I have already been in this place, experienced this situation, saw this landscape. Many are familiar with such moments when it seems as if reality doubles and slips away. The game of emotions, memory, the unconscious – how to explain these vague sensations?
Most often, a fleeting feeling of recognition of the unfamiliar – deja vu – occurs in everyday situations. You are sitting with friends in a cafe, and suddenly you get the feeling that you have already been here: with the same people, in the same interior … You recognize this scene in the smallest details, and it seems that you can even predict events a few moments ahead.
Deja vu happens both in a foreign country, where we arrived for the first time, and during a meeting with strangers – we do not have a common past, but we clearly feel that this person, place, event has already been in our life (although we can’t manage to recall when, under what circumstances). Surprise, curiosity, anxiety are mixed with this amazing feeling. There is an anticipation of a miracle, an illusion of clairvoyance, which allows, by deceiving time, to see the future or relive the past. And after a few seconds, everything disappears: the past becomes known again, the present becomes new, and the future, as usual, is unknown.
magical charm
The fleeting feeling of deja vu that most of us have experienced at least once in our lives is hard to forget. It raises too many questions about the perception of time and space, about the features of our memory, consciousness and the unconscious. And although the name of the phenomenon (from the French déjà-vu – “already seen”) appeared only in the XNUMXth century, it has been of interest to mankind since ancient times.
Philosophers – Platonists and Pythagoreans – considered it “a memory of a past life”, the Stoics saw in it “an eternal repetition of the same thing.” Aristotle tried to find a rational explanation for this phenomenon, suggesting that its cause is a disorder of the human psyche. However, deja vu continued to retain its magical charm.
According to the New Scientist magazine, about 90% of men and women claim that they are familiar with the effect of deja vu, and some say that this feeling visits them regularly, more often when tired, irritated or stressed. Children experience deja vu for the first time at the age of eight or nine years: for this experience to arise, a certain level of development of consciousness is necessary. Those who have a genetic predisposition to diseases associated with a violation of sensory perception (schizophrenia, epilepsy) are more prone to deja vu.
Artists, writers, and poets were not indifferent to this mysterious experience. “Do not brag, time, power over me. Those pyramids that you have erected again do not shine with novelty, ”Shakespeare exclaimed, considering modern life to be just a “resurfacing of antiquity” (Sonnet No. 123 translated by S. Marshak).
In the XNUMXth century, deja vu is mentioned more than once in the literary works of Dickens, Chateau Briand, Baudelaire, and then Proust, according to whom this “sparkling and indistinguishable vision” seemed to say: “Catch me in the air if you have the strength, and try to solve the riddle of happiness that I offer you. The feeling of mystery is due to the fact that at the moment of deja vu we have “eternal” questions. Maybe, in general, what we take for the present is something we have already seen once, in a different form, in a different life – different and at the same time ours?
Forbidden Memories
The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, tried to solve (and debunk) this “mystery of happiness”: he said that the feeling of deja vu is a trace of a repressed (forgotten) memory of a very strong emotional traumatic experience or desire that is unacceptable to our Superego.
Deja vu is a reminder of our secret fantasies, a signal that we are in contact with something we desire.
In the book Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he talks about a girl who first came to the village to visit her school friends. “Going to visit, she knew that these girls had a seriously ill brother,” writes Freud. “When she entered the garden and then the house, she felt like she had been here before—she recognized the place.” At that moment, she completely forgot that her own brother had recently barely recovered from a serious illness, and that she experienced unaccountable joy, realizing that she could remain the only child in the family.
A similar situation in the house of friends for a moment “revived” this repressed experience. But instead of remembering it, writes Freud, “she transferred the ‘remembering’ to the garden and the house, and it seemed to her that she had seen it all.” “My own déjà vu experiences I can explain in a similar way,” adds Freud, “by the resurrection of an unconscious desire to improve my situation.”
In other words, deja vu is a reminder of our secret fantasies, a signal that we are in contact with something desirable and at the same time forbidden. It was not for nothing that Freud, in his first works, associated deja vu with memories of the mother’s womb – the only place about which everyone can say with confidence: “I have already been there!” Perhaps this is precisely the reason for the exciting charm of deja vu?
Freud’s student, the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, believed that we could also talk about our dreams: something that is happening at the moment associatively reminds us of these forgotten stories. The creator of analytical psychotherapy, Carl Gustav Jung, also did not ignore this phenomenon.
He recalled the sensation he experienced while traveling in Kenya: “On a ledge of a rock, I saw a figure of a man leaning on a spear. This picture from a completely, it would seem, alien world fascinated me: I experienced a state of deja vu. Once I was here, I knew this life well! In an instant, it was as if I returned to my firmly forgotten youth: yes, this man has been waiting for me here for the last two thousand years. He explained this experience as the influence of the collective unconscious – a kind of ancestral memory, which, in his opinion, each of us possesses.
A moment like a dream
Deja vu is like a dream that, as soon as we wake up, slips away, leaving only vague memories. Like in Eyes of the Blue Dog by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
“She stared at me intently, but I still could not understand where I had seen this girl before. Her moist, anxious look shone in the uneven light of the kerosene lamp, and I remembered that every night I dream about this room and the lamp, and every night I meet here a girl with anxious eyes. Yes, yes, it is her that I see every time, crossing the unsteady line of dreams, the line of reality and sleep. I found cigarettes and lit a cigarette, leaning back in my chair and balancing on its hind legs – tart sour smoke curled up. We were silent. I swayed in my chair, she warmed her thin white fingers over the glass cover of the lamp. Shadows trembled on her eyelids. It seemed to me that I should say something, and I said at random: “The eyes of a blue dog,” and she answered sadly: “Yes. Now we will never forget it.”
Brain malfunction
A forgotten memory, a forbidden desire, or a symbolic representation—with these explanations, déjà vu no longer has anything to do with precognition or insight into a past life. The science of the XNUMXst century continues to debunk these illusions. She brought us back to Aristotle’s suggestion that déjà vu is nothing more than a brain malfunction.
The study of epilepsy, the attacks of which are often preceded by episodes of deja vu, allowed neurophysiologists to identify the cause of such sensations: this is a short-term dysfunction in the work of several parts of the brain. “As a result, dissociations (destruction of associative links) occur between new information and memories,” says Chris Moulin, a psychologist at the University of Leeds (UK). “And we instantly recognize an unfamiliar object or situation.”
Another explanation for this phenomenon: deja vu occurs due to a malfunction in the neural system of the brain caused by fatigue, stress or intoxication. Confused, our brain takes new impressions for long-familiar ones. So déjà vu is definitely just a false impression, perhaps endowed with meaning (like everything that comes from the unconscious), and scientists have yet to decipher it to the end.
But even knowing that there is nothing supernatural in deja vu, you should not deny yourself the pleasure of experiencing these moments. After all, for a brief moment they give us the illusion that time can be turned back or, conversely, at least a thousandth of a second ahead of it. All senses are sharpened when we feel that we have cheated time. And then we return to normal life again. But these moments are what you always need to catch: a little magic, in a homeopathic dose.