Explaining Deja Vu through it's Relationship to Other Paranormal Phenomena
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
On one hand, it could be a completely mundane occurrence. Similar stuff happens all the time. Let’s say that you and a friend are talking about how you love Italian food, and a mutual friend walks up to the table and states that she, too, loves Italian food, and Deja Vu strikes. Rationale tells you that yes, perhaps you have had this conversation before, and you vaguely remember that your third party friend was present at the time. Perhaps you saw a similar scene on TV, or read it in a book. Perhaps it is that your mutual friend seems to love everything you and your friend loves, so the statement "Oooooh! Really? I love Italian food, too!" really shouldn’t surprise you much coming from her. Perhaps the last time this happened the topic was Tai food, or perhaps you were holding this same conversation with someone else.
All of these explanations could easily account for the question of "Have I done this before?" but do not satisfactorily account for some of the crucial elements of a Deja Vu experience: being able to predict the next thing to be said, the detail, the highly accurate and detailed circumstances surrounding the experience. If it cannot be accounted for by the ordinary, a logical step is to explain in extraordinary terms:
You Have Visited the Future:
Sure. Uh-huh. Right. Whatever you say… No, really. One of the theories behind Deja Vu is that you have projected yourself into the future, saw the event occur there, then came back with the memory of it; sort of like an Out of Body experience that transcends the boundaries of time as well as some of the more obvious ones.
The Future has Visited You:
Just as weird sounding, but with some science to back it up are Tachyons. A physicist named Gerald Feinberg found a loophole in Einstein’s theory of relativity that allowed particles to travel back in time (I’ll spare you the gory details of how), which he dubbed Tachyons. He surmised that if Tachyons existed, and that if there were people that were particularly sensitive to them, they may be able to glean information off them as to what the future at that point in time holds (according to some quantum physicists, the future [if that’s what you insist on calling it] changes all the time, at least relative to our dimension, yada, yada, yada…) through a theory that holds that every particle in the universe is inextricably linked to every other particle in the universe from way back at their birth during the Big Bang and knows exactly what every other particle in the universe is doing at any given time. Giving you a headache? Me too, but it would account for such phenomena as visions and dreams predicting the future, prophesies and coincidentally, Deja Vu.
All of these explanations could easily account for the question of "Have I done this before?" but do not satisfactorily account for some of the crucial elements of a Deja Vu experience: being able to predict the next thing to be said, the detail, the highly accurate and detailed circumstances surrounding the experience. If it cannot be accounted for by the ordinary, a logical step is to explain in extraordinary terms:
You Have Visited the Future:
Sure. Uh-huh. Right. Whatever you say… No, really. One of the theories behind Deja Vu is that you have projected yourself into the future, saw the event occur there, then came back with the memory of it; sort of like an Out of Body experience that transcends the boundaries of time as well as some of the more obvious ones.
The Future has Visited You:
Just as weird sounding, but with some science to back it up are Tachyons. A physicist named Gerald Feinberg found a loophole in Einstein’s theory of relativity that allowed particles to travel back in time (I’ll spare you the gory details of how), which he dubbed Tachyons. He surmised that if Tachyons existed, and that if there were people that were particularly sensitive to them, they may be able to glean information off them as to what the future at that point in time holds (according to some quantum physicists, the future [if that’s what you insist on calling it] changes all the time, at least relative to our dimension, yada, yada, yada…) through a theory that holds that every particle in the universe is inextricably linked to every other particle in the universe from way back at their birth during the Big Bang and knows exactly what every other particle in the universe is doing at any given time. Giving you a headache? Me too, but it would account for such phenomena as visions and dreams predicting the future, prophesies and coincidentally, Deja Vu.
