Seasons

Yes: for some reason the body switches for a moment into a survival mode just long enough to accelerate certain perception skills, but the process is aborted before the heavier stuff like adrenaline is kicked in. The result: you know how when you are in a accident everything seems to slow down? De ja vu is the half realized state of that. Normally the data from your senses is scanned (for arguments sake) 100 times before it feeds a more cohesive stream to the consciousness; however since it has just kicked into this survival mode for a milisecond it scans the data 10,000 times in order to feed not just basic info, but excrutiating detail to the consciousness. The process is aborted before the "I" even realizes it so all it gets is the sense that it has way too much information about what seems to be occuring than is possible. Normally its correct as this kind of deep scanning speed is usually reserved for ooooh like flying off of a motorcycle at 90mph so that you have 'time' to try and land right perceptually speaking

Its a theory at least

I think I heard something about a theory of it being the result of your dominant eye (dominant in the same sense of dominant hand or dominant brain hemisphere) putting info through a little faster than the other eye. Thus you're getting the same bit of info twice, leading to a sense of it happening before. Cannot remember the source so I have no idea how solid a possiblility it is.

I like the rev's explanation too.

A theory of my own (just a thought that occurs now) The brain works by stimulus firing of neurons which fire off associated meurons in a huge network. Thus thought doesn't lead directly to thought, it leads to a whole lot of them simultaneouly. The brain does a lot of work through these associations. Perhaps deja vu is nothing more than a weird lateral association by the brain that creates a feeling of familiarity with a current situation even though we can't see a direct link to it in any specific memory, thus giving you the odd I've been here/done this before even though you haven't.

I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I get the feeling that if I go back over it and try and edit, I'm going to start bleeding from the ears.

I've had dreams about people who have died that I missed coming back to talk to me and tell me they're ok. Do I really think it's a message from the grave? Nah. But I still feel better.

As far as saying that there's no such thing as recurring dreams, that it's just a fancy nighttime deja vu, I totally don't buy that. I often dream that there are fish in my pool, or that I'm pregnant (but never that I'm giving birth, oddly). I've told people about these dreams and then had the dreams again since telling people about them. So I'm not having a dream and then mistakenly believing I've had the dream before. I suppose it might be possible that I'm waking up and believing that I've just had a dream I didn't have, but I don't get how that would be possible. (If I'm thinking about the dream in my sleep to the point that I think I've dreamed it, well, I've pretty much dreamed it, haven't I?)

Anyone ever get deja vu dreams? Where, in the dream, you know you've dreamed it before, but when you wake up you're pretty sure you haven't? I get those on occasion. I especially enjoy the ones that almost have a plot, and there's some "obvious" solution to the problem that makes no sense whatsoever once I've woken up.

One that I remember: "Oh, of course. Blue is the far yellow torment." Somehow, that was the key to the whole plot.

Corwin: I dont know if your familiar with the nueral pathways that the synapse fire along, but did you know that as you think more they naturally get larger? The ramifications of this is that "random thoughts" are really only so when you are pretty young as after that you begin to develope 'paths of least resistance' where electrical charge will more likely flow through; thus if one decides that they are bad at math an commence to doing very little of it as one grows older it LITERALLY becomes physically more difficult to think about AS WELL AS proportionately easier to be distracted from (becuse if say 'art' is your thing when you sit struggling w/ a math problem your white noise thinking is more likely to fire off in those wide open art-related nueral pathways). On the positive side though: if you find ANY form of thought or genre of being to be difficult or alien you simply should have faith that keeping with it and thinking about it a lot WILL eventually open up a path of least resistance to it and it will become natural or easier. Exactly like building the musculature to play a musical instrument- it takes a little time that is akward and torturously uncomfortable, but that time- relatively speaking- is insignificantly small.
...eh, kinda wandered there a bit... what all that was intended to preface was: perhaps a form of what you theorize is how the brain injects actual randomness into the psyche's workings to prevent deep inescapable stagnation due to slavery to our nueral pathways.

revscrj: I like that explanation of De Ja Vu. Sounds plausible.

How's this for an odd dream: I dreamt I had bubonic plague, and my grandmother (for some reason restored to youth) was going to heal me of it, but first we had to find the right energy connection, so I was touching hundreds of different objects to find the right one. Oh, and there was a large blue couch wedged into my grandmother's bathroom, making it impossible even to get in there.

That's a weird dream. My dreams are so annoying. Whenever I have, um, shall we say, interesting dreams, they always involve people I hate, never people I fancy. Why is that? I have no taste when I'm asleep, it seems. And whenever I'm having a good dream, I always wake up halfway through and can never get back into it to see how it turns out. Yet I slip straight back into nightmares. What gives?

That IS interesting, Laydee.

I rarely have any sexual dreams. My dreams just tend to be very long and continue the next night wherever they left off. I used to write them down, until I got sick and tired of writing.

I have always had epic length cohesive storyline dreams myself. I dont know about you BD but I have always felt blessed for it (despite never having had a graphicly sexual dream).

You need to talk to the producers and ask them to spice up the ongoing storylines.