Why do we experience deja vu and dream memories?

[elwestrand]

You have had deja-vu? I think deja vu expercieces are "raw" dream memories that are trying to surface in the intellect. If you think of it in terms of computers. "Raw" dream memories, residing in the aether, sublte mind, are in a "5th dimensional format," because the aural facilities of the mind transcend the time feature and dreams occour within them. Somehow the subconscious converts these memories into a "4th dimensional format" so that the physical mind can "think" them, and you thus remember your dreams when you wake up. This is proof that the mind is not reduceable to biochemical substrates.

Sometimes it fails to convert though, and you do not remember your dreams. Or sometimes it is "backed up" and when you woke up, you didn't remember the dream, but a few minutes later or hours later or even days and weeks later, the memories just flash in you for the very first time and you say "this was a dream I had last week." Deja-vu is the phenomenon that occours when the physical mind grabs onto one of these "raw" memories and attempts to "think it." Always in deja-vu there is a very eerie feeling of distorted time. Of course, there seem to be different varieties of "deja vu" and degrees of it that people experience. Some people merely have mundane feeling of have seen something before, while others experience a profound discombobulation of conscious perception of time interlaced with strange concepts barely related to immediate sense objects that have seemingly arisen out of no where.

"Untime" might even seem not natural; time is just one of the facets on the jewel of our conditioning. But, while it is impossible for our brain to experience/perceive "untime," I assure you it is completely within our capacity to comprehend.

Am, clinical psychology says that deja vu is "misfiring synapses." That is exactly what happens when the brain is trying to comprehend these memories. this is what we observe happening in the brain. Of course, I have just told you why the synapses misfire.

 

[Janus]

Deja vu is nothing but your conscious mind perceiving the events you are experiencing as a memory at the same time as you experience them.

When you experience an event it is also being recorded into memory. Normally, it isn't until after it is recorded that we can access the memory.

During deja vu, there is a type of short circuit that causes us to access the "memory" as it is being written, which we perceive as an "old" memory at the same time as we are aware of the direct input from our senses. Thus you get that "I've done this before" or that confusion of time feeling. It is the brain's equivalent of double vision.

 

[jimmy p]

But sometimes deja vu's arent totally accurate, like you can have one which seems the same but has some subtle (and not so subtle) differences. Usually i suppose you could say the situation seems familiar but the details are fuzzy... hey, memories arent perfect huh?