Déjà Rêvé - Strange Phenomenon

I have always had strong, vivid dreams. I am able to feel what happened in my dreams when I wake up. I have been encountering a phenomenon known as déjà rêvé (French for "already dreamed"), since I was a child.

Déjà rêvé is the opposite of déjà vu "already seen". Instead, it is when you relive a situation you dreamt about in the real world. I have been foreseeing my circumstances.

Some compare déjà rêvé to precognitive dreaming as it is a type of dream that comes true as a future event. In 350 BCE, Aristotle wrote "On Prophesying Dreams" to which he debated whether these types of dreams were mere coincidence, or if the dreams were prophetic (psychic callings we'll get to later).

Nonetheless, many researchers have searched for answers about such occurrences. A study conducted in 2010 by Arthur Funkhouser and Michael Schredl questioned how frequent déjà rêvé happened. Funkhouser and Schredl asked 442 students across three German universities to participate. It was reported about 95 percent of the students had a déjà rêvé experience, 34.6 percent reported the occurrences happened to them about 2 to 4 times a year. Alternatively, 4.8 percent said they never felt such an event.

Other researchers were interested in how these experiences worked. In 2018 study, researchers examined medical records from epileptic patients from 1958 to 2015. The records concluded that déjà rêvé could be linked to electrical brain stimulation (EBS). Epileptic patients sometimes stated having " experiential phenomena related to a previous dream they had during seizures or electrical brain stimulation." However, it doesn't explain how people without epilepsy experience déjà rêvé.

Through my own curiosity, I wanted to know if there were other types of experiences. I found three.

Episodic - People who have déjà rêvé events can remember a specific night when they had the dream. Sometimes, the dream occurred years or months ago.

Familiarity-Like - These people experience a hazy dream memory the morning after.

Dreamy-State - People who can't recall the dream, but instead feel like an experience is strange or dream-like.

I relate with the first type, episodic. I remember when I was 9, I had a dream about a beige colored house, with a mailbox shaped like the house. The house sat further back from the road and was split-level. I had never seen the house before in my reality, but my brain was able to conjure up that image. Years later, I found myself on the street in front of this house and remembered I had seen it before - once upon a dream.

Digging a little deeper, déjà rêvé and precognitive dreams are slightly different. Precognitive dreams are dreams that indicate an instance of interaction in the future, and you'll then experience the exact act later. Comparatively, déjà rêvé is when you have a sense that you have dreamed something before when you're experience it in real life.

Here are a few examples of déjà rêvé in a book written by Ian Wilson.

President Abraham Lincoln recalled he had a dream about his death weeks before his assassination. Mark Twain had a dream about his brother Henry dying weeks before the accident that killed him. David Mandell, a British painter, had dreamed three times planes where crashing into the twin towers. In 1996, Mandell painted this dream and had it time-stamped in a photograph.

While some people may say déjà rêvé is a psychic experience, others believe it is the mind playing tricks. Whatever the case, I'll chalk it up to my brain being a little wonky on occasion.