What is still to do

The future of déjà experience research

In my considered opinion, we have barely “scratched the surface” when it comes to understanding the various types and forms of déjà experience: there is still an awful lot that we do not know or understand. Researchers have (naturally) concentrated on what their own discipline might say about these phenomena and have used the tools at their disposal. Such approaches necessarily involve reduction, though, and while we concentrate on certain “trees” we miss the view of the whole “forest”. The only remedy, I think, is to keep an open mind and to collect as much information as possible about what people are experiencing. That is one of the purposes of this website.

From October 2004 an on-line questionnaire was available. By April 2015 more than 3,000 people from many countries had taken the time and trouble to answer its 85 questions. The questionnaire is now closed. A simple analysis of the data was prepared for the 2006 IASD meeting, where pie charts comparing déjà vécu with déjà visité results were shown in a PowerPoint presentation. A statistical analysis has since been carried out and a paper published.* We plan to present some results on this website soon.

Thanks to the surveys made so far, we now know that people have déjà experiences in Asian countries as well as in European ones, and tentative results indicate that African Americans have such experiences just as Caucasians do. Much remains to be done, though, in comparing the frequency and other aspects of these experiences across cultures and ethnic groups, especially among indigenous peoples. In the same vein, we in the West have adopted French names for these phenomena (in honor of the early French research), but it is strange that other languages seem to have no words for them. The only exception I know of is “kishikan” in Japanese, which I have been told is a translation of the Western term “already seen”. Are there really no words for these phenomena in Sanskrit, Urdu, Arabic, Swahili or one of the Australian Aboriginal languages?

There is some indication that drugs can produce states resembling déjà experiences, and recent studies using hypnosis seem promising.

*Funkhouser A, Schredl M (2014) Déjà Vécu and Déjà Visité Similarities and Differences: Initial Results from an Online Investigation. Journal of Consciousness Studies 21 (11-12): 7 - 18.