (p. 102). Déjà vu, or any inexplicable feeling on familiarity, was called by Jackson "reminiscence" (already in an 1876 lecture)(probably borrowed from Plato), and was included in what was known as "intellectual aura" or warnings which could precede or comprise an epileptic discharge. He had another patient, also a medical doctor, whom he designated "Z", who had similar symptoms. He called his "reminiscence" recollection and described it as
"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." (Jackson, 1889, p. 202)
I have presented here this rather extensive quotation because it is characteristic of the familiarity feelings which occur sometimes in connection with temporal lobe epilepsy, and to show that the tone of it is strikingly different from accounts of déjà vu among those not afflicted with the "divine disease". I am personally inclined to believe that Quaerens had both déjà vu experiences and epilepsy, whereas Z had false familiarity feelings during his epileptic seizures. It may be of interest that it was later shown through autopsy that Z had, in fact, a "very small lesion of the left uncinate gyrus" within the temporal lobe (Jackson and Colman, 1898, p. 580).
In 1876, Jackson said, "It is well known that such sensations of 'reminiscence are not uncommon in healthy people, or in trivial disorders of health." (p. 702) And, further, in 1889,
"I should never, in spite of Quaeren's case, diagnose epilepsy from the paroxysmal occurrence of 'reminiscence' without other symptoms, although I should suspect epilepsy, if ... [it] should occur very frequently" (p. 186).
Despite such admonitions, Sir James Crichton-Browne in his 1895 Cavendish lecture before the West London Medico-Chirurgical Society on "Dreamy Mental States" maintained that occurrences of "reminiscence" must be seen as pathological. From the literary quotations he presented (from twelve different writers!) it is clear that he was referring primarily to déjà vu. He said that it was difficult obtaining information about such experiences, because those having had them were disinclined to talk about them, "from a not unwarrantable suspicion that they are somehow morbid in their nature." (p. 2) He quoted Quaerens and some of Dr. Jackson's patients, as well as some of his own, to show what sort of epilepsy he was considering. He went on to point out that Scott, Dickens, and Rossetti all died of brain disease, though he neglected to mention which variety. He finished by saying that such disturbances should be watched for in young people and treated as one would "cerebral neurasthenia and epilepsy" (p. 75). He especially recommended "rest and liberal nourishment", the latter being vegetarian, if possible. Dr. Foster Kennedy, in his 1911 paper, seems to have adopted these views in toto.
Thus it is that up until recently, if one spoke of déjà vu with a medically trained person, especially a neurologist or psychiatrist, his first reaction would have been to think of possible temporal lobe epilepsy. Not only did Jackson lump déjà vu with false familiarity into his concept of "reminiscence", but others following him have tended to form their diagnoses on the bases of such historical accidents and anecdotes, rather than on scientific statistical evidence.
Fortunately, for those who wish to look into it, the necessary studies have been carried out. In 1933, Lennox and Cobb made a statistical study of the incidence of aura in all types of epilepsy. 1359 cases were reviewed and it was found that 764 (or only 56.2%) experienced some sort of aura in connection with their epileptic seizures. Of these, 750 described their aura and these descriptions were analyzed into 327 different categories. 167 had two or more symptoms, so that altogether, 1059 were tabulated. Of these, 3 felt that they were repeating former experiences, 1 (!) had the sense of having seen (déjà vu), and 1 experienced a dreamy state. We saw already in chapter one that roughly three out of every ten persons have had some experience resembling déjà vu (this probably includes feelings of false familiarity). Thus the incidence of déjà vu as part of an epileptic attack is amazingly low! Considering tumors of the temporal lobe, Keschner et ale published a study in 1936 of 110 cases and found no déjà vu in connection with this affliction. They did have two cases where "dreamy states" were noticed, however.
In 1944, Herman and Stromgren examined the records of 644 patients admitted for neurosurgery in Copenhagen. 322 exhibited disturbed consciousness symptoms and hallucinations. They narrowed these down to 68 for intensive study (34 men and 34 women). With regard to déjà vu (which they term "increase of recognition"), there were 8 instances (12%) and the temporal lobe was involved in only 3 of them. Their conclusion is that it cannot be used to pinpoint the source of the disturbance in the brain.
Bingley, in 1958, reviewed studies of dreamy state incidence in temporal lobe epilepsy and tumors and added the results of his own observations with 90 patients. He found 12 (13%) with illusions of memory, "mostly of the déjà vu type" (p. 106). Finally, Richardson and Winokur in 1968 showed that among neurosurgical patients, no one type reported having déjà vu experiences with a significantly higher incidence than the others, and that the incidence among neurosurgical patients was not significantly greater than among psychiatric patients.
Such results need to be more widely disseminated. In my opinion, only ignorance of them could permit an otherwise immanently capable neurologist to write nonsense like the following:
"Only the temporal lobe epileptic with his faulty assessment of time and coincidence has the feeling that he knows the words almost before they are uttered by the speaker." (Simpson, p. 48)
And this is 1969!
This chapter on the possible organic basis of déjà vu would not be complete without mentioning the important and fascinating work performed in Montreal and published by Dr. Wilder Penfield and his associates. They have treated surgically numerous patients afflicted with various types of epilepsy. Given the opportunity of an exposed cerebral cortex, they have used electrodes to stimulate the brain in an effort to better localize the malfunctioning area. Only in stimulating the temporal lobes have they elicited experiential responses from patients under local anesthesia (Penfield and Perot, p. 601). In 70, out of 214 temporal lobe investigations, they obtained what they term "psychical illusions" or "illusions of comparative interpretation". Under this heading, they include: 1) auditory illusions, 2) visual illusions, 3) illusions of recognition, and 4) illusional emotions (Mullen and Penfield, 1959).
The third category embraces both illusions of familiarity (déjà vu included) and illusions of strangeness, change, and unreality. In 6 patients, they were able to induce false familiarity feelings through gentle electrical stimulation of the temporal lobe on the non-dominant hemisphere. The sites are depicted. The accounts of two such patients reporting on their experiences while being stimulated are given and they sound very much like déjà vu (pp. 275 - 277). It is not entirely clear, though, that déjà vu episodes were what were elicited (and the authors carefully nowhere say that they were). It could be that persons who have had numerous déjà vu experiences would interpret an illusion of familiarity as being the same thing, since they are similar.
On page 281, in discussing their results, Mullen and Penfield make the observation:
"Unlike auditory illusions, these feelings of familiarity did not occur without having been present in the seizure, a feature that suggests that considerable 'conditioning' in the abnormal temporal lobe was necessary for the production of these feelings. ... [T]hey were found over a fairly wide area, and this was true even in a single subject, indicating, perhaps, that the function of estimation of familiarity has a diffuse representation throughout the temporal lobe." In one case, the illusion of familiarity seemed to be produced on the dominant side. It is interesting that the false familiarity feelings only arose in those pre-disposed for them.
