Déjà Vu "Firsts" : The Post-1800 Era

After St Augustine almost 1500 years passed before someone ventured to write about déjà vu experiences again. The earliest account I have come across to date occurs in a novel by Sir Walter Scott (1815), Guy Mannering or the Astrologer. There one finds the protagonist revisiting the ruins in Scotland of the castle grounds from which he had been kidnapped as a young boy. He asks,

"Why is it that some scenes awaken thoughts which belong as it were to dreams of early and shadowy recollection, 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!"(chap. 41).

(There are two theories the cause of déjà vu mentioned explicitly in this passage and a further one is implicit since he had actually been there before!)

Although only published in 1840, it seems the English romantic poet, Shelley (1815 / 1840) also wrote about a déjà experience. After his death, his widow, Mary Shelley, famous in her own right as the authoress of Frankenstein, published a collection of Shelley's prose notes with the title Speculations on Metaphysics in 1840. She assigned the fragment bearing the heading "Catalogue of the Phenomena of Dreams, as Connecting Sleeping and Waking" to 1815, seven years before his death. It seems that Shelley was the earliest to see explicitly a connection between his déjà vu experience and his own preceding dream.(Funkhouser, ) He wrote about an experience he had had at Oxford while walking there with a friend. Described the scenery he said:

"The scene was a common scene ... The effect that 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)

Before turning to more scientific thought on the topic, no such survey would be complete without citing the passage that is probably most often quoted in the déjà vu literature, namely that found in Charles Dickens's 1850 book, David Copperfield:

"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" (chap 39).

There were many other literary allusions to the phenomenon in the literature of the period, too many to cite them all here.

There is one figure, though, who serves well as a bridge to more scientific thinking and that is the eminent Bostonian and Harvard Professor of Anatomy, Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1858 he published a collection of thoughts that he had contributed regularly to a local newspaper. When published as a book this compilation was given the title, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. There one finds one of the boarders saying, "All at once a conviction flashes through us that we have been in the same precise circumstances as at the present instant, once or many times before" (pp. 69-70).

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 L. Wigan, The Duality of the Mind . In 1817 he attended the funeral of the 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 George's Chapel he said he was very near fainting. Suddenly, as the coffin was being lowered into its place of final rest, he "felt 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 thesis 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. The time interval, he said, "may seem to have been many years" since we have nothing upon which to base our judgment of the elapsed time (p. 85). Looking through his book (which has been re-published), one is amazed how much his thinking anticipated some of the most modern areas of current neurological research.

Subsequent to Wigan there have been several other authors with the same or similar ideas (e.g., Horwicz, Huppert, Jenssen, Wiedemeister, and Maudsley). One of the more recent revivals borrows electrical engineering terminology to speak of "the introduction of a delay network on a part of the input side (Comfort, 1977; see also Efron, 1963). Wigan's idea did not, however, meet with general acceptance. It was criticized already in 1874 by Sande and, more thoroughly, by Kraepelin in 1887 and Bonne in 1907.