One of the Cognitive ghosts discussed in the The Rest Is Science episode “Cognitive Ghosts”.
What it is
Déjà rêvé (French for “already dreamed”) is the sense that something happening in waking life is unfolding exactly as you once dreamed it. It’s a close cousin of Déjà vu, but the felt source of familiarity is specifically a dream rather than a vague “before”.
What’s happening in the brain
This one is, as the hosts note, poorly researched — much of what’s online is anecdotal (Reddit threads, wellness blogs) rather than rigorous science. The most parsimonious explanation is a source-monitoring error: the brain misattributes the origin of a familiarity signal, tagging a present (or recently formed) memory as “I dreamed this”, when really the dream memory is being reconstructed or invented after the fact. Some clinical research has elicited dream-like recollections by stimulating the temporal lobe, hinting at a shared neural substrate with déjà vu.
References from the show
- The hosts flag déjà rêvé as mostly anecdotal and under-studied, contrasting it with the better-evidenced Déjà vu and Jamais vu — a nice reminder that not every vivid mental phenomenon has a solid literature behind it yet.
Links
Related
- Déjà vu — the better-studied sibling
- Jamais vu · Presque vu
- End-of-life dreams and visions — another place dreams blur into reality
- Cognitive ghosts