Perspectives - Vol. 6, No. 1 - Dreams and Deja Vu

Modern survey data now indicate that the experience commonly known as "déjà vu" occurs so frequently in the general population that it can no longer be considered "paranormal". A brief overview of what various authors have written concerning precognitive dreams and their possible connection with déjà vu is presented and subdivided into three dream-based hypotheses of déjà vu etiology. Some modest research results, together with questions about their meaning, and suggestions for future research are also presented.

Author's address:
Dr. A. T. Funkhouser, Altenbergstrasse 126, 3013 Bern, Switzerland. E-mail: atf@alum.mit.edu

Whereas Reed (1972) refers to déjà vu as "false positive recognition", Neppe (1983) defines it very generally as "any inappropriate impression of familiarity of a present experience with an undefined past" (p. 3) and goes on to postulate four subtypes of déjà experience:

Regarding the schizophrenic subtype, two other terms one encounters in the literature are "reduplicative paramnesia," first proposed by Pick in 1903, and, more recently, "chronophrenia" (Pethö, 1985). Sno (1994) is of the opinion that these four subtypes are not distinct forms but may represent "a continuum of positive and negative misidentification symptoms".

The focus of the present paper is primarily the subjective paranormal subtype and its possible connection with precognitive dreams. Reviews of the history of this form of déjà vu and the various ideas that have been put forward to explain it have been provided by Neppe (1983), Funkhouser (1983a) and Berrios (1995) and will not be explored further here.

In a review of past surveys, Sno found that "the findings of empirical research on déjà vu experiences have been inconsistent and inconclusive. The reported rates vary from 30 to 96%" (Sno et al, 1992). This very likely depends, though, on which population is questioned and on how déjà vu is defined. Recent surveys of general populations have shown that déjà vu (particularly subtypes 2 and 4) is encountered more often than any of the other so-called mystical or paranormal experiences that have been studied (Hufford, 1992). Indeed, a Gallup poll made in June, 1990, of 1236 Americans over 18 years of age showed that 55% said they believe in déjà vu (an increase from the 30% who expressed this belief in a 1978 poll, according to the paper) and 57% readily admitted to having "had the feeling of déjà vu" (Gallup & Newport, 1991).

When inquiring about déjà vu, Gallup and Newport asked people if they had "been somewhere or done something before" (presumably while at the same time knowing that they had not); there thus seems to be some confusion about what constitutes a déjà vu experience. Some interpret it as living through an experience seemingly for a second time (more properly known as "déjà vécu"), while for others it is evoked in foreign locations, where the "afflicted" are convinced they know their way around while at the same time knowing that this should not be possible ("déjà visité") (Funkhouser, 1995). These two forms of déjà experience, which seem to be the most prevalent, provided the basis for the Rogers and Hart song "Where or When" (the lyrics of the song are provided in the Appendix); or, as an article on déjà vu in the May 5, 1997, issue of TIME almost as succinctly put it, "Been There, Done That" (p. 46). Neppe (1983) goes further and lists 18 additional manifestations of déjà experience (p. 10).

A question about déjà vu was included on the annual General Social Survey conducted by the National Data Program for the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Levin analyzed the results of the 1988/89 poll of 1481 respondents and found that 67.3% of them said they had had one or more déjà vu experiences (Levin, 1993). There, déjà vu is defined simply as "thought you were somewhere you had been before" ("déjà visité"). He goes on to quote Greeley, who wrote: "Whether 'deja vu' can be termed 'paranormal' or not is a matter for debate. . . . I assume there are 'natural' explanations for these phenomena. However, I do not assume that such explanations explain them away". (Greeley, 1975, pp. 7-8)

It should be clear from the foregoing that the experience of déjà vu is very common, justifying serious consideration.

Further on, evidence will be presented to support the contention that at least some occurrences of déjà vu can be explained by preceding, but (normally) unremembered, precognitive dreams. Therefore, it might be well to include a short review of this controversial type of sleep-event.