Psychological Difficulties
With the work of Penfield (see preceding chapter) and others doing similar research, much of what will be included here might well also be seen as organic malfunctioning. However, at the time the following views were presented, they were thought to belong more to the psychic realm, and even today, the part played by the organic apparatus in these functions is far from clear. If Wigan' s idea of the double brain was the first scientific hypothesis, Feuchterleben's term "memory fantasy", or illusion of memory, presents us already in 1845 with the next one. Terms such as "double perception" and "false recognition" soon followed.
There have been numerous ideas as to the exact psychological mechanism underlying déjà vu, too numerous to describe even mention them all here. The best reviews, though, are found in Ellis (1911), Bergson (1921 - 1928), Berndt-Larsson (1931), Herrmann (1960 - '61) and Brown (2004).
How is it, though, that this rather rare, yet impressive disturbance of mental functioning occurs? One circumstance seen by many theorists, following Wigan, as a necessary precondition is exhaustion or at least fatigue (e.g., Bergson). The idea is that then an abaissment du niveau mental can occur which allows all sorts of malfunctions of the mind to take place which otherwise do not, normally.
If present, the sleepiness must give way to alertness, however, once the déjà vu episode has begun. As MaeCurdy noted:
"... it is characteristic of déjà vu that attention is riveted on that which seems to have been experienced before, each detail stands out sharply, and each detail, as it is remarked, seems to add to the feeling of familiarity." (p. 427)
This is not unlike Wigan's idea that the formerly inattentive cerebral hemisphere suddenly takes notice once again.
There are other factors besides fatigue which can lower the level of mental alertness. Berndt-Larssonmentioned distraction. Herrmann added states of being over-loaded, over-excited, and infirmity or feebleness. Freedman et al. note that déjà vu "can occur in normal persons, particularly in settings generating anxiety" (p.393). This latter is in line with the psychoanalytic theory of déjà vu as a defense mechanism (see above).
Statistical evidence exists which would seem to indicate that fatigue may indeed be an important element in creating a mental climate conducive for déjà vu. There is, however, other evidence to show that it isn't a necessary one. The former is shown in an interesting paper by Leeds who had frequent déjà vu experiences (10 to 12 per month) during the time he was attending night school five days each week. The frequency reduced itself to 4 per month when he cut back on his studying and when his work during the day became more interesting. Heymans, on the other hand, in his 1906 survey of students, found that 43% considered themselves to be alert and fresh at the time they experienced either depersonalization or déjà vu, two effects which he thought to be related. Unfortunately, he omitted saying what part of these were having depersonalization feelings and what part déjà vu ("fausse reconnaissance" in his terminology), but he does say that 55 out of 94 had déjà vu 35 experienced depersonalization, and 4 knew both. I believe it would be safe to say, then, that a goodly percentage of the alert and fresh students were having déjà vu experiences. If this were not true, I feel sure he would have noted it because tiredness as a contributing factor is one of the hypotheses he was trying to confirm (pp. 10 - 11). He remarked in a previous paper (1904) that Bernhard-Leroy, in his 1898 medical thesis also found no correlation between déjà vu and over-excitement, overwork, exhaustion, or fatigue (p. 322)(see also Wohlgemuth, 1924).
I pointed out in the introduction that surveys have shown that young people, particularly in adolescence, tend to experience déjà vu more often and more intensely than when they are older. Kraepelin thought that this must be due to the lively fantasy life that arises in this period. One Russian author, K. A. Skvortzov, taking a somewhat different tack, says that there must be some connection between déjà vu and hormones.
Pierre Janet (1903, 1905) felt that one should include déjà vu along with other forms of derealization among the symptoms associated with neurosis, or psychasthenia, as he called it. Bash, in his Textbook of General Psychopathology (1955), seems to have the same opinion (p. 183). In their 1968 study, referred to in the preceding section, Richardson and Winokur found an above average incidence of déjà vu among psychiatric patients diagnosed as having personality disorders (9 out of 11) and situational and adjustment reactions (4 out of 5). They remark, though, that these were mostly young people, where the incidence is already rather high, and it seems to me that these sample sizes (11 and 5) are rather small for deriving any definite conclusions. The incidence among psychoneurotics was not greater than average, however. They note that within this category, hysterics, anxious, and depressive patients seemed to be those most prominently reporting déjà vu.
At the close of the preceding section, I mentioned the work of Penfield et al. in which they were able to elicit impressions of mistaken familiarity through electrical stimulation of the temporal cerebral lobe. Here I would like to point out an analogous series of experiments carried out by Banister and Zangwill (1941) using hypnosis. They use the term "restricted paramnesia" for erroneous familiarity feelings and are careful to distinguish this from déjà vu (p. 30 - 31).
Five male subjects (4 students) and a young army officer; average age 22) were shown on one day 6 postcards with various motifs. On the next day, they were hypnotized and shown 6 more. They were given the post-hypnotic instruction that they would be unable to recognize these cards if they saw them again. On the third day of the experiment, they were presented with all 12 cards mixed in with 12 others. As awaited, they were able to recognize the cards from the first day, but had only unexplainable feelings familiarity for the cards from the second day.
At the end of their first paper, Banister and Zangwill conclude with the statement:
" ... In no case did we find a paramnesia rationalized in the sense of déjà vu. This evidence then ... fails to provide support for the psychoanalytic view [of repression giving rise to déjà vu]. It may be that further experiments will enable us to duplicate also experiences of déjà vu under experimental conditions. But the existing results cannot be said to throw light on paramnesia in its more generalized forms." (p. 50)
Reincarnation
I indicated above that reincarnation was probably the earliest explanation for déjà vu, at least in western literature. This idea was revived in the nineteenth century, most prominently by the Romantics, so that many poems and books of that period contained musings on "intimations of immortality" and the transmigration of souls.
Probably the most telling remark made against the reincarnation theory of déjà vu was advanced by one of the earliest scientific writers to deal with the topic In Austria, Dr. Ernst Freiherr von Feuehtersleben published his book entitled Textbook of Medical Psychology in 1845. In a section on disturbances of the memory function, one finds the following opinions (my translation):
"Here one should include certain fantasies of the memory, e.g., when one has the feeling that a situation in which one finds oneself has already once existed just as it is now. This has been taken by some in poetic error to be a sign of reincarnation (PIatonic reminiscence). If at all, then scarcely were we in a previous life in coattails, lace clothes, kid gloves, sitting with each other in salons at tea and crumpets. We have here, therefore, to do with memory fantasies, a product, even when temporary, of aberrations of remembering." (section 115, part 3, pp. 255 - 256).
