Did this happen before or was it a dream? (I think I’m psychic)
I’m sitting at my dining room table. I’m in a zoom lecture, but I’m not paying attention. I’m on the phone with my hairdresser trying to schedule an appointment. I’m clicking back and forth between my lecture, my calendar, and my to-do list. The living room and kitchen are buzzing with noise. Pots and pans clanging, music playing, doors slamming, people yelling. I’m overstimulated. I can’t hear my lecture. I can’t hear my hairdresser. I can’t hear anything.
And suddenly, I feel as if I’ve experienced this entire scenario before. Down to the smell of the pasta cooking on the stove. Down to the way the sun is beating down on me from the window across the way. Down to the words coming out of my roommates’ mouths as they enter the kitchen. Everything feels repeated, but no one else appears to feel the same way.
Did I live this all before? Is this feeling just in my head? Why does no one else seem phased?
The first movie I remember watching growing up that wasn’t starring a Disney princess was Premonition. More specifically, the bootleg version of Premonition purchased by my uncle in 2007 on the street of New York City’s Chinatown.
Don’t feel bad if you’ve never seen it. It has a whopping 8% on Rotten Tomatoes, so you’re not missing much.
I’m not here to critique the film's artistry, just to point out that it follows a similar time loop trope first popularized by Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day (1993): the main character is stuck reliving the same day over and over. They must find a way to convince someone of their altered reality and successfully escape the cycle.
We watched Premonition on the drive home from the city, and even in my majorly obstructed view from the third row of my mom’s Tahoe, I saw enough to scar me. I couldn’t shake that movie for years, living in fear of suddenly waking up and experiencing yesterday all over again.
While I’m not saying I feel as though I’m stuck in a same-day loop, sometimes I get feelings that I’ve experienced things before. I often get a sense of prior knowledge about a situation I’m in. I could be driving on the freeway, eating at a new restaurant, walking through the grocery store. Things could be carrying along as normal, but then something will happen: a certain type of car cuts me off, the first bite of my meal hits my mouth, or something falls from a shelf, and suddenly everything shifts. I feel as though I’m floating through something a past me previously went through, and am no longer seeing things occur as if they’re happening for the first time.
The closest way I can compare how I feel in those moments is the feeling you get when you recall a dream you vividly remember. It feels as though you actually experienced it, but you experienced it in your subconscious, not in the material world.
Which brings me to my overarching question: did this happen before, or was it just a dream?
Many have similar sensations specifically associated with childhood memories. They are in the distant past, from a time when your memory was still developing. It’s difficult to decipher whether a scenario from back in the day really occurred or not. Often I personally have to use my mom for reference on those matters, and consequently have to bear the brunt of her confused stares when whatever memory I am recalling occurred only in my head.
I often don’t remember my dreams, which makes this process even fuzzier for me. My dreams are usually based in reality rather than fantasy — pertaining to real-life groups of people, locations, or activities — which is why my time-loop sensations come in waves of hazy feelings as I am going about my day-to-day existence. It feels like I’m watching actions that had taken place somewhere else in my brain suddenly materialize in real life.
This, naturally, brings me to the claim that I am psychic. Why else would I know that my roommate would walk through the door at that exact time with those exact belongings in hand, or feel a sense of familiarity when I’m sitting at a bar for the first time with a seemingly random, cross-over-episode grouping of friends? I must be psychic. There’s no other explanation.
That declaration led me to my next round of questions: is there any science behind this? Can I put a word to the feeling I get on an at-least-weekly basis? Or do I really just have other-worldly abilities?
Of course, I took to the internet. In my research, I found that there is a term for this sort of sensation called déjà rêvé. Opposite to its commonly used cousin déjà vu (“already seen” in French), déjà rêvé is the feeling of seeing something prior, but specifically in a dream state. This is often why some feel as though their dreams come true in real life. Some scientists believe that when our logical conscious mind shuts down when we sleep, our subconscious has the potential to predict the future, as events in our life are no longer logically locked into chronology.
As all internet searches go, I eventually ended up on Reddit. Specifically the Glitch in the Matrix Reddit thread, on a post entitled “I keep having dreams that happen in real life.” The post author explained how they experience instances once every six months that bring them back to a dream they once had. Once something triggers the memory of the dream, they are able to predict what will happen in the rest of the conversation, event, or excursion. They are no longer experiencing it for the first time, but they feel as though they “already knew about it” as they are going through it in real life.
Commenters contributed their own dream predictions, like one user who said they had previously dreamed of a job that they did not have at the time of the dream, but eventually ended up working in real life. The dream’s setting and characters were foreign to them at the time, but once they started their new job, they realized they had seen it all before.
So, are these people and I subconsciously predicting the future while we sleep? It’s hard to say. Since scientists really don’t know a whole lot about the functions of dreaming, I don’t think I’ll be getting a straight answer anytime soon. If anything, it was nice to hear that I’m not the only one who has these feelings, and that I’m definitely not stuck in a Premonition scenario.
Hopefully this semi-investigation-semi-ramble helped you better recall similar experiences in your own life. Or maybe (more likely), it just made you think I’m crazy.
