A Few Thoughts About Déjà Vu

[Adapted from my book When the Stars Align.]

Some recently asked me, “Is déjà vu an example of remembering something from a past life?”

In some instances, I’d say that’s possible. For example, I’ve heard of many cases where a person visits a foreign country and somehow knows the area like the back of their hand, as if they were extremely familiar with it. One such case was the story of Om Seti, a.k.a. British-born Dorothy Eady, who felt she had lived previous lives in Egypt and was actually able to assist archaeologists in their excavations at the temple of Seti the first because of how detailed her memory of the site was.

Sometimes, however, the déjà vu sense of past-life recollection can take a more symbolic form, as when a person is engaged in an activity and remembers doing something like it long ago, possibly in a past life, but with subtle differences.

For instance, I once read about an actor (it may have been Alan Arkin) sitting in his dressing room preparing to go on stage for a play, shaving his face as the sound of the audience echoed in the background. As he sat there in front of the mirror moving the long razor across his throat, he suddenly flashed back to disturbingly vivid memories of being executed by guillotine during the French Revolution, with the sound of cheering crowds around. He had little doubt this was a past-life experience being triggered. The small details of the two situations were different, but they were clearly similar in symbolism.

But there are other possible causes of déjà vu. I remember having a dream when I was 16 in which I stepped off a bus in a remote land and looked around to see beautiful mountains all around me. On awakening, the dream was vivid in my mind and I wrote it down in detail. Then, several years later, I traveled to a remote region in northern Norway, first by train and then by bus. When I stepped off the bus, I had a powerful sense of déjà vu because the entire situation was precisely as I had dreamt it years earlier, down to the smallest detail (including the look and color of the bus and the unusual vegetation alongside the road). In that instance, the sense of déjà vu seems to have stemmed less from a past-life experience than from a prophetic dream years earlier, but lived out in waking life years later.

But in some cases I believe the explanation for déjà vu is purely prosaic and non-metaphysical in nature. For example, there are simply instances where one is engaged in an action that’s similar to something one has done before in this life, perhaps even long ago in childhood, which one had consciously forgotten about. That similarity between those experiences hits one with such force that it feels like something almost paranormal or past-life in nature, when it most likely isn’t. (Along similarly prosaic lines, I once heard a neuroscientist claim that déjà vu is likely due to a phenomenon in which the brain simply registers a phenomenon in a microscopically “staggered” way, such that it thinks that phenomenon actually happened long before when in fact it occurred just micro-seconds earlier.)

Those are a few possibilities to consider.

Ray Grasse is a writer, astrologer, and photographer based in the American Midwest. he is author of ten books, including The Waking Dream, Under a Sacred Sky, and An Infinity of Gods. His websites are www.raygrasse.com and www.raygrassephotography.com.