Thread: Deja Vus... In dreaming?

It's possible that the feelings accompanying a deja vu are different from person to person and I don't think there's a widely accepted theory on the underlying cause anyway. I would say that if, as far as you know you've had the experience, based on what you think or know that a deja vu is or feels like to you, then I cannot really contest that since it's about our own personal experiences. I had to look up "cognitive dissonance" as a term, now I hopefully understand a bit more why you mention confusion about your own experiences. When you mention your experience of "I've done this", it sounds valid to me, anyhow, regardless of other subjective criteria I might be interested in.

Yes this is pretty much a meta thing as you say. I also agree with you that dreams often do run on false memories and I would even add that it's an important part of the "worldbuilding immersion" of a dream. In any case, for myself and like Tiktaalik says too, this has no resemblance to the occurrence of a deja vu in waking life, hence my curiosity here in the thread. I wasn't expecting a response like yours but it's still contributing to the discussion here. To continue on that point, my own dreams often have implied false memories about the dream's context, usually in some form of tacit knowledge about the dreamworld itself but there is hardly ever a situation in my dreams where I think this is odd or strange; maybe this is part of why I am not so frequently lucid and by contrast from what I've already seen of you, you seem to experience lucidity fairly often.

In regards to subjective perception of what a deja vu is... For me there's rarely (if ever) a clear-cut point at which a deja vu "ends" exactly and there isn't so much a feeling of confusion, if anything there's a feeling of great certainty about what's happening and like nothing can be changed in that moment, and it's like a continuous feeling for a short while, maybe a minute or so at most.

Quick Edit: Maybe I could add that I had deja vus frequently as a child and they became progressively less common from my teens onwards. What I mention about feeling "like nothing can be changed" in that moment influenced a lot of my thought in early life about concepts such as destiny and other pre-deterministic concepts in general. I have mostly let go of that type of thinking by now though, regardless of whether there is truth to it or not, it was simply not a healthy mode of thought, for me.