I think we need here to begin differentiating between two common forms of déjà experience, namely déjà vécu ("already lived through or experienced") and déjà visité ("already visited") -- or, as TIME magazine termed them, "Been there, done that". The experience just described by the good Austrian psychiatrist would be an example of déjà vécu because it describes a situation that is being "relived".
Reincarnation would seem to better explain incidences of déjà visité, the experience some have of knowing their way around in a locality that they are visiting for the first time. The whole place, or at least a significant part of it, seems familiar to them and they know what is around corners without or before going there. The important questions are: How long have the things around the corner been there? And, are there other people already there? If the person "knows" about a locality that has existed for one or more generations, then reincarnation becomes a viable explanation. If the houses, buildings, and landscape have been there only a relatively short time, then the explanation could lie in a so-called out-of-the-body visit there (cf. Chari, 1960-62, Carrington, The Story of Psychic Science, p. 100, or Shirley, The Problem of Rebirth, pp. 79 - 80), or a clairvoyant vision, or telepathy, given that other people are there (cf. Lalande, 1893). If none of these explanations seem adequate to the facts of the situation, then precognitive knowledge, as in déjà vécu, might be available to the person.
While speaking of déjà visité, there are, of course, two further explanations for it, the simplest and most obvious ones: either the individual really has been to the place, but he isn't able to remember it; or, he has had it once so well described to him that he knows what to expect. One example of the former is found in the paper by Osborne. He told of a clergyman who went with friends to visit Pevensey Castle, ostensibly for the first time. Yet it awakened an uncanny sense of familiarity in him. He found out later from his mother that she had once taken him there when he was 18 months old.
In Sir Walter Scott's Guy Mannering, one finds the following passage:
"... why is it that some scenes awaken thoughts which belong as it were to dreams of early and shadowy recollections, such as my old Brahmin Moonshie would have ascribed to a state of previous existence? Is it the visions of our sleep that float confusedly in our memory, and are recalled by the appearance of such real objects as in any respect correspond to the phantoms they presented to our imagination? How often do we find ourselves in society which we have never before met, and yet feel impressed with a mysterious and ill-defined consciousness, that neither the scene, the speakers, nor the subject, are entirely new; nay, feel as if we could anticipate that part of the conversation which has not yet taken place!" (chapter 41, p. 294)
Here the description is obviously of déjà vu, yet the protagonist has these thoughts upon visiting the ruins of the old manor house of his family from which he had been kidnapped by a band of pirates when he was only five years old. He had been taken to and was raised in the Netherlands. From there, he had gone to India to seek his fortune, becoming a junior officer in the British army with time. Although an instance of déjà visité is described in this quotation and two theories to explain it are presented (reincarnation and one that Freud would have agreed with), the real solution to his quandary is similar to that of Osborne's pastor.
A further example of the second explanation was provided by Nathaniel Hawthorne in Our Old Home(published in 1863), which is a memoir of a trip to England. In a chapter he called "Near Oxford", he related how he explored the ruins of an old castle at Stanton Harcourt. He was particularly struck by an amazing sense of familiarity he felt within the cavernous kitchen of the place. It was only later that he traced his feeling of recognition to a letter of Alexander Pope's, written to the Duke of Buckingham, where he described the kitchen of the place he was staying (without naming it), and Hawthorne had read this letter during his studies years before. The psychoanalytic aspects of this experience were treated in a paper by Zangwill in 1944.
Eternal return
Mircea Eliade in his book Cosmos and History points out that so-called primitive peoples have a very different sense of time from that of western man. He makes the distinction between mythical time in which activities accord with pre-existent archetypal models, and profane time, which has no particular meaning. The latter is hardly reality. Important deeds, such as hunting, eating, procreation, war, and work, as well as ceremonial rituals, are all done in conformance to mythical patterns. The individual identifies himself during these functions with the god who set the pattern "at the beginning of time". Eliade says, "... the man of a traditional culture sees himself as real only to the extent that he ceases to be himself ..." (p. 34)
Further on, he continues:
" ... the life of archaic man ..., although it takes place in time, does not bear the burden of time, does not record time's irreversibility: in other words, in a consciousness of time. Like the mystic, like the religious man in general, the primitive lives in a continual present." (p. 86)
If there is a consciousness of time, then it is cyclic. Life, like the seasons, like the phases of the moon, endlessly repeats itself. Events outside the pattern are ignored as being meaningless.
The Chaldeans, says Eliade, had the idea of the Great Year, which later spread to Greece, Rome, and Byzantium.
"According to this doctrine, the universe is eternal but it is periodically destroyed and reconstituted every Great Year ...; when the seven planets assemble in Cancer ("Great Winter") there will be a deluge; when they meet in Capricorn ... the entire universe will be consumed by fire." (p. 87)
Probably Heraclitus believed in some version of the Great Year. "In any case~ it dominates the thought of Zeno and the entire Stoic cosmology." (p. 88) He says one can find similar ideas among the Indians, Persians, Mayans, and Aztecs. This is death and rebirth at the cosmic level, and it is still an open question in modern cosmology whether the universe will expand forever or eventually return in on itself to begin a new cycle.
Eliade quotes from Henry-Charles Puech's article in the 1951 Eranos Yearbook, which speaks of Greek, and, in particular, the Platonic ideas of time. In the latter half of this quotation, one finds the following:
" ... all cosmic becoming ... will progress in accordance with an indefinite succession of cycles in the course of which the same reality is made, unmade, and remade in conformity with an immutable law and immutable alternations. ... [T]he same situations are reproduced that have already been produced in previous cycles and will be reproduced in subsequent cycles -- ad infinitum. No event is unique, occurs once and for all ..., but it has occurred, occurs, and will occur, perpetually; the same individuals have appeared 055, appear, and reappear at every return of the cycle upon itself. Cosmic duration is repetition and anakuklosis, eternal return." (p. 89 in Eliade, pp. 60 - 61 in Puech)
This is reminiscent of Solomon's contention that there is nothing new under the sun!
A few, more modern thinkers have also subscribed to the doctrine of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche had an idea of multiple worlds, replicas in the infinite universe of our world where the same lives were being lived as here. This, though, has little to do with déjà vu; and, as Priestley pointed out in Man and Time, p. 299, such a notion is even physically untenable.
Ouspensky, however, an early pupil of the semi-Sufi Gurdjieff, taught the notion that when one dies, one is reborn again to relive the same life again. This is found in his chapter on eternal recurrence in A New Model of the Universe. Priestley remarks, p. 30S, that actually the recurrence isn't eternal, since Ouspensky taught that successful people would improve slightly each time around and eventually free themselves from "this plane of existence", while some others gradually degenerate and are not even eventually reborn. Thus the repetitions would slowly change. This is all very similar to the Vedic traditions of Karma and reincarnation.
