This happens to me too, though it was more common when I was younger. And your description is the same: I find myself in a situation that I suddenly recognize and I specifically remember having dreamed it at some earlier point in time.
The dreams (or dream fragments; they’re usually pretty short) usually show up in early morning, just before waking up, in that half-awake period. The time lag between the dream and the experience can be up to six months or so. The dreams are no more or less vivid or weird than any others, so I don’t know ahead of time which ones will happen.
The experience of realizing that you’re seeing something you’ve seen before, realizing that you’re in a re-run, is always rather weird. Most of the *content* of the experiences are really mundane, though. Here’s two I can think of off the top of my head:
1) Real life version: I’m at summer camp in Maine, and I’m about nine years old. I’m in a canoe with a friend and we’re paddling along on the lake, when we see some teenage guys standing on the shore motioning to us to come over towards them. There’s a vacation trailer park near the camp; the boys have likely trespassed onto the camp property from there and are curious. We start paddling over, we’re smiling at them, when suddenly the counselor roars by in her little speedboat dinghy and warns the guys to get off the property and leave us alone. This is just as they’ve started throwing small stones at us from the shore.
Dream version: same thing, but no counselor showed up, and as we approach the shore, a feeling of foreboding was pervasive. Dream cut off with the uneasy feeling that something bad might happen.
(Years later, I realize that something bad *could* possibly have happened, what with two scrawny girls paddling naively towards a few law-breaking teenage boys, but I was totally unaware of that angle at the time of the dream and of the experience.)
So in that case, it’s as though the dream version was *a* version of the future, and the real life version had a different ending.
2) Real life version: I’m at a different summer camp, this one in the Berkshires. Different bunks are putting on skits to different songs inside a dance studio. One of the bunks is doing, I think, a disco song with disco dancing. One girl in the bunk suddenly comes bopping along into the skit, dressed in totally 80′s clothes and hair, and has a sign around her neck saying "80′s Music". The other girls look at her in disgust, she looks at them in confusion, and she exists.
Dream version: I had seen all of it before, specifically recalling the girl.
I sat there watching the skit with my jaw dropped open, it was so weird. I mean, if you dreamed of a girl who was meant to represent 80′s music, wouldn’t you just think it was yet another weird dream with weird dream symbolism?
Yeah, so the dreams are not always *exactly* like the real life versions. It’s like I can see *a* version of the future, but it’s not always exactly how it plays out, though close. And very few of the experiences have to do with any direct action or choices on my part, but rather with something or some phenomenon I’m observing.
Oh, and one more major deja-vu instance in my life: the Challenger disaster. I was six. The teachers told us at lunchtime. I turned to my friend and asked why they were making such a big deal out of this, making us watch Reagan’s speech on a TV they wheeled in, and all. Didn’t this all just happened *yesterday*? We’d seen all this already, we knew all this stuff already. (Or, at least, I did.)
Years later, in a fit of skepticism, I wondered if that deja vu was born just out of a sense of shock at having watched the explosion–that it was a psychological shock absorber or something–but I’m unconvinced. I honestly felt as though I was stuck living through the day all over again, and the six-year-old me felt bored by it.
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