Dreams and Deja Vu

[Starbuck]

There was a comment in another thread relating to how unusual experiences might shape our metaphysical world view.

That got me thinking about what got me started exploring new age and now idealism as a way of accounting for experiential anomalies.

From a very young age I have experienced a strong sense of deja vu, particularly when on holidays or in unusual locations. After a few years, I realised that I could trace this feeling to vaguely remembered dreams in which I had had a preview of the future. This got me more interested in dreams and my recall became stronger - to the point that when I got deja vu, I sometimes recollected the exact dream it related to and could gain a sense of knowing what would happen.

I would first be interested if anyone has experienced this order of events in their life?

Secondly, from a philosophical stance, lets assume what I am saying is true. Given that the dreams were relaying 'physical' phenomena that had yet to exist (i.e dreaming of a building when I was 8 years old that wasn't built till I was 20) surely this disproves the ultimacy of material causation as caused by my brain, and the materialist realism paradigm in general?

[Eugene I]

I had a similar experience in my youth of having a dream about an important event in my life that actually happened a few years later at exactly the same place that I saw it in the dream. That was a major break from my materialistic worldview of a physics major student.

[Simon Adams]

Yes I get deja-vu from a place from time to time. It’s very strange feeling, sometimes as if it’s so close that you can almost-but-not-quite grab awareness of the ‘memories’.

I’ve also had multiple dreams about two different places that had something similar to deja vu, not because they were repeat dreams but more that feeling of ‘knowing’ the places. When I was young it was a village by the sea with a mountain behind it. The dream was always the same story with a huge wave that comes, and somehow managing to survive. I still (partly) remember it because it was so familiar and real at the time, unlike normal dreams. The one thing that makes me think it wasn’t actually a ‘real’ place is that at the end I was always back on the beach, and there were lumps of green jelly stuff all over the place, which is just weird

Something else I get sometimes when awake is that I feel like I’m seeing what someone somewhere else is seeing, but it’s not clear, just an almost subliminal live image. The last time I noticed it was maybe a couple of months ago, and it was nearly dark where I was, but in the corner of ‘my eye’ I was looking out of a window in broad daylight, with a small car park area, a low brick wall, then a road, then some dark red brick houses or offices the other side of the road. This usually seem different from deja vu, more visual than the ‘feeling/memory’, so maybe it is just a literal daydream, but it feels more like sharing what someone is looking at.

I’m sure I shouldn’t be writing this as the men in white coats may come knocking on the door!

[Starbuck]

Thanks for replies, good to know Im not alone. Sometimes when I start doubting idealism I just recall these experiences and it blows any simplistic/ materialist conditioning out of the water!!