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Déjà Vu

A French term used by psychical researchers to characterize the feeling people sometimes have that some scene or experience in the present also occurred in the past. Déjà vu (already seen) is often coupled with déjà entendu (already heard). Through the years, many have related the feelings of déjà vu to the phenomenon of astral projection or out-of-the-body travel, when individuals apparently visit a distant place in an astral or etheric body during sleep. Déjà vu is also associated with fulfillment of a prior premonition of a forthcoming event.

More recently, déjà vu has been connected to experiences of reincarnation, when a feeling of prior knowledge is so strong that people feel sure it must have come from a former incarnation. In a celebrated case in India, a little girl named Shanti Devi, born in Delhi in 1926, claimed that she had lived elsewhere in a former birth, and even named the city. When taken there, she correctly identified the house, family, and other circumstantial details.

Feelings of déjà vu are rarely evidential or even reliable. Scenes in the present may only appear familiar because they contain some element connected with a past experience and re-activate the sensation of familiarity. Psychologists have characterized the phenomenon of false remembering as "postidentifying paramnesia."