Psychologists are dusting off 19th-century explanations of déjà vu. Have we been here before? In the summer of 1856, Nathaniel Hawthorne visited a decaying English manor house known as Stanton Harcourt, not far from Oxford. He was struck by the vast kitchen, which occupied the bottom of a 70-foot tower. "Here, no doubt, they were accustomed to roast oxen whole, with as little fuss and ado as a modern cook would roast a fowl," he wrote in an 1863 travelogue, Our Old Home. Hawthorne wrote that as he stood in that kitchen, he was seized by an uncanny feeling: "I was haunted and perplexed by an idea that somewhere or other I had seen just this strange spectacle before. The height, the blackness, the dismal void, before my eyes, seemed as familiar as the decorous neatness of my grandmother's kitchen." He was certain that he had never actually seen this room or anything like it. And yet for a moment he was caught in what he described as "that odd state of mind wherein we fitfully and teasingly remember some previous scene or incident, of which the one now passing appears to be but the echo and reduplication."When Hawthorne wrote that passage there was no common term for such an experience.

But by the end of the 19th century, after discarding "false recognition," "paramnesia," and "promnesia," scholars had settled on a French candidate: "déjà vu," or "already seen."The fleeting melancholy and euphoria associated with déjà vu have attracted the interest of poets, novelists, and occultists of many stripes. St. Augustine, Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, and Tolstoy all wrote detailed accounts of such experiences. (We will politely leave aside a certain woozy song by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.)

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I get déjà vu all the time; I even get familiar smells

So do I Doomie. I sometimes have dreams and the next day i see something that was in my dream like a person or building. Is this deja vu?

There is no doubt that the phenomenon of déjà vu exists, almost every one has experienced the weird sensation that we've "been here before." But I believe that déjà vu is actually a processing error, a slight glitch in our brain function causing a temporary confusion between the present and the past. Our brains are constantly processing and storing sensory information into our memories. I see déjà vu as a brief feedback loop between that part of the brain which stores our memories and the part of the brain that is processing current events.

-David

I get deja vu, but while I am having it I know it and if I work my mind quick enough I know what will happen before it happens. Like...if someone is telling me something and I am dejavuing it....I will say...wait...now you are going to say "blah blah blah" and that would be what they were just tihnking about.
Used to freak my freinds otu all the time. or sometimes when I see something, I say "now this is going to happen" and it will ,becuase I am dejavuing it and somehow am able to make my mind work a wee bit faster to speed up the deja vu in my mind quicker than the deja vu which is physically happening at that moment.

would love to hear how science explains that one. or if anyone else has any ideas on it.

you think may thats all psychics are? they are dejavuing and speed up the brain?

Pherrett.
they call those prophetic dreams...they arent deja vu as you dreamed it and remember the dream before it happens. even if you dont remember the dream until the event occurs, you still know it was a dream and not deja vu (which you cant remember ever seeing before, other than knowing it happened sometime prior)