Here, though, is a ready-made explanation for déjà vu. One has the impression of having been in a situation before because one actually has, not once, but countless times. Therein lies also the difficulty of this explanation: in all instances of déjà vu that I know of, one has the feeling that this situation has only one antecedent, not many. One sees in the mirror of memory only one reflection, not an endless number of them.
This does not, of course, exclude eternal return as a possible elucidation of déjà vu. It could be that some mechanism prevents our recalling previous lifetimes most of the time; and only occasionally slips up, permitting a brief glimpse of only one prior situation. However, the philosophical principle of Occam's razor says one should not multiply assumptions beyond the minimum necessary to account for all the observed facts. This would seem to exclude eternal return as an explanation of déjà vu until more evidence in its favor is brought to fore.
Precognitive "dreams"
Many report and believe the true source of many déjà experiences, especially paranormal ones where precognitive knowledge of the future is involved, is somehow connected with experiences that occur while asleep. One is tempted to say "in dreams", but many say these experiences are not like normal dreaming: There is no fantasy involved and the "dream ego" feels quite odd and strange. It may even be that the "dreamer" feels that he or she has somehow gained access to a space or realm they are not at home in or maybe that it is somehow forbidden to be there.
In addition, if the unconscious has the ability or is sometimes given the opportunity to look ahead, there is no reason to suppose that this can only occur while one is asleep (cf. Jung, 1951, par. 974). Recent physiological research seems to indicate that our 90 minute REM (Rapid Eye Movement) cycle doesn't cease upon awakening, but most probably continues throughout the day. Furthermore, dreaming is not confined just to REM cycles, as was formerly believed (cf. Solms, 1997). Thus the unconscious and its activities may weIl and most likely do continue throughout our day-to-day existence.
Some researchers believe the unconscious, or at least its physical substrate, is located within the non-dominant hemisphere of the cerebral cortex (cf. Myers, 1887, p. 57; Blakeslee). EEG's show no cessation of activity there during the day, so at least physiologically, it seems to be indicated that our unconscious activity parallels our conscious one(s) during waking and continues unabated during sleep, though possibly with cyclic intensity.
Moreover, there are precognitive dreams which are different from déjà vu "previews". They are usually more symbolic and frequently presage an approaching tragedy connected with some acquaintance or loved one. Then, there are also more realistic precognitive dreams, which are probably identical to the paranormal déjà vu type. These are remembered, though, and taken note of as being possibly precognitive before the fore-seen events transpire.
When the events "arrive", there may not be such an element of surprise, as with déjà vu, since one knew what to expect. One may even be engaged in altering things so that the events don't take the negative turn that would occur if left to their normal course. There are cases on record, however, where exactly those efforts were responsible for bringing the unwanted fulfillment about (cf. Cox, 1956; Stevenson, 1970). Premonitions would then be due, probably, to less perfectly remembered precognitive dreams and/or fantasies.
Keeping these reservations in mind, in the following I shall continue to use words like "dream" and "dreaming" in connection with paranormal déjà vu, although "some activity of the unconscious" would be more accurate. I wish to show now that this connection is not new (e.g., Jung, 1951, par. 974; Chari, 1964, p. 200; or West, p.267). It has its history and it has been to some extent investigated.
It seems that the English Romantic poet Shelley was the first on record to suspect a connection between dreaming and déjà vu. In a collection of some of his prose notes (Speculations on Metaphysics), there is a short section with the heading: "Catalogue of the Phenomena of Dreams, as Connecting Sleeping and Waking." At the end of this section, there is an account of an experience he had had at Oxford while walking there with a friend. He described the scenery and said:
"The scene surely was a common scene … The effect which it produced on me was not such as could have been expected. I suddenly remembered to have seen that exact scene in some dream of long ...
"Here I was obliged to leave off, overcome by thrilling horror!" (p. 297)
Although his widow, Mary Shelley, collected and published these reflections only in 1840, she assigned these fragments to the year 1815, seven years before his death.
The earliest scientific author to mention a connection between dreaming and déjà vu was apparently Hodgson, in an 1865 essay on metaphysics (Time and Space). In a section on the analysis of redintegration, he said:
"Sometimes we dream of a place that seems perfectly familiar; sometimes we see a place, waking, which appears familiar, though we know we have not seen it before, and then, perplexed, say we must have seen it in a dream." (part I, chapter V, section 29)
He then proposed the curious theory that it wasn't the scene which was identical to the dream, rather the interest in the subject matter was the same. I have mentioned some other authors that were concerned with dreams and déjà vu in the "something similar" section.
Along a parallel track, the study of premonitory and prophetic dreams also has its history. It would take us much too far afield to recount it all here, but I would like to mention a few items for those who may wish to delve further. Paul Radestock's book has already been referred to (in the "something similar" section). He often quoted passages from Dr. J. Ennemoser's book on the history of magic, published in 1844. The latter spoke about prophetic dreams (p. 133) and quoted many ancient authorities on dream interpretation. Another author who performed the same service was B. Büchsenschütz. His book, from 1863, has the title: Dreams and Dream Interpretation in Antiquity. Spitta, in 1877, though totally disavowing any possibility of prophecy in dreams, also lists a number of ancient authors. The Scotsman, MacNish, held already the same "enlightened" opinion in 1834. Two other interesting books from that period are K. A. Scherner's The Life of Dreams (1861) and E. R. Pfaff's The Dreamlife and its Interpretation (Following the Principles of the Arabs, Persians, Greeks, Indians, and Egyptians) (1868).
There have been some famous examples of precognitive dreams. The Bible provides several of the symbolic variety. Divination of the future through the interpretation of such dreams played an important role in ancient Chaldea and Greece. Calpurnia, the wife of Julius Caesar, is reported to have dreamt of his assassination the night before his death in the Senate (Moufang and Stevens, 1953, p. 128). Had he heeded her pleas, he might have lived longer.
Abraham Lincoln also had a warning in a dream (his own) of his impending demise. He told his dream at a gathering of friends occasioned by the surrender of Robert E. Lee. W. H. Lamon wrote down the account of it the same night. In his dream, Lincoln heard sounds of mourning and came to where someone was lying in state in the East Room of the White House. He asked a nearby soldier standing watch who was dead. The reply was that the President had been assassinated (cf. Moufang and Stevens, 1953, pp. 230-3).
Such dreams have not escaped the attention of the psychoanalysts. Werner Kemper published at least two papers dealing with these matters. The first (1954-5) had to do with two impressive dreams which came true. The second, longer paper (1956) tackled the problem of the forward-looking aspect of dreams. He compares there the various schools of depth psychology and remarks that C. G. Jung and his followers have long stressed this important aspect (see next section). Hans Zullinger (1951-2) also wrote about a patient who brought him an ostensibly prophetic dream, but he was less convinced than Kemper.
