In an intriguing essay titled ‘Memory of the Present and False Recognition’ (1908), the French philosopher Henri Bergson proposes that déjà vu is the result of memory and perception becoming intertwined in the present moment. This is based on his supposition that memory and perception – the past and the present – occur simultaneously. The British philosopher Keith Ansell-Pearson, who has translated Bergson’s work, writes:
Bergson’s claim is that at every moment of our lives we are presented with two aspects, even though the virtual aspect may be imperceptible owing to the very nature of the operations of perception. It is because the past does not simply follow the present but coexists with it that we can develop an explanation of paramnesia or the illusion of déjà-vu, in which there is a recollection of the present contemporaneous with the present itself. The illusion is generated from thinking that we are actually undergoing an experience we have already lived through when in fact what is taking place is the perception of the duplication we do not normally perceive, namely, of time into the two aspects of actual and virtual. There is a memory of the present in the actual moment itself. I cannot actually predict what is going to happen but I feel as if I can: what I foresee is that I am going to have known it – I experience a ‘recognition to come’. I gain insight into the formation of a memory of the present…
In Bergson’s own words:
As we witness an event or participate in a conversation, there suddenly arises the conviction that we have already seen what we are seeing, already heard what we are hearing, and already said what is being said … in sum, we are reliving down to the last detail an instant of our own past life. The illusion is sometimes so strong that in each moment, as long as this illusion lasts, we believe ourselves to be at the point of predicting what is about to happen: how could we not know already, if we feel that soon we will know that we knew it?
If we attend to the felt subjective quality of déjà vu, this does, indeed, ring true. When this experience lasts beyond a split second of uncanny familiarity, and a chain of thoughts is unfolding (usually for no longer than a matter of seconds), there is this sense that you know that the next detail will be familiar, and you are close to predicting it. This is like when you are trying to remember something that is on the tip of your tongue. During the déjà vu experience, you do not actually predict in the moment what the next detail will be, but when it does come, there is an immediate sense that you knew this would occur.
Bergson argues that this phenomenon of ‘experiencing again’ involves a duplication of the present – and, according to him, this results in the strange feeling of simultaneously both acting in and spectating on our lives. Bergson calls this a ‘false recognition’: you become a person “looking on at his own movements, thoughts and actions”. Essentially, you are split into two people: one of whom is “an actor playing a part” and another person who is spectating. This duplication can occur because of the way that memory functions.
Bergson was trying to dispel the illusion, which we do not commonly recognise as such, that a memory is only formed after a perception has taken place. He posits that “the formation of memory is never posterior to the formation of perception, it is contemporaneous with it”. The illusion that memory follows perception is “generated by the requirements of perception itself, which is always focused on the needs of a present,” writes Ansell-Pearson. Or as Bergson states:
But the forward-springing one, which we call perception, is that alone which interests us. We have no need of the memory of things whilst we hold the things themselves. Practical consciousness, throwing this memory aside as useless, theoretical reflection holds it to be non-existent. Thus the illusion is born that memory succeeds perception.
Memory formation is an unconscious process because becoming conscious of this process, which occurs simultaneously with perception, does not serve us in a practical sense. Information from the unconscious is typically only actualised if it serves a useful cognitive function (except, of course, in cases like the illusion of déjà vu, which does not appear to possess any utility). The idea that normal perception is strategically restrictive, due to practical concerns, is a common feature in Bergson’s thought. For example, he advanced a view – later accepted by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception – that the mind acts as a reducing valve, only letting information enter our conscious awareness that benefits our survival. If we were flooded by all the contents of the mind, conversely, we would be overwhelmed and less likely to achieve self-preservation.
The unconscious, for Bergson, is a vast repository of ‘pure’ or ‘virtual’ memory, which is only accessed when it helps to make sense of the present. Pure or virtual memories – which Bergson first described in his text Matter and Memory (1896) – are those that have not yet mixed with present perceptions, while pure perceptions are, equally, those that have not yet been mingled with memories. Unrevealed pure memories in the unconscious are primed to combine with new perceptions in the present as and when it is deemed necessary and useful. This is a dynamic relationship between memory and perception, yet with the two formulated as having a ‘pure’ form, memory and perception are also fundamentally divided in the mind.
This division means that we can see the difference between memory and perception as one of kind and not merely degree or intensity. Memory is not just a weakened or diluted form of perception (with the images we recall being hazier and less vivid images of the actual perception they pertain to). Rather, the recollection of an image is more like a concentrated act of intellectual effort. Memory is also a highly creative act, prone to embellishment and all other kinds of colouring and biases. As Bergson insisted, “To picture is not to remember.”
Returning to the ‘false recognition’ that is déjà vu, Bergson uses the analogy of our shadow:
Step by step, as perception is created, it is profiled in memory, which is beside it like a shadow is next to a body. But, in the normal condition, there is no consciousness of it, just as we should be unconscious of our shadow were our eyes to throw light on it each time it turned in that direction.
Lynne Pearce explains Bergson’s theory of déjà vu as follows: “these presentiments are, in fact, things we have already thought – but only just. They belong, as it were, to our shadow-present and, rather than waiting to be actualised years later, come into being a heart beat after they have been formed.”
