Double take: Experts at a loss to explain the sensation of deja vu

Kirk Baird

Thursday, Nov. 1, 2001 | 8:34 a.m.

The Webster's dictionary definition of deja vu: "The feeling that one has had an experience previously, although it is actually new to one; a feeling that one has been in a place or had a specific experience before."

Erin Kelly knows the feeling well.

An 18-year-old University of Nevada, Las Vegas student, Kelly said the sensation of having lived a specific moment before came over her during a recent conversation with her boyfriend.

Sitting on his bed, the two were engaged in an "everyday" conversation while a sitcom blared from a nearby TV. There was nothing extraordinary about the situation, she said, nothing to jar her senses.

Nevertheless, after a few moments there was a familiar pattern to her surroundings: the room, the clothes, the discussion, the TV show ... it was all just as she had previously seen it.

"I was like, Oh my gosh, I've had a dream like this before,'" she said. "Then I told him. He looked at me like I was weird."

Three weeks before, Kelly remembered, she had a dream where she was sitting in the same room, wearing the same clothes, watching the same TV show and having the same conversation.

However, at the time of the dream she was dating someone else and had never seen the room before.

Some might dismiss the feeling as merely coincidence. Then again, there's also as much of a possibility that Kelly had a moment of deja vu, said Dr. Charles Tart, former distinguished visiting professor at UNLV, who teaches at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, Calif.

"Deja vu is about a feeling; it's a purely subjective experience," Tart said. "There's no method of proving it or disproving it."

Instead, science has offered two basic explanations for the feeling, he said.

There's malfunction of memory, when the brain "mislabels" new experiences as old memories.

"For example, touring France, even though you've never been there before, you may walk around the corner and know you've been on this street before. "That may be malfunctioning of memory," Tart said.

Then there's the "other way," he said, when deja vu indicates some form of extrasensory perception, or ESP.

"If you're able to predict what's around the next corner without seeing it, then you're into something more interesting," Tart said. "That means there must be some kind of extrasensory perception involved -- from a dream or a vision."

While there's no scientific data to determine just how often either type of deja vu experience occurs, he said it is a phenomenon most everyone is familiar with.

"I doubt there are many people you can mention deja vu, and have them look at you with a puzzled look like they don't have any idea what you're talking about," Tart said. "I think it's fairly safe to say everyone has had at least one experience."

In the case of Las Vegas resident Angela Pendleton, it's even more than that.

Having had moments of deja vu for more than half of her life, Pendleton, 30, has grown to enjoy the feelings as "kind of fun."

She said her first deja vu occurred at dusk while she was cleaning up her back yard.

Staring at one spot in the yard, Pendleton stopped as she felt a "warm feeling" settle over her that she had lived the experience before in a dream.

"It was a little strange," she said, "like I was in slow motion."

The feeling lasted only a few seconds and a minute later Pendleton resumed cleaning the yard. The entire experience, however, is typical of almost all of her deja vu experiences, she said, as it suddenly appeared and just as quickly went away.

"Most of the time my deja vu experiences have been comfortable," Pendleton said. "I don't think of myself as a prophet ... I'm in tune with things around me that I'd like to believe that I'm aware and I'm open to experiences and maybe that's why it's happening."

Which may be as valid an explanation as anyone else's.

Dr. Art Funkhouser has devoted nearly 30 years to the study of deja vu, beginning when he commenced his training to become a psychotherapist at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1973.

Born and raised in the United States, Funkhouser, who lives in Bern, Switzerland, took an interest in deja vu that was based, in part, on two of his personal experiences: one as a boy while playing a neighborhood game of hide-and-seek, the other as a high school student during a pingpong match.

He ascribes both his incidences of deja vu and others he's studied to precognitive dreaming, and has met many other therapists and researchers who have come to the same conclusion based on independent studies.

"A survey I made a few years ago of contributions to the alt.dreams newsgroup showed (precognitive dreaming) was the most favored explanation," Funkhouser said. "A Web-based survey made by Kei Ito of Buckingham University in the U.K. also showed this to be a popular explanation."

He cautioned, however, that prophetic dreams may not be the only factor behind the ESP-type of deja vu.

"We do not know enough about it at this point to make any such claim," Funkhouser said. "I contend that there are many different experiences that have all received this 'label' and we need to see about sorting this all out."

So far, however, scientific research has yet to yield much in this regard, which is not unusual, Tart said. When it comes to elements of the paranormal, science often falls short of providing answers.

"Part of my career has been investigating (deja vus) all my life. I've seen all the explanations and none of them are worth a damn," he said. "I have no idea why they happen."