Dreams and visions that presage the future have fascinated humanity for countless ages, and dream interpreters have long been in great demand in many cultures, mainly for that reason (Van de Castle, 1994, pp. 45-66). One does not have to be content only with dreams and visions from the Bible, Sumerian incised clay tablets or ancient Egyptian papyri. In modern times, an enormous body of evidence has been assembled over the years seeking to demonstrate the existence of precognition and precognitive dreams. Excellent reviews can be found in a chapter Robert Van de Castle contributed to the Handbook of Parapsychology (1977) as well as in a chapter of his 1994 book, Our Dreaming Mind (pp. 407-09). Another good review appears in the chapter "Parapsychological Dream Studies" in a book by Martin Ebon called The Dream and Human Societies (1966). Four other books also deserve mention: An Experiment with Time (Dunne, 1939), Man and Time (Priestley, 1968), Dream Telepathy (Ullman, Krippner & Vaughn, 1973), and Dreams That Come True (Ryback & Sweitzer, 1988).

In An Experiment with Time, Dunne, an aeronautical engineer and designer of planes flown for England in the first world war, told of experiences with his own precognitive dreams and those of others. He became convinced that everyone has just as many images from the future in their dreams as they do residues from the past, and he set out to prove it by studying 22 volunteers from Oxford University (mean age: "in the neighborhood of 21"). His idea was that if dreams are examined closely elements will be discovered that only make sense if attention is paid to persons, objects, locations and events in the day or days following the dream (such dream elements may account, in fact, for some of the vaguer forms of déjà vu). Concerning "resemblances to the future", out of 71 dreams he found 4 good ones, 5 moderate ones and 6 indifferent ones ([4 + 5] /71 yields an incidence of 12.7%) (Dunne, 1939, pp. 278-98). Kruisinga (1948), in an analysis of 1444 of his dreams, found correspondences with subsequent reality in only 4.3%. Sondow (1988), on the other hand, arrived at an estimate of 10% based on her dreams, which agrees better with Dunne's percentage.

There appears to be no regular rule as to how far ahead (or backward) the unconscious chooses to (or can) "look". In Dunne's case it varied considerably. Dalton (1962), in a critical review of 47 precognitive dreams published in a book by Osborn (1962), tallied the fulfillment lags and found that 15 were one day or less, 11 were within 2 to 3 days, and the remaining 21 were spread over a period of 4 days to 8½ years. Kooey (1957), a professor of theoretical physics at Breda, Holland, discovered 193 "Dunne effects" in 2½ years of dream diary entries and found that most occurred within 24 hours of the dream.

Orme (1974) plotted the logarithm of the incidence against the logarithm of the fulfillment-time intervals and showed that the relationship is a nearly linear, negative slope, indicating that the relationship is probably inversely exponential. More recently, Sondow (1988) discovered that most future-determined elements in her dreams also came from the day following the dream, while a lot fewer were from days later on. The plots and calculations she presents are consistent with those of Orme, whom she quotes. While not specifically concerned with dreams, Radin's research on presentiment (1997) also indicates that the unconscious has access to the immediate future, especially when emotionally intense events are going to take place.

The late German actress Christine Mylius had numerous precognitive dreams (Mylius, 1974), which she began sending to Prof. Bender in Freiburg to be archived. Thus she was occasionally able to point him to dreams that subsequently showed up in her film roles. With his help, she eventually published a book about her experiences, the English title of which would be "Dream Diary: Experiment with the Future" (Mylius, 1974 -- my translation). Going further, Magallon (1997) reports that it is possible for precognitive dreams to be incubated in couples and even induced in a group.

