Deja Reve

Deja Reve and Love at Second Sight: The Experience of Meeting in Dreams before Meeting in Life is discussed by Irish author and poet Daniel Bourke in his interview with host Stan Mallow on the podcast/YouTube show Paranormal Yakker. In the interview Bourke distinguishes Deja Reve from the more widely known Deja Vu. He also examines experiences where individuals claim to have met their future romantic partners or spouses in dreams before encountering them in reality, and cites historical examples. The phenomenon frequently appears around figures of renown, including shamans, healers, and spiritual teachers. In fact, Bourke notes instances where practitioners dream of their future patients or masters, or where initiates dream of their teachers before meeting them, sometimes involving double dreams where both parties report the same dream experience. Explored by Bourke are various cultural rituals, poems, and spells historically used to induce these dreams to foretell future love encounters. Bourke gives due credit to psychiatrist Vernon Neppe and colleague Arthur Funkhouser as the first to formalize the term Deja Reve in literature. While many consider Deja Reve experiences precognitive, Bourke acknowledges they exist in a grey area that may involve a combination of extrasensory perceptions, including clairvoyance and telepathy. After viewing this episode of Paranormal Yakker you will see validity in Bourke’s primary objective of his work; that being to highlight the vast volume of existing accounts and to ignite a sense of mystery. He aims to show that these experiences are not isolated, rare, or purely literary devices, but an ongoing, often hidden social phenomenon that deserves further serious study and attention.
TimeCodes
00:00:00 – Irish Author & Poet Daniel Bourke: When Dreams Foretell Love.
00:00:40 – Deja Reve: What It Means & How It Differs From Deja Vu.
00:02:31 – Researching The Deja Reve Phenomenon.
00:03:45 – Different Ways The Deja Reve Phenomenon Manifests Itself.
00:05:58 – Deja Reve From Ancient Folk Tales to Modern Internet Reports.
00:08:29 – Saints, Shamans, Religious Figures & Other Visionary Mysteries.
00:11:36 – Folk Practices & Spells That Foretell Love Encounters.
00:14:14 – Neuropsychiatrist & Consciousness Researcher Vernon Neppe.
00:15:58 – Daniel Defines Love At Second Sight.
00:16:39 – Interaction of Deja Reve Accounts & Similar Psychic Experiences.
00:18:02 – Are Deja Reve Accounts Truly Precognitive or Something Else?
00:19:27 – Author Explains Main Goal of His Work.
00:20:41 – Where to Buy Deja Reve and Love at Second Sight.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Demanial mark the manual almost level has the black venture in the natural submens, the marks and the video game industry will be talking with me about his book, Delja Lovele and Love at the second side, the experience of meeting in dreams before meeting in life. Daniel Bog, welcome to Paranormal Yaker. I'm fairly certain just about everyone on planet Earth has heard of Deja Vu and knows its meaning. And I'm fairly certain that is not the case with Deja Rive, which is the title of your book, What Daniel is Deja Reve?

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Yeah, like so the difference between the two is uh it comes out for me very in most interestingly in a kind of a classic story. Like there's this c very often cited um account of um British romantic poet Percy Shelley, where he was um in Oxford um during his younger years. He to he and a particular scene that he comes upon, he says that while turning a corner with his friend, he recognized every detail of this scene as if this moment had occurred in exactly this way before. He says, right down to the layout of the brickwork, I recognized this scene. He said the effect this produced on me was not such as could have been expected. He says, I suddenly remember to have seen this exact scene some of in a dream of long ago. Now, this is interesting because this is often considered a deja vu and showed an example of it. But he actually specifically stated that he recognized this scene from a dream. That's a deja reveal, that's the difference. With the deja vu, it's defined as this vague sense of familiarity, this general sense that you may have, in some sense, experienced this before. With deja reveal, it's very clearly tied to a dream. And in some cases, those dreams were written down ahead of time, written down before their fulfillment. And this is the intrigue and kind of specificity of Deja Réveis.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

What resources, Daniel, did you utilize in researching the Deja Réveis phenomenon?

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Well, like my first two books, Apparitions at the Moment of Death and Telepathic Tales, I take a more kind of my approach is one of volume. I want the reader to be kind of confronted with many hundreds of these accounts. I take examples from folklore, from the records of ethnologists and anthropologists, from ancient history, but also just in this book, particularly compared to the other two, many modern accounts, many accounts from the last 10, 20, 30 years, including some internet informants of my own that I have spoken to. So I bring a kind of a broader uh scope of accounts just so that the reader can understand, not only that this is a phenomenon that has been known, that has been implemented in some of the most famous romances, but something that's ongoing kind of under our noses. Because you uh this book brings up this book the research for this book even surprised me. Like I was shocked just how many people claim to have had this experience, including some interviewers that I've spoken to, and it it seems to kind of come up in conversation once it's uh broached. So uh yeah, I utilize many resources.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

What are the different ways the deja reveal phenomenon manifests, and how are the different account types of deja reveated in the uh chapters of your book?

