Déjà vu

The following descriptions of déjà vu sensations associated with migraine attacks are collected from various sources in the internet.

Observation 1

"I had a really interesting experience last week: an occurence of what I can only call anti-deja-vu. I was writing an e-mail to my sister to let her know about a web site I came across that she and her kids may be interested in, and after writing a paragraph I thought to myself 'no, wait, I've told her about this before'. It was a VERY intense feeling of deja-vu. However, as I re-edited the paragraph to remove the part I thought I had already mentioned to her (in an e-mail or phone call some months ago), I couldn't even remember which part of the paragraph I was thinking this memory applied to. We're talking here about a period of about 10 seconds during which I experienced the deja-vu and then it went away. Just for the record, however, my mind was not quite normal at the time. I was also experiencing an odd visual disturbance related (according to my ophthalmologist to a migraine headache, so my mind may have been a little clouded from that."

(Richard Wells, Newsgroups: rec.puzzles, Subject: Puzzling dilemmas, November 3, 1996)

Observation 2

"Please tell me if the following sounds like an aura, as it doesn't match the typical description of an aura and in fact I don't always get a migraine following it. It is a sense of deja vu. For example, I might be in a conversation with someone, and I have a sense of thinking that I know what that person is about to say, and then the person actually does say it. It is very bizarre, and I'm not describing it well. The feeling probably lasts only a few seconds. Then I feel disoriented, sometimes I can't talk for a minute, I feel slightly queasy, and extremely tired. Am I crazy, or has someone else experienced this? I don't ever get classic aura symptons."

(Elaine Rapaport, Newsgroups: alt.support.headaches.migraine, Subject: weird aura, March 16, 1998)

Observation 3

"Since March '97 I have been suffering intermittently with what I call 'Deja Vu Attacks', usually within a limited time period after suffering a migraine. The 'attack' goes as follows: I will be doing a normal daily activity such as ironing, looking out a window, doing my hair, etc. when I will suddenly feel a 'blow' or 'hit' on my head, and I experience a distinct feeling of deja vu, sometimes to the actual situation I am in, other times of another place and time. This deja vu lasts about 5 - 10 seconds, then the physical part hits. The sensation starts at the top of my head, and moves slowly through my whole body - I get lightheaded, then my heart starts pounding, I lose my breath, I feel violently nauseous, my 'nether regions' feel tingly, my knees go weak, and I have to sit for the duration of the attack - usually about 1 - 3 minutes before these symptoms clear enough for me to be able to communicate. The experience leaves my mental processes slow for a couple of hours, but also I have a heightened perception, as if I am seeing everything for the first time [i.e. jamais vu]. I have been under some serious emotional and mental stresses over the past months, and as some of these stresses have abated, so has the frequency of the attacks. In March, there were 5 to 7 attacks per week, now they occur about once every 2 1/2 weeks or so, and I recently made the connection that they seemed to occur after a migraine."

(Taylore T. Darnel, Newsgroups: alt.support.headaches.migraine, Subject: "Deja Vu" + Physical Symptoms - Anyone Else??, August 8, 1998; additions in square brackets by Klaus Podoll)

Observation 4

"I'm a 35 year old white male. I had my first classic migraine at age 24. As the years go by, i have fewer 'pain' migraines, but i still have the ocular version, which is only sometimes associated with mild headache. Recently, however, i've been experiencing some strange events that seem to occur within the same day or two of my ocular migraines. It's very hard to describe, but it's like a combination of memory loss, constant deja-vu, and the feeling you've dreamed everything that's happening around you. I've come to call them 'mind-scrambling' prodromes because that's exactly what they do. I swear it's like being in another world, with familiar things becoming very strange. I think i may have found a trigger......dark beer. Anyway, I'm hoping someone has had similar experiences and they are indeed migraine related and not something more serious. I'm really very frightened by the whole ordeal, because I'm really out of my mind when this happens (5 occurences within the year) Thanks for any input......."