Brennan (1997), in his review of precognition, came to the conclusion that "it appears that there are really far more instances of precognition than is commonly realized. So many, in fact, that the phenomenon may be almost universal. The reason we are largely unaware of this is that most precognition occurs in dreams" (p. 31). Dr. Stanislav Grof reported that persons under the influence of LSD experience something similar: "Occasionally, LSD subjects report . . . anticipation of events that will happen in the future. Sometimes, they witness complex and detailed scenes of future happenings in the form of vivid clairvoyant visions and can even hear the acoustic concomitants that are part of them; the latter range from ordinary sounds of everyday life, musical sequences, single words, and entire sentences, to noise produced by motor vehicles and various alarming acoustic signals (the sound of fire engines, ambulance sirens, or blowing car horns). Some of these experiences manifest various degrees of similarity with actual events occurring at a later time." (Grof, 1976, pp. 177-78).

Physicists have postulated particles called "tachyons" which, if they exist, travel faster than the speed of light and thus backwards in time. While it seems matter could not travel backwards in time in the form of tachyons, signals and information could (Davies, 1995, p.235-6). Theories about "loops" in time based on cosmological entities like black holes and quantum entities like wormholes and strings have also been posited which suggest that time travel is not totally impossible (Deutsch & Lockwood, 1994; Kaku, 1994; Davies, 1995, Brennen, 1997).

There are registries where premonitions and precognitive dreams can be sent for archival purposes. For a time, Robert Nelson directed the Central Premonitions Registry in Manhattan and reported that as of 1976, after seven years of the registry's existence, over 3000 persons from all over the US and even 23 foreign countries had sent in their (presumed) previsions, dreams and hunches. In a brief report, he provides an overview of what sorts of categories were "generated by the flow of predictions" (Nelson, 1976). John Migliacco of the International Association for Near Death Studies also established such a registry where survivors of near-death experiences can send accounts of things they "saw" which they think might presage a future happening (anonymous, 1981). As one might expect, websites now exist at which persons having had what they think is a precognitive dream or premonition can register it. One has been set up by Yaron Mayer, an Israeli parapsychology researcher, at (http://www.clever.net/yaron/precog/index.shtml), and another is being moderated by John Atkinson from the Isle of Man (http://www.manx2.demon.co.uk/news/faq.htm). In California there is a site devoted specifically to premonitions about earthquakes (http://www.efc-inc.com/earthquakes/Syzygy/Archives/t10-0925.shtml).

Dr. Mary Louise von Franz, a prominent Jungian therapist in Zürich, Switzerland, once wrote (1978) that there are two types of precognitive dreams: ones which she referred to as telepathic and others which are symbolic in character. The first are true to life and to what is going to happen, while the latter require interpretation and some acquaintance with symbols. In addition, a dream may contain only elements from the future (à la Dunne and Sondow) or an extended prevision of what is to come. Dr. von Franz pointed out that while most dreams, including precognitive ones, arise from the personal unconscious, some dreams come from deeper, more collective and archetypal levels. In her words:

"In our analytic work, when one has to deal with a dream containing only personal material, one can generally relate its meaning to the immediate present as a reaction to the things one did or experienced the day before or which one would meet the day after the dream [in agreement with what Nancy Sondow found]. If we have to deal with an archetypal dream motif, its meaning is valid for a much longer period of time, for months or even for many years. Archetypal dreams remembered from early childhood even often anticipate the fate of an individual for his whole life, or at least for his first half of life." (pp. 181-82)

Strictly speaking, there is not one, but three dream-related hypotheses that have been put forward over the years to explain déjà vu experiences: The first says that the person has dreamt something similar to what has already occurred and his or her mind then makes an association between what has been seen in the dream and what was earlier experienced to produce the sense of familiarity which is the hallmark of the déjà vu experience. At least six authors have put forward this notion: Jessen (1855), Kraepelin (1887), Guyau (1890), Ellis (1897), Störrig (1900) and Dwelschauvers (1916). The last investigator suggested that several sources probably generate déjà vu experiences and dreams with similar elements may be just one of them. This hypothesis may well explain Neppe's fourth subtype of déjà vu (associative) and possibly some vaguer forms of the second subtype (subjective paramormal). This explanation does not suffice, though, for those instances where what is "relived" is very clear and often in exquisitely detailed agreement with what is remembered from a preceding dream (see third hypothesis, below).