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Within this book, I differentiate it with, for example, there's a chapter called Love at Second Sight, which is part of the title of the book. And this is a chapter which deals with accounts in which people claim to have met their loved ones or their their lovers rather ahead of time. And this goes back, this we can find these kinds of classic accounts in romances from the Middle Ages. We can go further back to the Welsh Mabinoggian, for example, that's a 13th-century Welsh text. We see this story of Maxim, this emperor, who dreams of a beautiful land and a beautiful woman, and he becomes lovesick and sends his men to find this beautiful land and this beautiful woman, and he does so, of course. And the of course, there are many more of these uh examples, but my point in this book is to say that these kinds of instances are not just the remit of folklore or the folk tales, they're not just literary devices necessarily. As I said, many ordinary people consistently have these accounts. For example, I have one account in my book and with a young Russian girl who lived in a small village. I just found this in a kind of a uh random biography. She says that she dreamed of a particular man, and in her over and over I should say, and she was engaged at the time, and in her times, I believe this was 60 or 70 years ago, the tradition in the village was to send um was to write letters to the prisoners of the of the local prison. And for some reason, one of these letters struck her. Her name was Yelena Razdieva, I should say. And something about this letter struck her in the first instance. So she asked through her next letter for an image of this person. The image came back, and the image was the man from her dream. And this this is a kind of kind of account that uh speaks to your question again. I have another chapter called Picture Perfect, which deals with accounts in which people don't meet the person after the dream, but they visualize them in some way, whether it's a newspaper, a book, a statue. So they do come in many shapes and sizes, and each chapter will is kind of its own thing in that regard.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Your book presents, as you said earlier in an interview, accounts of Deja Renee from ancient uh folk tales, historical letters, modern internet reports, and often mentions in in the memoirs of authors, politicians, and ballet dancers, uh, highlighting in particular the experience of dreams that foretell love encounters. You just gave us an example of one with that urchin girl. Can you, Daniel, uh share perhaps two or three others?

SPEAKER_01 6:35

There are many accounts in the book, but there's there's there's certain ones that kind of stick out. One for me, it's a mildly long-winded, but I'll try to be quick. It's quite interesting to me. It's uh it was in I found it in a biography of a 107-year-old man called TJ Kearney. He was from the southwest of Arkansas, and his daughter actually related this incident, which was from 1936, Christmas, and it was published, as I said, in his biography. And so he was driving to the in his dream to Pine a place called Pine Bluff Main Station. Okay, he gets out of his car, heads to the terminal, and he sees a particular girl standing there as if waiting for him. He says, I swear in all my years of travelling, I've never seen a girl as pretty as this. And he just goes on to describe certain aspects of her actual her hair, for example. He describes that she was wearing a very specific type of green jacket, for example, also. Uh, some sometime later at a New Year's Eve party, I should say the dream's a bit more detailed, but I don't want to waste too much time, it doesn't take forever. But for the reader who's interested, they he meets he goes to a New Year's Eve party and he sees a particular girl which is a cousin of somebody he knows and says, I was sure I'd seen that girl smile somewhere before. It was like electric currents went through me, he said. Um, she had the very same eyes and smiling mouth and same voice from my dream. I stood there shaking her hand, mouth hanging open. She must have thought I was the biggest fool in Arkansas. That's what uh Carney says in his biography. And this is what's interesting, also. Well, I shouldn't I should say that they do get married and fall in love, rather fall in love and get married. But he also states that while he didn't see the green code when he met her, when they actually got married, sometime later he discovered he had she did own this green code of uh the dream of his initial dream. So these accounts are interesting also for like the parapsychologist or the more serious researcher because there are these veridical elements uh which uh again are sometimes mentioned ahead of time. Someone might mention the hairstyle, the color, the coat, and it's again confirmed later. So there is that aspect to these accounts also, which is interesting.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

Stories of uh saints, shamans, religious figures such as Buddha, and other visionary mysteries are also featured in Deja Reve. Could you tell me about some of those stories?