(marci, Newsgroups: alt.support.headaches.migraine, Subject: strange symptoms -- Migraine?, September 20, 1999)

Observation 5

"I was diagnosed with Classic Migraines at age 8, I was having several a day when they first started. I had visions with them. Went through all the brain scans and they diagnosed me. The doctors told my Mom that seeing visions was not too out of the ordinary with Classic Migraines. My mom went and found a book at our local library (I don't remember the name. That was almost 20 years ago. =) It told about documented cases of people having visions with the migraines. It said a majority of the people see God or Angels. It also said that Joan of Arc's symptoms when she had her visions were very similar to Classic Migraines. I have premonitions. Unfortunately I can never remember what they are until they happen, and then I have another 'dizzy spell' as I call them. It's never a neat premonition, though. It's always a conversation or something like that. I'll be watching a brand new episode of a TV show, I'll get hot and cold flashes and this horrible sense of Deja Vu, and then I know exactly what each person is going to say.

I never saw God or Angels. I saw a variety of things. Used to see a person walking through streamers in a dark room, and then for a while I saw a little green man on a purple elephant. Weird, huh? I don't recall the others right off hand.

A person I know via internet just had her very first experience with a vision followed by a migraine. She saw a yellow car being hit by a train in her town. Shortly after she happened to be driving that way and saw emergency vehicles at the tracks and a smashed up yellow car. She's having a rough time of it.....

Hope I didn't rattle on too much. =)"

(kittyhm, SciFi.com BBoard, lost webpage, August 11, 2001/March 9, 2004)

Observation 6

"I also get Deja Vu often before a migraine or when tired, and I read recently that this could be attributed to a 'short circuit' in the brain, where events which are being transmitted to short term memory are simultaneously being sent to long term memory, resulting in the brain recalling events as they happen! I love that theory. It makes perfect sense to me (but takes some of the mystique away!)."

(Super Deformed Rhod, Newsgroups: alt.support.headaches.migraine, Subject: Is there a connection between dreaming and migraine?, February 14, 2003)

Observation 7

"Dear Dr. Podoll, of course you can reproduce that - so to say - 'piece' [One day and a hundred billions nights]... Also, you may be interested in more sheer migraine-driven 'products' like this: www.lastcereal.com."

(Andrea B. Previtera, Email to Klaus Podoll, November 21, 2004; additions in square brackets by Klaus Podoll)

"I had my first migraine in my early teen ages, I was twelve if I remember correctly. The symptoms were basically a strong 'pressure' I could feel flowing down from my forehead to the eyeballs. Then confusion ensued, and the real headache struck. It lasted usually 6 to 12 hours, awake or sleeping was the same. It never got worse than that, my migraine began in its most strong incarnation, and slowly wore off in the years, eventually vanishing when I was 19 or so. I wrote about that [One day and a hundred billions nights] in 1998, but the thing actually happened in 1995, when I was 18 years old."

(Andrea B. Previtera, Email to Klaus Podoll, November 21, 2004; additions in square brackets by Klaus Podoll)

"My typical aura has never been visual. I never knew how to describe it. The best way I could is this: Think of the soft 'electric' noise you can hear coming from a freezer at night, when everything else is silent. Think of it not just as a sound, but as an 'atmosphere' engulfing the whole house. This is what I felt, the sound in my head, and that sort of 'suspension'. But as I stated before, I don't really know how to describe it - and anyway yes, I still feel it quite often."

(Andrea B. Previtera, Email to Klaus Podoll, November 21, 2004)

"I could say that it was already 'tactile', like the air being thicker and 'sharp'. It may sound strange, but I am trying to describe something I can barely try to explain in my mother tongue. I could describe it also as if gravity got stronger, and I felt the very pressure of air on my body, but not only the pressure - this kind of 'sharpness', thousands needles, or ants walking on my skin. Absolutely simultaneous to this feeling there was that noise in my head. - I can't really say at which age these symptoms started, nor how long they lasted usually. But they were indeed linked to headaches. I could say the feeling was a 'prequel' to the headache, warning me that I was going to experience a migraine half an hour later."

