Deja Vu

Have you ever experienced deja vu? I feel like I get it all the time. The last time I got a really strong feeling of deja vu was a few months ago in Hawaii. I was hiking with my dad. He was ahead of me on the trail and turned around to tell me something. I remember that when he turned around on this trail that neither of us had ever been on before, he had this certain look on his face. I looked at him and whoa, deja vu. I started thinking about this deja vu stuff last night while eating dinner with my family. I randomly brought up the fact that I often dream about people yelling at me for something that I did wrong. After mentioning that, the conversation moved into recurring dreams and then somehow moved onto deja vu. My brother brought it up first. He said that he'd heard of this theory on deja vu that stemmed from tests done on military snipers. The military found that their snipers were getting deja vu over and over again throughout their everyday experiences. After testing, they came to the conclusion that the snipers were constantly getting this feeling of deja vu, because of their vision. It's common, if you're a sniper, to have one eye that is quite a bit stronger than the other. This is because snipers are used to holding a gun and closing one eye in order to aim with the other before shooting. Over time, one of their eyes will become stronger. What does vision have to do with deja vu? Well, this "sniper theory" states that you'll get a feeling of deja vu in an instance after one of your eyes (the stronger eye) takes in an image a millisecond before your other eye does. Since our brains process things so incredibly fast, the image taken in by the stronger eye is made into a memory before the other eye has time to take it in. So once your weaker eye gets around to taking in the image, you see it, and feel like you've seen the image before, at a different time; You get deja vu. This theory fascinated me so much that I decided to read up a little on deja vu instead of reading the chapter due for my lecture tonight...Maybe my next blog post will be about the dangers of procrastination. Anyway, here are one doctor's findings on her study of deja vu:

• A majority of people experience Déjà Vu, roughly two-thirds of the population.

• The frequency of Déjà Vu decreases with age and is most common among people ages 15 to 25.

• People with higher incomes and more education have more Déjà Vu experiences.

• Déjà Vu appears to be associated with stress and fatigue.

• Those who travel have more Déjà Vu experiences.

• For some, Déjà Vu experiences appear to repeat prior dreams.


Speaking of dreams, you know how I mentioned earlier that I often have dreams about people yelling at me. Well during our dinner conversation about deja vu, we also talked about dreams and the interpretation of dreams. Leesh said that she totally believes in dream interpretation. I'm on the same page with her and tend to gravitate more toward the possible meanings behind dreams instead of believing that dreams are completely random neuro explosions inside your brain. I guess the neuro explosions are a more logical explanation, but when has logic ever been any fun? So I looked up what my dreams may mean by going to this handy dream dictionary. Here are two common themes in my dreams and what it all possibly means:

Yelling

To dream that you or someone is yelling, represents repressed anger that needs to be expressed. If you are yelling and no one hears, then it suggests that you are not being heard. You feel that your voice does not matter.


Screaming

To dream that you are screaming, symbolizes anger and fear. It is an expression of your powerful emotions which you have kept pent up inside.

If you try to scream, but no sound comes out, then is suggests that you need to immediately confront some situation. Perhaps you are unable to pinpoint your fears or feelings.


As you can see, I don't usually have very pleasant dreams. You may also have observed that I am clearly in need of some major therapy.

Our dinner conversation ended with a lovely story my dad told us about a dream he had as a kid. He said that back when he was about 6 or 7 years old, he had this really vivid dream where he was ice skating on the street right outside his house in Tucson. Everything was frozen over and he was just ice skating by himself up and down the street. My dad went on to say that just a couple years ago, he was out jogging around his old neighborhood in Layton (real life, not a dream). It was a really cold morning. He turned a corner and came across this street that was completely frozen over. He had to cross the street, so he found himself having to "ice skate" across it to complete his jog. At first, he had an overwhelming feeling of deja vu, but then he remembered that old dream he had when he was just a kid back in Tucson. He was finally fulfilling his dream. I loved hearing this story. I guess dreams do come true. Sometimes we just have to wait 50 years for them to become reality.