Are there any issues with Bergson’s exposition? One possibility – which does not necessarily nullify Bergson’s account – is that some instances of what we call déjà vu do not involve consciously experiencing the simultaneity of perception and memory formation but instead come from an actual re-experiencing. So, the reason why some experiences feel so uncanny is that they have, in fact, occurred in an identical, near-identical, or similar way before. One has had this very thought, or chain of thoughts, before – or one has had a conversation that feels repeated. Certainly, it is difficult to tease apart such instances from the déjà vu Bergson has in mind. It may be that the scenarios I allude to illustrate just how powerful the illusion of déjà vu is: nothing truly repeats; any feeling of spooky repetition simply involves a glitch in the functioning of perception and memory.
I wonder, too, whether some other instances of déjà vu are actually instances of remembering dreams. On this account, some present perceptions may be so similar to a forgotten segment of a dream scenario that one’s immediate reality takes on this oneiric quality. We may think that dreams become rapidly erased from our memory upon waking, but many dream memories may be lodged in our unconscious. They are not typically brought to light because, from the perspective of practical consciousness (where we are aware of only what is deemed useful: a sliver of reality), dream content can have little utility in our lives. However, it is not unheard of for elements of our dreams to percolate to the surface of conscious awareness. Perhaps this remembering is context-dependent: when a certain context manifests, the memory is triggered. Consequently, when waking life shares the context of a dream – be that a place, thought, feeling, or conversation – we may be struck by an eerie feeling, a sense of déjà vu, influenced by a previous dream that did not disappear into the void after all. (Déjà rêvé, meaning ‘already dreamed’, is the specific term denoting the re-experiencing of a dream but as a real-life event, as if the dream were a premonition. It is distinct from déjà vu.)
In Matter and Memory, Bergson argues that pure memory is, by its very nature, virtual. It is not located in our brains, or anywhere physical, in fact. Instead, he thought of pure memory as the non-actual repository of all past events, the contents of which will be actualised at different times, depending on our current needs and concerns. Pure memory is the totality of memories existing, eternally, in a virtual state. Recollection, then, is the actualisation of a memory-image from this virtual place, becoming a memory-image in the present. This move from the virtual to the actual, as the lecturer Stamatis Zografos points out, creates “the illusion that memory-images are archived somewhere in the brain”.
Pure memory records all of our experiences, which, of course, then includes all of our dreams. Bergson’s philosophy of memory could help explain why we can recall long-forgotten dreams in the present, which can lead to a sense of déjà vu (or more specifically, déjà rêvé). But the cause of this feeling in this case is not recollecting the present as we experience it. Instead, it is being aware of a dream memory-image that has gone from virtualised to actualised at the same time as having a present perception that in some way accords with that memory-image.
One criticism of this take on déjà rêvé, nevertheless, is that it assumes the existence of a virtual realm. The virtual, according to Bergson, is real (unlike the possible), but it is not actual or physical. So how would we establish the existence of this realm – some ‘place’ of infinite potentiality – as an ontological reality? Postulating such a realm could unnecessarily complicate our explanations of strange memory-related phenomena, especially if we can explain something like déjà rêvé through empirical research.
There may also be a gap or incompleteness in Bergson’s explanation of déjà vu, since if this phenomenon does involve a glitch in the normal functioning of the mind, we should then ask, why does this glitch occur? Is the glitch merely a random malfunction that happens, expected in an organism as much as a computer? Or is there an underlying pattern or reason that helps explain why déjà vu occurs in specific instances and so rarely?
References
Ansell-Pearson, K. (2018). ‘Bergson on the Time of Memory’, Centre for Philosophy of Time, 7 March. https://www.centreforphilosophyoftime.it/2018/03/07/keith-ansell-bergson/
Bergson, H. (1896). Matter and Memory. Translated by Paul, N.M. and Palmer, W.S. New York: Dover Publications.
Bergson, H. (1908). ‘Memory of the Present and False Recognition’ in Henri Bergson: Key Writings. Edited by Ansell-Pearson, K. and Mullarkey, J. London: Continuum, 2002.
Bergson, H. (1920). Mind-Energy. Translated by Carr, H.W. London: Macmillan.
Bluemink, M. (2020). ‘On Virtuality: Deleuze, Bergson, Simondon’. Epoché Magazine, Issue 36, December. https://epochemagazine.org/36/on-virtuality-deleuze-bergson-simondon/
Curot, J., Valton, L., Denuelle, M., Vignal, J., Maillard, L., Pariente, J., Trébuchon, A., Bartolomei, F., and Barbeau, E.J. (2018). ‘Déjà-rêvé: Prior dreams induced by direct electrical brain stimulation’. Brain Stimulation, 11(4), pp. 875–885.
Huxley, A. (1954). The Doors of Perception. https://maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfPerception.pdf
O’Sullivan, S. (2013). Chapter 10: ‘A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite Relation: Towards a Bergsonian Production of Subjectivity’ in Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film. Edited by Mullarkey, J. and De Mille, C. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Pearce, L. (2016). Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Zografos, S. (2019). Architecture and Fire: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Conservation. London: UCL Press.
This is an excerpt from my book Altered Perspectives: Critical Essays on Psychedelic Consciousness (2024, Iff Books).