(Andrea B. Previtera, Email to Klaus Podoll, December 7, 2004)

"As to my writing 'Deja-vu... no, wait... Deja-vu of a Deja-vu', I remember well to which experience I referred with this line. I saw children playing with some rather unusual wooden toy. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that once I had a déjà vu about that, so that definitely could be called a déjà vu of a déjà vu..."

(Andrea B. Previtera, Email to Klaus Podoll, November 21, 2004)

"As for the 'double déjà vu', let me clarify the ambiguity: it was clearly the déjà vu of a déjà vu. Just like awaking from a dream, realizing that you're in another dream, and then wake up. I had the strong feeling of a déjà vu, emerging from that I had the same feeling again, then I was 'back to the normal state of mind'."

(Andrea B. Previtera, Email to Klaus Podoll, November 22, 2004)

"Luckily my migraines are a nightmare of the past - formerly my teen ages. But yes, I remember that while suffering a migraine I experienced many, many déjà vus, which happened mostly when I was outdoor."

(Andrea B. Previtera, Email to Klaus Podoll, November 21, 2004)

"Actually, in my life I still experience many déjà-vus, and moreover those seem to be somewhat connected with my extremely intense REM phase. Each night, infact, I have at least two or three dreams, which I can clearly remember in detail: such dreams often revolve around déjà vus of both real life situations, and situations happened in other dreams. I consulted a neurologist, who diagnosed me with a very strong synaptic activity, but nothing more than that."

(Andrea B. Previtera, Email to Klaus Podoll, November 22, 2004)

"I used to have migraine symptoms after awakening from such dreams with déjà-vu sensations. Maybe migraine aura phenomena like déjà vu may also be experienced whilst dreaming? Now that my migraine vanished, I still awake with a déjà vu sensation now and then, but with no migraine symptoms at all. Once, the two things were absolutely tied up."

(Andrea B. Previtera, Email to Klaus Podoll, November 21, 2004)

Observation 8

"Actually, I had all the vus heralding my migraine attack from January 23, 2004: presque vu that one is on the verge of a large mental breakthrough, almost seeing the absolute truth about something but not quite getting it, see here] and jamais vu as well, the sense that you haven't seen something before when you know you have. It was several hours - long enough that I was reflecting on the phenomenon before the migraine visual disturbance made itself apparent. I can't remember ever having any of these sensations with another migraine.

It was quite an interesting experience. My training is in psychology too (Honours degree, with a cognitive psyc focus) so I was most interested in tracking how it felt as I went along. I am interested in metaphysical concerns too, and I'm sure that was part of what was in my head (I was obviously trying to make a lyrical reference to the metaphysical in my description of what I felt) but that was secondary to the viewpoint of 'an interested cognitive psychologist'. So I wouldn't say it had a lasting aftereffect, except as yet another reminder of the gap between our mental construction of reality and the somewhat more elusive nature of reality itself."

(Morgan Davie a.k.a. morgue, Email to Klaus Podoll, December 8, 2004; additions in square brackets by Klaus Podoll)

Observation 9

Elizabeth Munroz, Aura, 2002. © 2002 Elizabeth Munroz

"This one represents that sense of not entirely being connected with the world, and the sense of déjà vu that I experience sometimes with my auras. This is one of the pleasant experiences I have with an aura. I will see things that are not there and have a sense of having psychic visions of ghostly apparitions. Sometimes it feels as though I can communicate telepathically when I am like this. During these times it is difficult to concentrate or focus my attention on tasks, and I am in a dreamy state. This can last for hours, or temporary episodes will occur throughout a day interfering with getting things done. But, I rather enjoy these as long as I don't have to bother to respond to others during these times. I do not have enough presence of mind to realize that a migraine may be on the way, and forget to take any medicine until it is too late."

(Elizabeth Munroz, Email to Klaus Podoll, May 15, 2007)

References

Raskin NH, Appenzeller O. Migraine: Clinical aspects. In: Smith LH (ed) Major Problems in Internal Medicine 1980; 19: 28-83.

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