Throughout the history of psychoanalysis, experts have not abandoned their attempts to shed light on the mystery of d'ej`a vu - the state of “already seen”, when in an unfamiliar place a vivid, almost mystical feeling suddenly arises that you have been here before.
D'ej`a vu is accompanied by depersonalization: reality becomes vague and unclear. Using Freud's terminology, we can say that there is a "derealization" of the personality - as if it denies reality. At the same time, a sense of the historicity of what is happening can arise - something like a memory of a previous life. This feeling is fleeting, but unforgettable. It was this that suggested to Jung the idea that "life is just a short fragment of a text, from which the previous and subsequent paragraphs were deleted."
Carl Gustav Jung was convinced that he lived a parallel life and was partly in the 18th century: this feeling first visited him at the age of 12. Regular excursions into his own past invariably led the great psychiatrist into complete confusion. He was struck, for example, by a sketch depicting Dr. Stackleberger, who lived in the 18th century: Jung immediately recognized boots with buckles on the hero of the picture … his own! “I have a strong conviction,” he writes, “that I once wore these boots. I literally felt them on my feet! Every time, such things made me wildly excited. Often my hand, against my will, printed the number "1776" instead of "1876" - while I felt an inexplicable nostalgia."
Henri Bergson defines d'ej'a vu as a "memory of the present": he believes that the perception of reality at this moment suddenly bifurcates and is partly as if transferred to the past.
Meanwhile, this phenomenon exists not only in visual impressions. It can take the form d'ej'a entendu (already heard), d'ej'a lu (already read), and d'ej'a 'eprouv'e (already experienced). Some consider this to be an echo of previous incarnations, while others speak of the ancestral "memory of ancestors", awakening in consciousness under the influence of strong emotions. Spiritualists assert that d'ej`a vu is an "impression" acquired by a detached part of the psyche; so, in the fantasies of Charles Fort, this phenomenon is interpreted as a memory of a forgotten teleportation. And Dr. Wigan, in his medical essay "The Duties of the Mind" (1860), called the phenomenon a "defect of apperception", first guessing that d'ej`a vu, perhaps, is a consequence of the independent perception of reality by two lobes of the brain, one of which is somewhat ahead of the other,thus creating the illusion of a failure of time.
However, what intrigues us most, of course, is the idea that d'ej`a vu is not a memory of the past, but of the future: a premonition, which, due to the peculiarities of the human mind, is automatically projected into the past - from foresight turns into a memory. And this already - completely regardless of whether we are talking about a dream or sensations in reality - draws us into the depths of the most amazing of the mysteries, the mystery of time.
One patient told me how, being captured during the Second World War, he suddenly remembered that four years before that, he had already dreamed of the arrest scene. The dream was forgotten, and then … turned into reality. In The Unknown Guest (1914), Maeterlink calls this "earthly realization."
My Budapest nephew told me something similar: “I read your article“Premonition and Life Crisis”and remembered one of my dreams. I first saw it in 1909, and it was repeated every year until the outbreak of the war. I dreamed that I was an army officer and I was in Italy. The orderly brought me lunch, and then the mistress of the house, a very beautiful woman, appeared. While I was eating, she had a conversation with me, and in the next episode … she appeared in front of me in a black nightgown, which very promisingly revealed a beautiful body. The war began. When Italy announced the beginning of hostilities, my unit was transferred there first. We were advancing on Piave, when I suddenly found myself in a very familiar situation - as if I had returned home.
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The table was laid for us on the terrace of the castle. When the orderly brought me food, I thought: only that beauty is missing. And she appeared! I greeted her as an old friend. The most surprising thing is that later she admitted that I seemed familiar to her. I will stop here, because soon I saw a nightgown. How could something that I dreamed in a dream five years before happen in reality?"
So a dream five years ago has clearly become a memory of the future. Maybe he is akin to those dreams, not idle, but creative, that are visited by writers, musicians, poets in moments of inspiration?
Professor Halley is known to have discovered the moons of Mars in 1887. And 150 years earlier, Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver's Travels about the astronomers of Laputa: “They discovered two small stars orbiting Mars. The near one is at a distance of three diameters from the center of the planet, the far one is at a distance of five diameters from it. The first satellite makes a complete revolution in 10 hours, the second - in 20.5 . The figures, perceived by his contemporaries as proof of the writer's complete ignorance in the field of astronomy, strikingly coincided with the calculations of Professor Halley.
Andrew Jackson Davis (Penetralia, 1856) “remembered” about the typewriter long before its appearance: “I had the urge to create an automatic psychograph - let's call him a spirit writer. The instrument could be constructed like a piano: one row of keys would represent elementary sounds, the other a combination of them, and the third a rapid recombination, so that instead of a piece of music a sermon or a poem could be played here.
Let's not forget, too, that science fiction in recent decades is one never-ending "memory of the future."
I found an unusual example recently in a book by Freiges Karinfi, Traveling Along the Boundaries of the Skull. Describing his first meeting with Dr. Olivecron, a neurosurgeon from Stockholm, who approached him for the removal of a brain tumor, he recalls being struck by the feeling that he knew the man. Many years after this successful operation, he tried to describe the doctor's appearance to one of his colleagues in Budapest. "But this is exactly the description …" - he interrupted him, naming the hero of one popular Hungarian theatrical performance in those years.