Nandor Fodor has had a continuing interest in parapsychology and published in 1955 a paper entitled "Through the Gate of Horn". There, he included in his bibliography references to papers by Freud and others who also were confronted with analyzing premonitory dreams. Fodor began his paper with a longish quotation from Homer's Odyssey (W. J. Black edition, p. 248). It is the famous scene where Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, spoke with his wife Penelope after his return. She told him a dream she had had which seemed to portend the death of the many suitors who had come to vie for her hand. In the course of the subsequent conversation, she said,
"... dreams are very curious and unaccountable things, and they do not by any means invariably come true. There are two gates through which these insubstantial fantasies proceed; the one is of horn, and the other ivory. Those that come through the gate of ivory are fatuous, but those from the gate of horn mean something to those that see them." (Fodor, p. 283)
Mention was made above (in the section on outside influences) of the Society for Psychical Research. Besides its Journal and proceedings, its first major publication was Phantasms of the Living by Gurney, Myers, and Podmore, which appeared in 1886. Though primarily concerned with bringing together evidence for telepathy (a word Myers coined), there appear several instances of precognitive dreams and one which included an occurrence of déjà vu (case 100, pp. 327 - 328), though not identified as such.
A few.years later, Myers published his "The Subliminal Self" article in the society's proceedings. As described above (in the section on outside influences), the first part had to do with retrocognition (abnormal knowledge of the past), but he offered some remarks about déjà vu (for which he suggested the alternative term "promnesia"):
"... a suddenly evoked reminiscence of a past dream may give rise to the feeling of "déjà vu", of having witnessed the actual scene at some indefinite time before … The really important question … is whether the connexion may be other than casual, whether the dreamer may in some supernormal way have visited the scene, or anticipated the experience, which he was destined afterwards to behold or to undergo." (p. 341)
In the next chapter, dealing with precognition, Myers gave several examples of precognitive dreams, some of which are so close to déjà vu in tone that I would like to present four of them, somewhat abbreviated, here.
The first is from a man who vividly dreamt that a business associate would show him a collection of slides. The next day, his printer visited him and related that he had just acquired a slide collection containing views from Egypt which he felt sure would interest him. This so amazed him that he told his dream to his children. To quote from the report sent to Myers, the following evening,
"I went to Mr. Wingat's house, and there to my astonishment stood the very box and its surroundings that I had seen in my dream. I sat down and looked over twenty or more slides, then got up and said, 'I will look at no more!' for there I saw the identical views I had seen in my dream." (p. 459)
I find this example interesting because it seems he altered things from what he had dreamt. From his account, one receives the impression that he saw more slides in his dream than in reality, because he refused to see more. We shall never know whether his dream-viewed ones were the same as those remaining to be seen in reality. He missed an ideal opportunity to test his precognitive knowledge: he could have tried telling Mr. Wingat the contents of the slides he hadn't yet examined. I would also wish to have known if the sequence of the ones seen followed that of his dream. He didn't say.
In another account, a lady in England wrote that she was terrified of monkeys and yet dreamt of seeing one. She told her dream to several people, trying to dilute its terror for her. Her husband recommended some fresh air and she decided to take her children out for a short walk. On the roof of a nearby coach house (this occurred in 1867), she saw the very monkey of her dream. She continued:
"In my surprise and terror, I clasped my hands and exclaimed … 'My dream! My dream!' This I suppose attracted the attention of the monkey and he began to come after us, he on top of the wall, we beneath, every minute I expecting he would jump upon me and having precisely the same terror I experienced in my dream." (p. 488)
It turned out that the monkey belonged to the Duchess of Argyl, whose lodge was nearby and it had gotten loose. Myers noted that this case was interesting because the dream set the stage for its coming true. Without the dream, she most likely would not have gone out for the walk and her exclamation, based on the dream, helped the terrifying experience continue, as in the dream. One can speak of self-fulfilling prophecy.
The third example bears some resemblance to the first one in that the lady involved also acted on the strength of a dream to change its fulfillment. In her dream, she went for a coach ride to London. On a particular street, she was standing beside the coach and the driver fell from his perch to the street below, smashing his head badly. The next day, she actually did go by coach to London (as planned previously) and on the way home, they turned into the street of her dream:
"My dream flashed back upon me. I called him to stop, jumped out ... and called a policeman to catch the coachman. Just as he did so the coachman swayed and fell off the box."
Thus the accident was narrowly avoided. She found out afterwards that the driver had had diarrhea the night before and had misjudged his strength. She continued the account saying,
"... my premonitory dream differed from reality in two points. In my dream we approached Down-street from the west; in reality we came from the east. In my dream the coachman actually fell on his head ... In reality this was just averted by the prompt action which my anxious memory of the dream inspired." (p. 497)
This is not the accuracy of detail normally found in déjà vu, but it is close. It is also interesting because it seems to indicate some freedom of will: events don't have to go as predicted (cf. L. E. Rhine, "Precognition and Intervention", 1955)). It's as if the action of the lady created a split in the flow of time, a fork in the way, where the dream-seen future was one possibility and she got things to go another. Do futures seen with less accuracy allow more freedom of choice? A bit more on this in the next section.
The fourth example also happened in 1867. A young engineer, T., later a professor at Nancy in France, was helping a friend restore a fallen-in sulfur mine. The wife of the friend was pregnant and one morning T. came running from his bedroom to read his friend a telegram about the birth of their second child. He had read three lines of it when it slowly disappeared and he realized that he had been dreaming. His friend asked him to repeat the first three lines and these were written down. Ten days later, the telegram did arrive heralding the birth and its first three lines were identical with those he had preseen and luckily recorded (Myers, pp. 504 - 505).
An interesting aspect of this example is that as T. was awakening, he said he could still see the rest of the telegram, even though he could no longer read it. When he wrote the first three lines down, he drew the remaining three which also turned out to correspond with the later telegram. This would seem to indicate that dream memories are mediated by the non-dominant, non-verbal cerebral hemisphere.
An astronomer at the Paris observatory, Camille Flammarion, was interested in more than the stars. In 1900 he published a book with the title The Unknown and the Problems of the Soul, the eleventh chapter of which had to do with premonitions in dreams and divination of the future. By the 1917 edition, he had included 76 examples, some of which sound remarkably like déjà vu (eg. pp. 373-4, 378-9, 382, 388, and 401 in the 1919 German edition). Towards the end, he remarked (my translation from the German):
"The human spirit is equipped with faculties, which are unknown to us, but make it possible to see far beyond time and space. And this is what we wanted to document through a number of mutually agreeing testimonials." (p. 415)
On the last page of the chapter, he said he hoped at a later date to devote some effort to examining more minutely the connections between such prophetic dreams and déjà vu. Some other collections of precognitive dreams can be found in Moufang and Stevens (1953), Osborne (1962), and in Priestley (1968).
