Dreams and Déjá Vu

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You walk into the house of a new friend. As you scope it out, you realize something a bit strange… You’ve been there before. But not exactly in person. You think about it a little bit, and you then realize that it was in a dream, a dream that perfectly portrayed with every small detail the exact room you’re now standing in. Sound familiar? This is an experience that is not as rare as most people think. For many, these arbitrary feelings of extreme familiarity, known as déjà vu, come through dreams that some say predict the future. The things that dreams show may not be something at all significant, just a random moment proposed to happen somewhere in the near or far future. There have also been accounts where the dreamer claims they saw a catastrophic event happen before their eyes up to weeks before it actually occurred. The study of this unnatural phenomenon has become more and more popular with time. Multiple cases of this have come forward, all of them experiencing the same distinct feeling that déjà vu brings. Although there are many skeptics that say “psychics” don’t exist, could dreams that foreshadow a future event really be explained? If so many people have felt the same feeling, can this really be anything but real? Science has tried and tried again to explain these situations, but is still completely left in the dark by these bizarre happenings.

Dreams showing the future, known as precognitive dreams, are much more common than believed to be. “Modern survey data now indicates that the experience commonly known as ‘déjà vu’ occurs so frequently in the general population that it can no longer be considered ‘paranormal”’ (Funkhouser). It may seem that cases of this have only popped up recently, but there are studies of p...

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...e to them. No matter how much evidence science provides, there will never be enough to answer one simple question: Why? So it is now left up to each individual to discover and form their own theory for themselves, making precognition and déjà vu a mysterious and complex, yet quite an intriguing and eccentric idea for the world to ponder.

Works Cited

Hill, Beverly. “Understanding Precognitive Dreams.” Suite101. 27 Apr 2008. Web.

18 Nov 2009. .

Foleide, Lars. “Can dreams predict the future?” Stanson. 20 Feb 2009. Web. 18 Nov

2009. .

Funkhouser, A.T. “Dreams and Déjà Vu.” MentalHelp. 1 Jan 2001. Web.

18 Nov 2009. .

Licauco, Jaime. “Can dreams show us future events?” Inquirer. 5 June 2007. Web.

18 Nov 2009. .

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