The second hypothesis seems to have much less support in the published literature than the other two in that only two authors have held that the association with dreams is just a trick of the memory. According to this idea, one has the impression one has lived through an event or seen a place in a dream, but in reality the impression is illusory and the purported memory of the dream is bogus (Hodgson, 1865; Sander, 1874). This, like the previous hypothesis, could explain vaguer forms of déjà experience but not clear, detailed occurrences with clearly remembered dreams.

The third hypothesis is that precognitive dreams are the source of many déjà vu experiences (Funkhouser, 1983b). As Schafton (in print) has pointed out, three subtypes of this explanation can be distinguished:

It is very difficult, of course, to distinguish accounts stemming from subtype 1 from hypothesis 2, and we have only the word of the experiencer and the firmness of his or her conviction as the deciding factor. Subtype 2 is distinguished from "ordinary" precognitive dreams both by the fact that the dream was subsequently forgotten and by the intensity of the déjà vu feeling.

Of the many investigators who maintained that precognitive dreams are the precursors for déjà vu experiences, Paul Radestock (1879) seems to have been the earliest. Looking over his dream diary, he believed he could identify dream antecedents with the incidents of déjà vu he experienced. Other authors from that period who maintained the same thing include Buccola (1883), Sully (1884), Lapie (1894), Allin (1895), Myers (1895) (who suggested calling it "promnesia"), Bozzano (1901), Méré (1903), Lemaître (1904) and Grasset (1904). Many even provide accounts of their experiences or those of others.

A number of modern authors also have suggested that precognitive dreams provide the best explanation for the experience known as déjà vu. They include MacCurdy (1925), Carrington (1931), Ferenczi (1951), Moufang & Stevens (1953), Chari (1962, 1964) and Shafton (in print). Dreams that are recalled long after they were dreamt apparently reside in what Schacter has referred to as "implicit memory" (1996).

In a 1973 article, White quotes from many of the sources just listed. She mentions, for example, that Carrington put forward a theory that out-of-the-body experiences could be an explanation for what might best be termed "déjà visité" (Funkhouser, 1995). She also says that Dr. Louisa Rhine of Duke University felt that either that or precognitive dreams were the source of déjà vu experiences. White goes on to say that "the most commonly offered parapsychic explanation for deja vu [sic] is the precognitive dream".

Shafton (in print) has investigated dreams and dreaming among American Blacks. He devotes a chapter in his book to the relation between predictive dreams and déjà vu. He found that whereas his white subjects favored neurological and reincarnation explanations, the largest proportion of his black interviewees (57%, n = 116) favored the predictive dream hypothesis, while the reincarnation theory "came in a poor second" (the number is not provided). One of the interviewed individuals said he was sure experiences in past lives influenced the precognitive dreams he had but could not remember. Like Mylius, one woman said "that after déjà vu she can go back and locate old preview dreams recorded in her journals as much as twenty years earlier" (p. 111).

The http://www.dejanews.com website was employed to query the alt.dreams and alt.dreams.lucid news groups on the UseNet. By entering déjà vu as the key words, 48 people were found who, between May 13, 1996, and April 26, 1997, spontaneously wrote to tell about déjà vu experiences they had had and/or to offer explanations for how such an experience can arise. Compiling the results, 32 (67%) favored precognitive dreams as the most likely explanation for déjà vu, while the others were evenly split, offering either some other explanation (8) or none at all (8). A few reported experiencing déjà vu in their dreams: they said they would recognize in the dream that they had dreamt the same action before or been in the same place, a dream experience which could be termed "déjà rêve" (Neppe, 1983, p. 10).