Books and articles dealing with premonitions, precognitions, prophetic dreams, and the like have been numerous. In order to stay with my chosen topic of déjà vu, I won't devote much more space to them here. Those wishing to acquaint themselves with the many accounts and investigations need only browse through the Journals and Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, and/or its French, German, Italian, or American counterparts. Some of the books dealing with the topic include E. Lyttelton, Some Cases of Prediction (1937); C. Richet, The Future and Premonitions (1931); H. Saltmarsh, Foreknowledge (1938); and G. N. M. Tyrrell, The Personality of Man (1947).
A few facts that I might mention in passing that I found interesting during my perusal of this literature are the following. In antiquity, along with many others, Aristotle and Cicero were concerned with precognition and Plutarch with prophetic dreams (Dodds, 1971). There has been some success in experimental trials, not only with humans (where it is in some cases remarkable), but also involving rats (Eysenck, 1975), mice, jirds, and hamsters (Levy et al., 1973)). There may therefore be some influence of precognition in evolutionary survival (Eisenbud, 1976). However, the survival value of precognitive knowledge is questionable: it may help one avoid an accident or attack, but if Bergson, Huxley, and Priestley are right (see below), it is not good to have too much of it. That some helps, though, is shown by the interesting fact that successful business executives tend to score relatively high in precognition tests (Dean and Mihalsky, reported at the Oct. 14, 1970 meeting of the American S. P. R. according to "Parapsychology", vol. 1, #5, p. 21).
There have been registers where one could send a report of what one believes to be a precognitive dream, vision, or premonition (Nelson, 1976). According to West (1946-9), "... the precognitive dream is by far the most commonly reported psychic incident at the present time ." (p. 265) Green (1966), in a survey of students who went to a lecture on ESP at Southampton University, found the same was true of déjà vu (80% of 115 attendees). Mood seems to be significant in affecting experimental precognitive scores (Nielson, 1970). Precognitive clairvoyance is sometimes experienced in advanced LSD sessions (Grof, 1975, p. 329).
A book which can be viewed as a milestone in the research concerning déjà vu and dreams appeared in 1927. This was An Experiment With Time by J. W. Dunne, a former Boer War infantry officer turned aeronautical engineer, who incidentally designed Britain's first military airplane in 1906. He had numerous experiences of déjà vu, so numerous in fact that he was faced with the problem that he must be somehow abnormal. He kept a scrupulous record of his dreams and there, like Radestock before him, found astonishing correspondences. He gradually came to the conclusion that his dreaming self somehow had access to the future and that probably most everyone had the same ability if only they would pay more attention to it. He further reasoned that "visiting" the past while asleep was most likely just as easy and that one could find traces of both sorts in looking through ones dreams.
Through his research he found that not only are entire sequences from the future occasionally previewed while asleep, much more often can one find elements or details from the future or past cropping up in more ordinary dreams (this became known as the Dunne effect). In two experiments, one with the S. P. R. in 1932, and one subsequently at Oxford with 23 undergraduates, despite disappointment that not everyone seemed to have his ability like he wanted to believe, he did find evidence of many precognitive elements in dreams (12% of 165 reported, 148 from the students, and 17 of his own)(see Besterman [1932-3] for an independent report of the results). This might account, by the way, for the some of the vaguer forms of déjà vu that people often have.
There appears to be no regular rule as to how far ahead (or backward) the unconscious chooses (or can) look. In Dunne's case and others (see below), it varied considerably. Dalton, in his 1962 critical review of Osborn's 1962 book, The Future is Now, tallied the fulfilment lags of the 47 cases reported there, and found that 15 were one day or less, 11 were within 2 to 3 days, with the remaining 21 spread over a period of 4 days to 8 1/2 years (p. 259). Kruisinga (1954) found roughly the same distribution. He recorded 1444 of his own dreams and found 62 correspondences (4.3%) within an arbitrary, self-imposed limit of 90 days following each dream. He chose another 90 day period three years later to serve as a control and found only 17 elements which corresponded with items in the dream series (p. 301). Kooy (1957), a professor of theoretical physics, Breda, Holland, in 2 1/2 years of dream diary keeping, found 193 "Dunne effects". Most, he discovered, occurred within 24 hours. Orme plotted the logarithm of the incidence against the logarithm of the fulfillment-time intervals and shows that the relationship is nearly linear with a negative slope, indicating that the relationship is most probably inversely exponential.
Dunne remarked that the reason this effect had gone so long so relatively unnoticed is that not many people pay enough attention to their dreams, especially going so far as to keep a written record of them. This is not to mention periodically reviewing this record to check for unusual correspondences with the past or with future elements or sequences. Zuger (1966) found that persons who claim not to remember their dreams also do not report having déjà vu (p. 193). Honorton (1972) arrived at a similar conclusion with regard to experimental precognition trials.
Further, Dunne noted that there is within us something that resists such scrutiny. Priestley (1968) ascribed this to our instinct for survival. As he said,
"... this would be a bad time for men and women to be constantly observing that they were seeing, hearing, feeling, what they had already seen, heard, felt, in their dreams. We live in an age that is constantly demanding our sharpest attention. A wrong turn of the wheel or a neglected signal can end our lives hideously. We must attend to things through the narrowest now-point that men have ever known." (p. 274)
Henri Bergson (1908) was convinced that we are capable of remembering everything we perceive and that it is the job of some mechanism in the mind to keep us from being constantly flooded with all the material we potentially could be. In his theory, déjà vu arises when this mechanism fails to operate as it should, due to tiredness, anxiety, etc., allowing us momentary access to raw perception data before it has been screened and processed, as weIl as to it's normal digested form. Thus the doubling. (This theory does not, as it has been pointed out, account for cases of apparently remembered dreams where there can be, as we've seen, some considerable time lags.) This position of Bergson's bears some resemblance to Freud's notion of the dream censor and it is not unlike Huxley's idea of the mind as a reducing valve, keeping our perceived world narrow enough that we can cope with it (1954).
A worthy successor to Dunne's self study is the 1974 book published in Germany by a film and theater actress, Christine Mylius. She called it her Dream Diary (Traumjournal) with the sub-title: Experiment with the Future. It seems she has had experiences of déjà vu frequently and intensely most of her life and she began in 1953 to send her dream accounts fortnightly to the Freiburg Institute for Borderline Areas of Psychology, headed by Prof. Hans Bender. By 1974, over 2400 such reports had been archived.