“I wrote the play, and it was twenty years ago,” admits Karinthi. - Its main character is a very talented, but too emotional young engineer, - suffered from excessive indecision. He invented something like an automatic unmanned bomber (this idea was later really turned into reality), but a skeptic friend began to convince him that the true motive of the invention was a desire to take revenge on the whole world for leaving another beautiful wife. To prove his disinterestedness, the engineer announced that on the day of the demonstration he would take to the air. And then he was suddenly seized by the fear of death.
His alter ego - a surgeon from Scandinavia - appears on the scene and offers to operate on the brain in order to remove the "center of fear", which is located in the cerebellum. The engineer agrees to the operation. And the next day it rises into the air and remains alive. My actor friend was very familiar with this role, because he played it more than once.
Here is an excerpt from a letter from Dr. Leela Veji-Wagner, a psychiatrist from London, just about this book.
“I was very interested in what you said about Journey Along the Boundaries of the Skull,” he writes. - I remember both the book and the play, so I can confirm everything the actor testifies to. The only difference was that the prototype was Swedish, and the artistic hero was Finnish. Both are Scandinavians, but the Finn is ethnically much closer to the Hungarian."
Alexander Woolcott tells the story of a young woman from Catonville, Maryland, who, on her honeymoon in France, saw a house that had been in her dreams for many years. Arising in extraordinary excitement, she decided to go into the courtyard and … scared to death the priest, the gardener and the old lady who lived there: they recognized the guest as a ghost that had lived here for the past ten years! This, you see, is already something more serious than an ordinary d'ej`a vu!
According to the story of Professor Augustus Geir, included in the book The Story of My Life, the same thing happened with a certain Mrs. E. Butler, who lived in Ireland.
For many nights, she dreamed of herself in an extraordinarily beautiful house, equipped with such amenities that one could only dream of. A year later Mrs. Butler moved with her husband to London and went to Hampshire to look for a home. At the gatekeeper's gate, a woman exclaimed: "Yes, this is the gate of the house that appeared to me in a dream!" When she reached the front door, she recognized the smallest details one after the other - except for only one "extra" door. The latter, as it turned out, was built into the wall six months ago - just when the wonderful dreams of the Irish woman stopped. The house was selling for a suspiciously low price, and the agent later admitted that the reason for the discount was the appearance of a ghost within the walls of this in all respects beautiful home. The reader has probably already guessed that the "ghost" was … Mrs. Butler herself!
So, seeing herself in a dream as an inhabitant of the future house, the woman clearly “remembered” about the future. Does it mean that the time in some of its parts got out of a rut, allowing its separate "patches" to overlap?
Jung recalls a strange experience that happened to him on the way to Nairobi. On a sharp rock that towered over the railway along which the train was going, he saw a slender figure of a man leaning on a spear. “This picture from a seemingly completely alien world fascinated me: I experienced the state of d'ej`a vu. Once I was here, I knew well this life, separated from me by only a period of time. In an instant I seemed to suddenly return to my secret, firmly forgotten youth: yes, this dark-skinned man has been waiting for me here for the last two thousand years. I carried the feeling of historical belonging to this land throughout my entire journey through wild Africa."
The so-called "prenatal memories" are a phenomenon of the same class. Freud in his book "The Uncanny" directly links the memories of the "former life" with the craving for the mother's womb.
“This secret, forbidden entrance is the gate to the former house: to where each of us lived for some time. There is a joking expression: "Love is homesickness." Exactly. If you dream of a place or country and in a dream you say to yourself: "Everything is familiar to me here!" - this means that we are talking about an artistic image symbolizing the mother's genitals or her whole body."
Most of us are not happy with Freud's overly naturalistic theories, but they do not correctly explain the essence of "prenatal memories" and the subsequent attraction of the child to the mother.
And the last thing. Between the "prenatal" state and what we call "previous life," stretches a dim patch of pseudo-existence prior to conception. In any case, specialists who consider the true "generic" or "unremarkable" impressions that patients share from time to time are convinced of the reality of the existence of this "gray area".
In Fantasies of Conception, I analyzed the dreams of patients in which they were swimming in “other waters”; dreams that hinted at memories of a reality much more distant than life in the mother's womb. “I swam under water, passing one by one unusually beautiful places,” one girl told me. - Most of all, it reminded me of flying at a great height. As I approached the house, I became more confident that I should swim into it, I knew for sure that I would do it. Everything was already predetermined."
The "house" into which the girl was going to "swim" was the mother's womb. This dream, a vivid example of the phenomenon of deja eprouve, symbolically tells about the descent of the soul into this world along a path that was clearly calculated in advance. The sleeping woman knew that she was leaving the "pre-mother" state for a mission on earth.
Alas, official science is unable to prove the reality of "prenatal memories", nor to refute it. The visions of mystics, saints and simply mentally gifted people have psychological and artistic value, nothing more.
From the book: "Between Two Worlds" Author: Fodor Nandor