BootsnAll's Travel Community

At the risk of sounding completely crazy (it was bound to come out here eventually I suppose), have any of you that have gone on extended travels experienced an increase in deja vu? Not even necessarily deja vu as something you have experienced before, but the feeling you have dreamt of a place/experience before? While this had happened to me maybe a handful of times in my life, ever since we began our adventures in Europe 6 months ago, I have had this feeling a lot. Sometimes it is so intense it catches me off guard.

Any reassurance I am not the only one? Any new theories out there explaining this phenomenon?

if you do enough research, read guide books, watch travel shows, it should happen all the time...it does for me

Well, it's not connected to travelling, but I've at least had that feeling before (ha! I can't promise I'm not crazy though )

I guess I've had a feeling like I've had an experience before - like where people are standing, not what they say exactly but the dynamic or something.

I've also had kind of random moments where I remember something odd. A street corner in Chicago regularly reminded me of one random evening that I walked to a one to one lesson in Budapest, etc. Nothing remarkable about it, but somehow I remembered that day.

I get weird flashbacks to trips. Like anytime i smell burning diesel, I am instantly reminded of Central Hong Kong. Or I'll hear a song and have a flashback of listening to it on a flight or something. That kinda stuff happens all the time to me.

Flashbacks, yeah - Deja Vu, rarely. I try to go to places as open-minded and without expectations as possible. I only do research on travel logistics and local custom (in order to not offend anybody). I never do research about towns/regions/attractions and will let my intuition guide me around once in the country. There's little that could give me deja vus based on research.

Not only do I get deja vu, but somtimes I get the oddest sensation that I've been in a specific place, but in a completely different time. In the old city of Quebec, I could swear I walked down that street, but it was more than a hundred years ago. Some of the landscape out west really put me in a different time, hundreds of years previous.

Very weird.


Jet

I do fairly limited research for my travels. I tend to just read a quick bit about the highlights I should visit and then see where the road takes me. This "dream-like" experience has most often happened in places I had never researched or sometimes even heard of. For example, we just arrived at our latest long-term rental in France. There are no pictures on the website of the property courtyard, but as soon as I saw it, I vivdly recalled having a dream with the exact same layout. I don't know if it's just my mind playing tricks on me from traveling so much? Maybe it's confused by this nomadic lifestyle I've taken on?

Not traveling. Just in every day life I will have such intense deja vu, feeling that I have seen that exact moment in time before in a dream. It happens every so often and it always feels like it follows the dream by about 3 months.

My only deja vue is when I get off the plane, train whatever when I get back and say 'Oh! S*&#! I have to get a job."

lol, BushTrekker...Well, that certainly isn't the most pleasant of deja vus.

Not necessarily increased by travel, but I have deja vu all the time, though a bit less now than when I was younger. It's usually not just thinking I'd been somewhere before, but I often remember occurrences, conversations, and thoughts I could swear all happened before in the location I'm in. I remember the first time was when I was about 7, riding in the back seat of my dad's K-car. I was contemplating the rules of time travel, as explained by Back to the Future, when we went over the train tracks by the house. And that's when I had the feeling I'd been on that ride, discussing with myself the flux capacitor while being tossed around as we crossed the tracks. There was something on the radio that triggered it too and played into the equation, but I don't remember what it was now. The first time threw me, but then it kept happening. I figured it was something I had dreamt before, so I began trying to focus on my dreams so I could try to remember these things and fulfill my goal of becoming a gypsy fortune teller. It never worked out that way... but now as soon as I recognize I'm having deja vu, I try to remember what's going to happen next. I can only get a couple seconds or so ahead, though, and only with deja vu moments that last for a while, so it's not very effective gypsy-ism.