Fortunately, Frau Mylius also has the habit of keeping a detailed diary. What is especially fascinating is that many of the later dream fulfillments (déjà vu experiences) were recorded on celluloid, since they had to do with her film roles. In this case, one does not have to only take the individual's word for what happened; the investigator can himself see the correspondences between the dream reports and the events which later "come true".
Prof. Bender, in his foreword to the book remarked (my translation):
"Family and profession are the preferred territory of the secret antennae for that to come, but accidents, sickness, and death seem also to spread their shadows in her dream experiences ... [Her] diary showed that Fr. Mylius had her psi-dreams often in life situations in which she had to struggle with stress and worry. The future situation turned out to be the solution for the anxiety. That anxiety is a primary motif for breakthroughs in the space-time continuum is proven by the analysis of the countless reports, from all levels of the population, known as 'spontaneous phenomena'. Out of an analysis of 1500 probable paranormal cases at the Freiburg Institute, it happened that in 44% of the cases, death was the theme; in 19%, sickness, injury, or mortal danger; and in 26%, important occurances which were largely connected with strong negative emotions. Only 11% had to do with unimportant episodes. With Frau Mylius, in notable cases, anxiety is the discharging motif, yet the palette of unimportant, emotionally neutral ones is wider than in the statistics quoted above. This may have to do with the completeness with which the authoress describes her dreams and the corresponding happenings. Without 'expectant observation', such coincidences would not [normally] be noticed." (pp. 9 - 10)
It may also have to do with the closer contact with the unconscious that an individual who is able to remember his or her dreams must have. He or she is thus more able to remember small details -- they are not so far away.
Prof. Bender further said that he and his colleagues, including Fr. Mylius, are well aware that self-fulfillment can be at work in such cases. He spoke of the breakup of relationships which the unconscious could well know about, way in advance of the actual partings. Anxiety about a believed sickness or death can produce the very thing feared. Possible knowledge which can lead to a reasonable surmise of the future must also be watched for and the results excluded. Coincidence can always be appealed to as explanation for this and that detail. The impressive aspect, however, is the vast quantity and accuracy involved in the incidents reported in Fr. Mylius' book.
Deja vu, synchronicity, causality, and time
Toward the end of his long and productive career, C. G. Jung began to write about what he called "meaningful coincidences", those things which sometime come together and are not only coincidental, but are somehow of import to the person(s) involved. He published his reflections in two papers: "On Synchronicity" (1951) and "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle" (1952). In these he provided examples of such synchronicities and outlined a hypothesis that the unconscious, at its deepest levels where it transcends space and time, is able to bring together in some as yet unexplained fashion the elements necessary that the conscious mind might somehow notice that something is afoot. Very often, these would be due to repressed and neglected aspects of the individual which consciousness refuses to acknowledge. Rather than appearing only in dreams, if the "psychic charge" is great enough, so to speak, the outer environment would become involved in the attempt to "wake" the inattentive ego.
Some of these could be quite striking. Jung's most famous example was of a patient who brought him dreams for analysis, but in her rationalism had little respect for the "messages" contained in them or for the unconscious. One day, she dreamed of a golden scarab beetle (as a piece of jewelry). After she had related this during her analytical hour, Jung heard noise at the window, went there and found a green-golden scarab-like beetle trying to get into the room. He gave it to the woman saying "Here is your beetle" and that provided the breakthrough that got the analysis really underway (Jung, 1951, par. 982; 1952, pars. 843, 845)
Actually, Jung his life long emphasized the prospective, future-oriented aspect of the human psyche, especially as evidenced in dreams. This teleological point of view contributed to his break with Freud, who insisted during most of his career that dreams were made up of nothing but Tagesresten (remainders from the day) and disguised wish fulfillments. Jung, in his writings and lectures, spoke of purposes and ends to be attained. Often the goal was in part to bring the conscious mind away from one-sidedness and back into balance with the rest of his nature and destiny. Thus dreams often serve a compensatory function within the psychic economy. The scarab incident, Jung wrote, brought the patient away from an overly rationalistic stance and made it possible for the analytical work to bring her back into contact with deeper, more feminine strata of her nature.
If we ask which came first: the dream or the beetle's arrival, it is clear that in terms of time sequence, the dream was earlier. Yet the latter could have been to some extent precognitive. Dunne (see previous section) would have thought so. If that was the case, then it would not be necessary to suppose that the unconscious of the lady somehow "arranged" for the beetle to come to the window. Rather, it "knew" it was coming and included this element in a striking dream. For lovers of paradox, it must be mentioned that most likely the only reason Jung went to the window to fetch it was that he was searching for something to help the person, and if it hadn't been for the dream, he may not have shown the beetle to her. That, at least, was arranged by her unconscious!
It is moreover fascinating that it was her instinctual side, possibly symbolized by the insect, which had been neglected (or repressed?) during her studies. In addition, Jung pointed out that the scarab was a symbol of rebirth in Egyptian mythology. Thus of all the coming future events, this one suited the needs of her unconscious, and therewith was it meaningful for her.
Jung mentioned that one can not speak of causality in such cases. He said, "... we cannot conceive how a future event could bring about an event in the present." (1951, par. 979). Or, perhaps more emphatically,
"... it would be absurd to suppose that a situation which does not yet exist and will only occur in the future could transmit itself as a phenomenon of energy to a receiver in the present." (1952, par. 840) (See also 1952, end of par. 856.)
Here Jung emphasized an important aspect of causality: not only should the effect follow its supposed cause in temporal sequence, but there must also be some form of energy transfer between them, if only by some mode of communication. The minimal amount of such communication, according to information theorists, is the simple yes/no, on/off, the most basic element of all digital computers. This is referred to as a "bit". Assuming a perfect receiver, the minimum amount of electromagnetic energy required to transmit such a bit is a photon, be it using radio wavelengths or visible light. As soon as the receiver or the transmission channel is noisy, the number of photons/bit must be increased.
The human eye consists of millions of light receptors, all functioning simultaneously (i.e., in parallel), each one registering the arrival (or not) of photons. A picture is said to be worth a thousand words; it contains millions of bits of information! Thus even the dark-adapted eye (i.e., at its highest sensitivity) requires a goodly number of photons in order to see anything.