SPEAKER_01 8:45

I found that in my research, a lot of these accounts clustered around kind of figures of renown, masters, teachers, healers, doctors, and particularly, for instance, shamans. Like there are many accounts in which, like, for instance, in the Caribbean, there are it's expected among many traditional societies that an initiate to be will dream of their master ahead of time. And there are specific examples where, for example, they dream of the person, they dream of their location, they go to them and they say, Wow, you're the person from a dream, and then the master reciprocates and says, I was dreaming of you also. This is like a double dream. This is something that people still report. So, again, there are so many examples, but I even found that while traditionally you even find this in the Ozarks, for example, you find healers who dream of their patients ahead of time, not the other way around. I find that interesting. And I found accounts in kind of um hospital records, for example, of people who claimed to have dreamt of the doctor who would be um treating their cancer ahead of time. And it was the kind of dream which facilitated a more productive relationship between the two, which I uh something I also found interesting. And uh, like I can get a little more specific, I found an account from 1981 Istanbul, a man called Muzaffar Ozak. He dreamed he was in the middle of a coastal town in Bosphorus in a damaged sailing boat during a wild storm. A stranger hands him a note explaining how he could avoid disaster. Having come back to this shop, his shop the following morning, he says, I saw the very person who had given me the paper in my dream passing in front of my shop. He goes on to say that he goes on rather to dream of the man a couple more times before working up the courage to speak to him, which he eventually does. It turns out this man was a guy called Sayyid Sheikh Alamed, Tahir Al-Murashi. This was a particularly renowned sheaf who later became his master based upon this dream. So again, I I I I like to get across that when we read these kind of distant tales among Sufis or again among Native Americans, we it is easy to kind of say, well, you know, this is the type of thing you would implement into such a story in order to sanctify the individual at the heart of the story. Sure, fair enough. But you, me, and people we know are still having these experiences. John Smith is having these experiences, and they're hidden away in the strangest places. Like I found one in the uh biography of a rock climber, a guy called Paul Ament. It's literally a paragraph or two, and it's not mentioned again before or after. This is something I found commonly also, especially in the biographies. These accounts are very, very much mentioned in passing, as if there is a kind of a omerta again, where we shouldn't be speaking about them because they're kind of strange. We may be considered strange. But rest assured, they are consistently occurring. This phenomenon of Deja Rivay is a somewhat major hidden social phenomenon and definitely deserves our attention for that reason.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

You also delve into folk practices and spells, which you've just talked about, that foretell love encounters and even learning the exact name of one's future lover or spouse. Could you give me any other examples of those folk practices and spells?

SPEAKER_01 11:59

This was an area that I found especially interesting because we l in the kind of modern West we live in a time where these kinds of things aren't necessarily believed in widely, at least certainly in academia, for example. It's one of the interesting findings of parapsychology over the decades has been that it seems that the extent to which one believes in the possibility of these kinds of things occurring actually affects the extent to which they will occur. You know, it's kind of like set and setting with psychedelics. You know, there can be this environmental aspect where, or not so much environmental, but individual and social aspect where belief will shape the ability for these things to even occur. So that's why I found these fog practices interesting, especially in the early modern period, for example, because it seemed that, and some authors that I read, especially in Germany, for example, noted that these ideas were very much quote unquote in the air. These things were expected. It was expected that one could dream of an a person ahead of time, a lover ahead of time. In my own country, for example, the Druids would specifically attempt to dream of the future king of Ir of Ireland ahead of time, specifically to locate him and then find him based upon that dream. They would enter a kind of a particular type of sleep called the bull sleep. But with these, again, to come back to your question, Syphili, with these folk practices, they take the form of rituals uh combined with poems, diddies, and songs, charms and spells, items may be placed under the pillow. For example, in Nebraska, there is a poem which goes, which w one must see the new moon over their right shoulder, for example, and say, New moon, true moon, pray let me see who my husband is to be, the colour of his hair, the clothes he is to wear, the happy day he weds me. And you see these kinds of deities over and over again. And sometimes the rituals are rather complex and kind of um idiosyncratic. And I find it for me, I always found it interesting. I think maybe it's less about the specifics of the ritual, and it's more about the individual becoming into a more receptive state of mind for these kinds of experiences. And uh yeah, so I think the for I placed this just before the chapter about Love at Second Sight, where kind of lots of modern accounts come in, and I th I I wanted to create that bridge from the folklore to the modern accounts for the reader to uh kind of see the contrast and the similarities there.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Who, Daniel, was Vernon Neppe, and what is his relevance to accounts of the kind you write about?

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Vernon Nepp actually he was South African psychiatrist, and he he was one of he, along with Arthur Funkhauser, another psychiatrist, was one of the first, in fact, he was the first to formalize the term deja reveal in the literature. You know, you can go back to 19th century France, even some early, very early 9th century papers and journals, and find references to this phenomenon. You can find references to this phenomenon in very much in early medical literature, uh, under the heading of paramnesia, this this form of false memory, which relates to errors in memory and perception. And you will find that early on a lot of these accounts were filed away under errors in memory and perception, which is fair enough. Many like many many probably are, but again, we have to deal with these accounts in which these details are sorry, I should say A, we shouldn't throw everything, uh the baby away with the bathwater, because that's what a lot of these people do, these early scientists who had these kind of uh dealings with parmesia, and B we have to deal then with these veridical accounts, these accounts in which aspects of the dream turn out to actually have been true and written down ahead of time. So those are so just to come back to your question with Nep, Nep was Neppy was the first to formalize this term, and I would say even since his time it's been very much little written about. It would be nice if a lot of these accounts could be spoken about under this umbrella term because they have been scattered throughout the literature, very much scattered. So I'm hoping that bringing them together under this term will uh help at least somewhat.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

How, Daniel, would you define love at second sight?