In those instances in which precognitive dreams are the source of déjà vu experiences, why are the foreseen events generally so banal? One would think that if the unconscious goes to so much trouble to provide a "preview of coming attractions", it would pick out or be drawn to events and localities that are momentous or memorable in some way. This has seldom if ever proved to be the case, neither for the author nor for most of the people that have been queried.. It may be that dreams of important, emotionally charged events are more likely to be remembered on waking and are thus known as precognitive dreams; they don't then result in déjà vu experiences where the antecedent is only remembered when it happens. Future research will have to show the extent to which this is true.

Even though the scene preseen is banal, the effects of having a déjà vu experience are not. Like Shelley (1880), some people get very upset. Others, though, seem to find déjà vu experiences reassuring: They feel they are where they are supposed to be (Schafton, in print). It could be added that déjà vu experiences are also important in that they imply there may still be a lot to learn about this space-time universe we inhabit and abilities may well exist which are not yet very developed in most people. The author's initial interest in dreams was prompted by his déjà vu experiences, and the latter have thus proved to be of great value, banal as they might be in themselves.

There is much that isn't known about déjà vu in its various forms. It can be safely said that, with the exception of investigations concerned with temporal lobe epilepsy, amazingly little research has been done on such an uncanny phenomenon which is experienced so broadly. It would be interesting, for example, to know the incidence of Neppe's four subtypes in the general population, not to mention the 20 various forms he listed in his 1983 book. At this point, for example, neither the interpersonal nor the intrapersonal frequencies of déjà vécu and déjà visité are known, to mention only two prominent forms of déjà experience.

While surveys have shown that déjà vu tends to be more frequent and more intense among young people (Chapman & Mensh, 1951-52; Richardson & Winokur, 1967), the age distribution has yet to be broadly established. Early notions that the propensity to have déjà vu experiences might be correlated with mental illness, fatigue or anxiety have not been substantiated. Studies have indicated that some connection may exist between having déjà vu experiences and being intelligent, as well as being widely traveled, but these relationships are far from certain.

At this point, no investigation has been made into a possible correlation between a predisposition for having déjà vu experiences and Jung's psychological types. Possible racial determinants for such a propensity have also never been adequately studied. For example, although there is a Japanese word for déjà vu ("Kishikan"), the incidence of déjà vu among the general Japanese population is not yet known. Several scholars (East-West Institute, San Francisco, private communication) have stated that there is no mention of an experience like déjà vu in the Indian Vedas or Upanishads (which can be viewed as ancient psychological treatises) leading one to wonder if such occurrences are relatively new or not even experienced by people in India.

If it proves possible to obtain precognitive elements in dreams that occur in laboratory settings, it will be fascinating to know if one part of the night more commonly yields such elements than do other parts of the sleep cycle. Dreams from the early part of the night are normally less well remembered by most people, for example, and any precognitive elements or scenes from such dreams would thus seem more likely to produce subsequent déjà vu experiences than precognitive dreams occurring towards the end of sleep. It would also be interesting to see if the inverse exponential relationship that Orme (1974) and Sondow (1988) obtained between the precognitive dream elements and subsequent fulfillment holds true in broader-based studies and especially with déjà vu experiences. (Here one would be forced to rely on subjective impressions, however, since a remembered dream, even if precognitive, do not normally produce feelings of déjà vu.)

Concluding this brief overview, Rhea White (1973) might be quoted: "It may be that we are dealing with a continuum of experience here, with vague fleeting feelings at one end and with vivid, detailed impressions at the other. Or it could be that the experiences, at base, are not cut off the same bolt, but that different predisposing factors result in different types of experiences of familiarity and recognition which tend to get lumped together under the term 'déjà vu'". (p. 48)

I would like to express my sincere and heartfelt thanks to four individuals who translated early French scientific papers concerning déjà vu for me, namely, Anne Bosch, Eve Portmann, Maurice Schommer and Heidi Zimmermann. I am also very grateful for the helpful suggestions provided by Ruth Reinsel and Anthony Shafton and the editorial help supplied by Don Smith and James A. Collins.

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