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I had this experience not too long ago. I was riding in a car across an overpass in Cleveland, Ohio, when I suddenly recalled having a dream just a few days earlier of what seemed like that exact spot. The view from the overpass was strikingly similar to my dream. Then I remembered what came next in my dream. Up the road a bit, after some curving, there would appear a row of beautiful stone houses on the left, seeming somewhat out of place. Sure enough, that is exactly what appeared: A row of beautiful stone houses on the left, and they indeed seemed oddly out of place. I could not recall having been along that route before, yet I could recall having vividly dreamt recently about that route.
No, I don’t think it was a premonition or that I am "psychic." I actually think that there is a logical explanation here, and one that has to do with memory.
I am not alone in having this type of experience. The term deja reve (a term similar to déjà vu) means to have “dreamed before” (Brown, 2004). In his book, Alan Brown discusses many early writers who self-observed that feelings of déjà vu had come from dreams. More recently, Brown carried out a survey study in which a very high percentage of participants (approximately 86%) reported having experienced events that they remembered from prior dreams.
Why is this such a common experience?
An important consideration is that dreams themselves do not come from nowhere. They reflect elements of our pasts and elements that have recently been residing in our minds—elements that may get conjured up during sleep. Years ago I had spent long hours creating dozens of virtual reality scenes for research using the Sims game engine. I would joke to people that I knew I was working too much on it when I started seeing the Sims game in my sleep; I would dream about moving elements around within the Sims. Similarly, researchers have shown that after extensive training at playing Tetris, people reported (upon being wakened at certain points during sleep) having imagery of the Tetris images falling in their dream states.
Interestingly, even amnesics (who lack the ability to consciously recollect the Tetris-playing training episodes that led to the dreams in the first place) reported these same types of dreams upon being wakened (only the amnesics could not explain why they were "seeing" these strange dropping block images).
Here are some reasons, all having to do with memory, for why a situation might seem like a re-experience of something that had only been dreamt before:
Forgetting the Experience that Led to the Dream
One way an actual event might seem like a re-experience of a dream is if you previously experienced something, later dreamt about it, then later on only succeeded in recollecting the dream and not the experience that led to the dream. My own experience of having dreamt about the overpass was likely due to this. As I pondered the situation, I realized I had likely been on that road before despite failing to recollect it; the road was very close to where I used to live in Cleveland many years ago. My spouse confirmed this: He had driven with me over that overpass and down that road many times before in the 1990s. I just wasn’t remembering. I had probably dreamt it recently precisely because it was an experience in memory, available to be dreamt about. The cues that I might have been surrounded by during the trip to Cleveland itself probably triggered those old memories during dreaming. So while it seemed at the time that I had only experienced it in a dream, in reality, I think the dream had contained fragments of old memories in the first place.
Making Connections During Sleep
Sleep cultivates neural connections essential to making discoveries and solving problems. Another way an actual event might seem like a re-experience of a dream is if your mind managed to make connections during sleep that you later made again while awake. In their article, "Sleep Inspires Insight," Wagner and colleagues showed when people trained on problem sets that had a hidden structure to them then slept afterward, they were more likely to discover the hidden structure than if they didn’t sleep afterward.
Basically, connections that reflected patterns previously experienced while awake were being made or strengthened during sleep. From this, it seems possible that we might sometimes make novel connections during sleep that we later remember as having been from dreams. Maybe you come up with an idea or solve some problem and feel like the idea or solution had come from a prior dream. Maybe something comes together in a way that it seemed to have in a prior dream. Importantly, although patterns that we detect in the world may sometimes seem like patterns that we remember only from dreams, it doesn’t mean we are “psychic”: Instead, some prior experience in which the pattern was present but we hadn't realized it yet probably led to the dream in the first place.
Mistaken Source Attribution
A less interesting way that an actual event might be remembered as having been dreamt is if you falsely attribute the source of a prior experience to a dream instead of the actual experience. For example, maybe you actually did have a prior experience like the one you are currently experiencing, but are misremembering it as a dream rather than an actual event.
In short, if our dreams reflect aspects of our prior experiences, then the fact that our new experiences might sometimes seem similar to past dreams is to be expected.
