From: gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us (Gary S. Trujillo)
Newsgroups: alt.dreams,alt.consciousness
Subject: Re: Deja-vu (was Re: Drug-induced dreams)
Date: 6 Sep 92 21:08:55 GMT

In <robg.715583851@citr.uq.oz.au> robg@citr.uq.oz.au (Rob Geraghty) writes:

> ...I have had deja-vu *without* being able to remember a dream
> in connection with it...

Me too.  Though I have (rarely) had a feeling that something I was
then seeing or experiencing or was about to experience was already
seen or experienced in a dream, I have more often had the experience
of being reminded of a dream that I may not have thought about for
years - or (it seems at the time at least) may not have even remem-
bered the day after having it!  It's as if dream memories have been
stored, but remain inaccessible for a long time, and then are sud-
denly triggered by some aspect of new experience (which is often not
connected in any obvious way to the dream material).

> ...No other person can ever know *exactly* what the experience I
> call deja-vu is like - if I describe it, someone else may have had a
> *similar* experience due to different causes...

I thought people might like to be aware that there are two separate
terms to describe these kinds of experiences.  The first, and more
familiar to most, "deja vu" (with an accent mark over the "e") refers
to "the sense of reliving something that one has seen before," while
the other, "deja vecu" (again, with an accent over the "e" in "deja")
is described as "the sense of reliving something that one has *exper-
ienced* before."  I obtained these definitions from an article by
Stanislav Grof, M.D., the text of whose paper "Survival of Conscious-
ness After Death: Myth and Science" appears in the _Proceedings of the
Symposium on Consciousness and Survival_ ("an interdisciplinary inquiry
into the possibility of life beyond biological death") published by the
Institute of Noetic Sciences (475 Gate Five Road, Suite 300, P.O. Box
97, Sausalito, California 94966-0097).  The _Proceedings_ were published
by IONS in 1987 (ISBN 0-943951-00-3).  The conference was organized and
sponsored by U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), and held at George-
town University in Washington, D.C.  (The speakers at the conference
are all noted authorities in their respective fields.)  BTW, Dr. Grof
has written a number of very interesting books that readers of alt.dreams
and alt.consciousness might like to take a look at.  Many of them refer
to his work with psychoactive substances and with a technique he calls
"holotropic breathing" (a form of hyperventilation) in a clinical setting
to produce altered states of consciousness which enable a person to con-
nect in a very direct and personal and powerful manner with images and
symbols and literal experiences of the birth process and identification
with other life forms, as well as an understanding of death as a personal
experience (he operated a clinic at the Johns Hopkins University Medical
Center in which he helped terminally ill cancer patients understand and
make peace with the reality and immanence of their own demise, and wrote
about the subject in a work called _The Human Encounter with Death_).

On the subject of dreams, let me offer a recent one from my own experience,
which I recently reported to an electronic mailing list in connection with
a personal report I made there:

| Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1992 14:14:10 EDT
|
| As is often the case, I could only recover the briefest fragment of a
| dream when I awoke this morning, and I've been pondering it for the
| last little while.  First there was a scene in which I was "cleaning
| up" (as I'm trying to do in my life just now, actually, in a material,
| as well as an emotional sense).  During my cleaning, I came upon what
| looked like subway tokens for the Boston MBTA, and I decided I didn't
| need them or couldn't use them.  (Perhaps I had moved, as I've been
| considering, and decided it was unlikely enough that I'd ever be able
| to use them that they were just useless pieces of metal.)  Then in a
| subsequent scene, I found myself somehow involved in the operation of
| a bus.  It wasn't clear that I was driving the bus (something I've
| never done in my life, BTW), but I was somehow attempting to see that
| it got where it was going, and I found myself standing alongside the
| bus as it pulled up to what looked like a toll-collector's window
| at the entrance to one of the "turnpikes" (toll roads) that are common
| in this part of the country.  Immediately prior to pulling up to the
| tollbooth, the driver had had to make a decision, since there had been
| a fork in the road, about fifty feet before the booth itself, in what
| looked to be a lighted tunnel.  I had a feeling of having been in con-
| sultation with the driver in making that decision, and we had chosen
| to approach the tollbooth, rather to take the other fork in the road,
| which appeared to lead downward, as if going under an underpass or
| down into the bowels of the earth.  So there I was, standing at the
| tollbooth, talking with the toll taker, who I'm sure was a woman, with
| a sense of wondering whether we had made the right decision (oh, I
| don't suppose it matters, but the booth was on the right fork, and the
| other fork which led downward was on the left).
|
| In the course of talking with the toll taker (presumably on behalf of
| the driver - but I'm still not sure I myself was not the driver, since
| I don't recall being aware of the driver as a figure in the dream), I
| learned that one acceptable form of payment on this toll road was the
| kind of token which I became aware I had just recently discarded, think-
| ing them worthless relative to what I had expected to be doing.  Then I
| looked back down the road from the direction we had come, wondering
| whether it might not be too late to back up and take the other fork in
| the road.  It seemed that it might be possible, but then other cars
| began to come - I could see their headlights as they approached the
| fork that we had recently passed, and I realized that we were pretty
| well committed to the course we had taken, and I would have to buy new
| tokens to get past this toll booth.  It was then I learned that the
| price had gone up considerably since I had bought the ones I had just
| thrown away, and getting past that tollbooth would be a lot more ex-
| pensive than it would have been had I just held on to my tokens.
|
| At that point I awoke, or the dream ended - or my recollection ends.
|
| Strangely enough, just as I began thinking about including mention of
| this dream in this article, the words and melody of a song came into
| my head, as often happens when I'm thinking about something intensely.
| Often the song, which in this case I haven't thought about for some
| time, since it was a song I used to hear on the radio when I was about
| 13-14, living near San Francisco, during a country-western phase I went
| through at that time.  The words to the song, sung by a woman are:
|
|     Don't call me from a honky-tonk, expecting sympathy,
|     'Cause you still love the night-life more than you love me.
|     If you love me, you'll have to leave this way of life behind.
|     Don't call me from a honky-tonk and think I'll change my mind.
|
| I find, when this kind of thing happens, without fail, that the words
| to that song will have something to do with what I've been thinking
| about, and there's some kind of "message" in those words.
|
| Well, folks, it seems to me that the dream and the words to the song
| are essentially symbols of CHOICE!  I won't burden you with my inter-
| pretations of each, so as not to get too ponderous in all this.  Perhaps
| there's something there in my unconscious mind that isn't satisfied with
| the account I gave earlier in response to what Don said about choice.  I
| find myself wondering whether there might not be in any phase of our life
| certain choices open to us of which we're dimly aware, and we would some-
| how prefer to retain the awareness as a dim kind of thing, rather than to
| develop it and to take the road that having that developed awareness
| might require one to take in order to be true to and to continue to
| develop the awareness.
|
| You might find yourself wondering what I really feel about choice.  Well,
| I don't really know.  Yes, I do have some strong emotions tied to a belief
| that at a certain time in my life, at least, my choices were severely con-
| stricted, and that I did the best I could to cope under those circumstances.
| It's hard to go back that far to recall in any detail what life was really
| like then, and I'm sure there's something in me that resists doing so in
| any case, afraid to encounter the pain and frustration - and perhaps afraid
| to encounter the possibility that there were choices open to me which I had
| even at the time, but was not strong enough or resourceful enough or brave
| enough to take.  I still resist the notion that the stutterer chooses to
| stutter under all conditions, but I'll gladly admit that choice is a very
| important tool in understanding a lot about our lives.  (I seem to recall
| that Soren Kierkegaard made a big deal about choice and decision, and I've
| found myself a time or two wanting to go back and read what he and others,
| like Nietzsche and maybe Schopenhauer have to say on the subject, since it
| is clearly an issue which I have not resolved for myself.)

I don't know if it's clear to readers of this article, but these symbols
of choice seem to be essentially about collecting and retaining important
and valuable currency which is required for later experiences in life.  It
reminds me of the episode in Lewis Carroll's _Alice in Wonderland_ where
Alice finds a small doorway in the woodwork down by the floor of the room
she's in and then when she manages to become just the right size to fit
through the door, whose keyhole she's been peering through, she discovers
she's left the key up on the table that she's now too tiny to reach.  That
story has always been a very powerful symbol in my life.

The song also represents a very powerful theme, having to do with making
choices, which was the topic under discussion on the mailing list where I
posted the included message text originally.  A noted authority in his
field had claimed that a certain condition was one that is subject to the
person deciding to choose that form of behavior.  The ensuing debate has
finally persuaded him to soften his position, and he plans to write to the
editor of a professional journal reporting what he learned from our online
discussion.  In any case, the song represents for me the vital question of
whether I can make certain changes in my own life, rather than insisting I
be allowed to retain certain behaviors while at the same time expecting to
be accepted into a society which part of me recognizes it is important that
I re-enter to feel a more complete sense of fulfillment.

I've been thinking lately a lot about time and its irreversability - about
how each moment of life is really precious, and how we have to "keep on
our toes" in order to take best advantage of the opportunities we have in
each instant, and how we must recognize the value in each of the "tokens"
of opportunity and personal power that we are offered in order to achieve
that sense of fulfillment.

Well, I guess I'll just end this rambling essay here for now.  If I have
any central point to make, I guess it's just that perhaps the unconscious
mind can attempt to communicate via a number of means, through dreams,
through snippets of songs, during altered states of consciousness, etc.
I'd be interested in hearing the thoughts of others on these topics, and
I'd be especially interested if you know of any good books on such subjects.

Thanks.

Gary
--
    Gary S. Trujillo                            gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts              {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,ima,cdp}!gnosys!gst