Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Déjà Vu

Every night I have many dreams. Right before I completely go to sleep, my brain starts a dream. I suspect that may be the reason I have a hard time getting to sleep since the dream process must start before I can really get to sleep. My dreams are very vivid and usually involve real life circumstances. I may dream about work, school, home, or anything. Sometimes, however, my dreams mix with my real memories. Sometimes distinguishing between dream memories and real memories is quite a challenge.

The most unusual feeling, though, is the one of déjà vu. Sometimes, in real life, I encounter a situation: a scene that seems to me to have come straight out of one of my dreams---as if in the past I had dreamt about a scene in my future. This past weekend it happened again, I was at a friend's house where he was having a gaming party. We started playing a game I had never seen before (Halo 3). We all took turns playing (two people could play at the same time), and at some point two of my friends were playing when they encountered a scene in Africa on a highway system. This triggered my déjà vu and I remembered having a dream watching both of them playing and encountering the exact same scene.

Now I suspect that I did not really dream exactly that, but the feeling of déjà vu is so strong that immediately when I feel it, I wonder if I am currently dreaming...

1 comment:

Apolo Imagod said...

Wow... that is very intriguing. I've always wondered if déjà vu isn't really an instance where we've had, at some point, a glance into the future, and right there when we see it, it seems as a memory of something past. Your case is more interesting because they come out of your dreams... so maybe sometimes in your dreams you get to see things that will happen to you later...

Those visions would be more useful if we could keep constant memory of them, and not just at the moment when we see them again. When this happens to me, sometimes I can feel the moment coming way before it actually happens. Like all of a sudden I'll have this feeling of familiarity and I'll be like "wait, I've seen this before" and then I'll see it unfold, until the really vivid scene is exposed before my eyes... I wonder if you can train yourself to better control this.

I know you can try yourself to have vivid dreams and keep better memory of your dreams (I've done this myself, and it's a great experience). I think I might start looking into this again...