In a precognitive dream or déjà vu, has one removed energy from the future? I think not. Jung reported on a patient of his who was comatose from loss of blood following a difficult delivery. She had the impression of leaving her body and observing the frantic nurses and doctors who were hard at work to restore her to consciousness. She was able to tell them what she had "seen" from her near-the-ceiling vantage point and it was true (1952, par. 950-2). Moody, in his 1977 book Life After Life, relates many such instances. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, in her research on the experience of dying, has met with such accounts, too. Here there is no question of normal energy being used for such "seeing", since there are no normal receptors (eyes) being employed. If photons had left the room at points where her pupils would have to have been, one would at least see two dark spots of absorption. Such spots have never to my knowledge been observed. In precognitive dreams and déjà vu, one can imagine that a similar sort of mechanism (not yet explainable) must be employed, even though there the viewpoint is usually the same as the person will have at the time the "dream" becomes reality. If there is an "out of the body" excursion to the future involved, it is to visit one's own there.
Thus from the standpoint of energetics, causality is probably not violated by precognitions (cf. Foster, 1969), i.e., no energy (as we know it) has been taken out of the future into the past. But we do sometimes have an impression from them upon which to base a decision and here one could speak possibly of the future influencing the present (Priestley, 1968, pp. 21Sff, refers to this as a FIP). The decisive word here is "impression". One is never completely certain that one has actually "seen" what is to come (cf. Flew, 1974). It would seem that only prophets have that sort of assurance (if they did or do). One is impressed when what one has seen actually turns out to fit the future facts, but one is never sure.
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There may be a few determinists around who still believe that there is no chance at work. Despite Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (which established that there is a fundamental limit as to how accurately we can measure simultaneously physical quantities such as position and momentum, energy and time at the atomic level), they would contend that only our measuring apparatus is (necessarily) blunt and that things nevertheless go the only way they can. I suppose they would say that the physicist's statistical description of reality is only required by this bluntness, not by anything more fundamental. The logical positivists, however, say that if you can not measure something (at least in principle), it makes no sense to speak about it.
There are some atoms (neon, for example) which can hold on to absorbed energy for a while (measured in microseconds) before releasing it in some direction in the form of a photon of electromagnetic energy. (Einstein predicted that this release could be "triggered" if the atom was suitably stimulated by another photon of the appropriate energy. This forms the basis for the maser and laser.) Such atoms are said to have meta-stable energy levels. Left to itself, the time of emission of the released photon appears to be a random affair. The decay of radio-active nuclei seems to be likewise unpredictable. There seems to be no cause for it, it just happens.
Thus, in spite of Einstein's fervent belief that "God does not play dice", there seems to be some random chance built into the scheme of things. It is difficult to know what the long term consequences are if an atom should "decide" to emit its photon or decay sooner or later than it does, but it could be that eventually macroscopic (i.e., noticeable) differences would gradually appear among the various alternative universes thus created. The number of these alternatives is obviously unimaginably large (infinite, if the time or the angle of emission is not quantized).
The decision of a person to take one course of action out of all his or her possible alternatives also leaves many possibilities open and creates such "branchings". Whether he or she actually performs his or her intended activity (or inactivity) sooner or later also, like atomic decay, multiplies them further. This is like Nietzsche's multiple worlds, except the multiplicity is in time rather than in space.
Remember the lady in the previous chapter who saved the ailing coachman from a probable fractured skull? As I remarked there, she changed the way things were going by her intervention and created a branching in the flow of time. The coach driver existed on one branch with an injured head (assuming the fall wasn't fatal), the branch "seen" in her dream. She chose (or created) another branch where he could be caught by the nearby policeman.
I must admit that it isn't entirely clear to me, but I belive that only one extra time dimension is necessary to contain all these other possible futures. It turns out that modern physics has recently come to entertain just this sort of idea in order to resolve certain philosophical problems now encountered in quantum mechanics. According to Douglas Hofstadter (1981), it was first proposed in 1957 by Hugh Everett III. The theory seeks to include the observer in the quantum mechanical description of a physical system. The problem is seen, for example, when a two-slit experiment is performed with photons or electrons which arrive at the detector array sequentially. With both slits open, an interference pattern gradually appears, the same as would be observed if the number of particles per second were increased to where they could interfere with one another. When one slit is closed, the pattern no longer appears. How do single file particles "know" that two slits are open if they can only pass through one of them? One can speak of the probabilities of the particles passing through one slit or the other, but how can probability patterns interfere with each other? It is as if the probability distribution (wave function) depended on what observation was being made. Thus the observer must be somehow included in any quantum mechanical description of the situation.
This is what Everett's theory sought to do by enlarging the number of time dimensions to two and allowing for alternate futures. A 1973 book is devoted to a detailed exposition of the underlying theoretical framework: Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, edited by B. S. Dewitt and N. Graham. See also Other Worlds by Paul Davies (1980). The idea of an extra dimension of time has also been treated by H. A. C. Dobbs in his 1965 article, "Time and Extrasensory Perception".
If the unconscious is able to leave one time-path and jump ahead to the same one or a nearby one (or even a far-out one?!), there is likely an added time dimension required, orthogonal to the others, so that movement within it will not take time in the other two. This brings the number of time dimensions to three, incidentally equaling the number of spatial dimensions. According to Priestley (1968), Ouspensky (1931) had much the same idea.
Dunne (1927) also argued that an observer watching himself made it necessary that we have an added time dimension, but he quickly found himself in an infinite regress mess with observers observing observers observing observers ... and an infinite number of associated time dimensions. He referred to it as a serial universe. Various authors have pointed out that Dunne should have stuck to experimenting and left the philosophizing to others more competent.
For their part the latter have not been idle. There have been numerous articles in the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research concerned with the philosophical implications of precognition. Probably the best anthology is to be found in The Philosophy of C. D. Broad, edited by P. A. Schilpp (1959). Other books on time which may be of interest are: G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time (1961) and J. T. Fraser, The Voices of Time (1966).
Before concluding, I would like to at least mention work published on synchronicity by Dr. M. L. von Franz. Particularly in her 1974 book, Number and Time, one finds elaborated the fascinating thought of Jung's (1952, par. 871) that synchronicities and the occasional success of divination methods are possible because of a fundamental order in the cosmos, order in its temporal unfoldment. Further, that the concept of number is an expression of this basic, archetypal ordering. The contention is that number and numbering has not been invented by man, rather discovered, brought to consciousness gradually through centuries of mathematical puzzling and development.
The unconscious is held to be aware of this underlying orderedness and to be able to draw on it in order to "create" synchronistic coincidences. She points out that this way of thinking is, in fact, typical of eastern, particularly Taoist, thought, and that it forms the basis of the I Ching. The goal, then, becomes to align oneself with the flow of this Tao, and to cease striving against it. I find it awesome and even frightening to think that the order thus postulated would include the future in such detail as one "sees" it in a precognitive dream or déjà vu. This is determinism of quite some caliber!
I personally prefer the relative openness of more than one time dimension when thinking about déjà vu and to reserve the Taoist point of view for a more "behind-the-scenes", pervading order, perhaps throughout the six (or more?) dimensions.