SPEAKER_01 16:05

So I thought I was very smart. I thought I was a genius coming up with this title. So love at second sight is like I was playing with the idea of actual second sight, this idea of this psych, this this um from the Scottish Highlands, this idea of having the capacity to envision or dream events in the clairvoyantly or in the future or the past, for example. It was referred to as second sight, this capacity, and then love at second sight is obviously this idea of dreaming of your lover. Your first side of them is in the dream, your second side of them is in life. So it's just kind of encapsulating that idea.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

How do the accounts you write about fit with and interact with other similar, seemingly psychic experiences?

SPEAKER_01 16:51

Very interesting question. So, like the the most obvious way for at least as it relates to my work, is you know, my work is specifically concerned with uh veridical accounts, accounts in which the the inner world of the individual is corroborated in the outer world. So there is a direct connection between the two. You know, in some cases these corroborations are stronger than others. For example, as we spoke about before the crisis apparition, when the individual dreams of their mother waving goodbye and telling them they had died, they again then get the phone call and discover that their mother had died at that exact moment. That is a correlation that while you could make the argument it could be ignored if it was one account, it can't be ignored when there are thousands of accounts. And the same is true of these deja reveal accounts, and that's the the strong the connection there is that all of these accounts are veridical, and whatever their ultimate origin and meaning, they deserve attention for that reason because we're dealing with something quite uh intriguing, quite mysterious, and quite ultimately kind of less explored and under-explained.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Are these accounts truly pre-cognitive, or are they something else and w what distinctions exist in this regard?

SPEAKER_01 18:15

This is something that I've actually I've had a lot of a struggle with because while a lot of the the kind of initial senses that these are pre-cognitive, this idea but the reality is in many of these accounts, people if you dream for example, TJ Carney that we mentioned, his dream of the green coat let's assume it was a clairvoyant vision of that green coat. The dream was fulfilled in the future, but is that actually precognition or is it some sort of clairvoyance or telepathy? These are grey areas for to some extent for sure. They're examples, as I mentioned, of the dreams being recorded ahead of time. You could say it was precognitive in that regard, but again, there could be aspects of even a precognitive vision that are telepathic. I'm kind of getting into the weeds here a bit, but uh needless to say, for the purposes of my work, I don't get too bogged down with those specifics because I'm more interested in allowing letting the reader decide what they think these accounts may be. And of course, I would love further work to be done in these areas more specifically regarding those delineations that you're mentioning in your question. But needless to say, it seems to be a combination of the elements of what we usually consider extrasensory perception.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

What, Daniel, was the main goal of your work, and what do you hope readers of Deja Reve take away with them after reading it?

SPEAKER_01 19:41

The main goal of all of my books so far has been to A to just kind of direct the communities and the readers' attentions just to just how many accounts in the past and throughout the records of sociologists and historians are indistinguishable from those collected from by parapsychologists. I wanted to be known how much volume of these accounts there really are. And also, just more fundamentally, just to kind of potentially ignite a sense of mystery in the reader, just this sense that everything there's a lot more on the table than we sometimes realize. There's a lot less known than we sometimes think. Things we we live in a world and a time where things are often presented in such a way as it seems like we have this kind of control over them, that we have this kind of fundamental knowledge of the universe, how things work, why they work? I won't go that far for a lot of people. It's an aspect of that. I just want the accounts to show that there is a lot more still to be explored and uh much work still to be done.

SPEAKER_00 20:42

Should viewers of paranormal yakker want to buy deja reveal and love at second sight, the experience of meeting in dreams before meeting in life. How, Daniel, can they do that?

SPEAKER_01 20:58

They can buy the book at uh Amazon.com, Inner Traditions, which is my publisher, the website, or just any good bookstore. You will find a copy of the book.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Daniel Balk, I thank you for being my guest on Paranormal Yaker. It's always great yakking with you. Thank you. Likewise, Sam, appreciate it. Hi everyone, this is Dan Bandel, Paranormal Yanker. I hope you enjoyed the interview with just like so that you don't miss any upcoming shows. Please don't subscribe to my free YouTube channel. So do not just press the subscribe button on your screen.