I’m with id (and on preview, with Melinka) on this- I’m quite the skeptic, but sometime’s I’ve had incredibly vivid "deja vu"- but such that it was more than just that very brief, somewhat dizzy sense of vague memory.
It’ll happen rarely, but with great intensity, like I’m watching a movie, and I’ll more accurately recall not just dreaming something that was like this, but recall thinking in normal waking life something precisely like the present moment weeks earlier, to the point of a very specific place and time that I envisioned it initially.
This also happened most recently for me a week ago. Our team at work decided to go to a place called Tech City Bowl in Redmond, Washington. Our whole team was there, including my relatively new manager. As we were bowling, I suddenly shifted into that space and was watching the game progress as he bowled his frame, and as I watched knowing this whole thing playing out, I specifically remembered imagining this very scene a month before I met him during the interview, while at lunch with two co-workers at the Teriyaki place we go to on 24th street. We were talking about our then current boss leaving, and I drifted off and wasn’t following the conversation and had a musing on the whole team, that involved bowling oddly enough, and what my manager looked like. Thing is, he looks very much like I imagined him, and when I fell into that head space while we were bowling I realized I’d imagined this all before it happened. This wasn’t a "did I dream this?" experience but a "I imagined this on this day 4 months ago, when we were at that restaurant, and I wasn’t dreaming or asleep, I was just on lunch break." experience.
It can go on for a minute or longer, like I’m watching a movie I’ve seen a dozen times, but with the certain sense of my own imagining of this some time earlier, exactly like I’m seeing it now. It’s that same sense of remembering you’d get if someone told a joke that you yourself told them a week earlier, and knowing you’d told that joke. As they tell the joke, you know how it ends, and there’s no "doubt" or "skepticism" about whether you know the joke or have told it yourself. It’s that same certainty, not a nagging "whoa, haven’t I dreamed about this?" feeling.
As a fan of Memento, I’m not supposing it’s anything more than wacky brain hijinx… but the experience is more than simply the deja vu I’ve also had, where it’s a single phrase or visual impression that feels "remembered", for only a second. So the "deja vu, 1 second time delay in the centers of the brain" explanation doesn’t work for these experiences (as easily).
I guess it could be an extended period of time where you experience an event twice, once as it comes in to the initial processing in the brain, and again as it commits to memory, and get an "echo" sensation that you chalk up to memory. And certainly your brain could do something as spiffy as make a past memory on the spot- perhaps I never did have lunch that day, in that way, and imaging anything, but have only convinced myself after the fact that I did.
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