The Immemorial Recognition

Déjà Vu as Archetypal Participation in the Self

Chloe Jane Tully Independent Researcher                              

https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5661-7332

A Meditation in the Spirit of C. G. Jung

26^th October 2026

Introduction

In the experience of the sentiment du déjà-vu the ego is seized by a peculiar and often uncanny certainty: that the present moment has already occurred, that the configuration of persons, places, and gestures now unfolding is a precise repetition of something once lived. This is no mere optical or mnemonic glitch of the cerebral apparatus. Rather, it constitutes a momentary dissolution of the barriers that ordinary consciousness erects between the personal and the collective, between the temporal and the eternal. As I have observed, the sentiment is frequently founded upon a foreknowledge already present in dreams—or, more rarely, arising spontaneously in the waking state. When an outer event touches upon some knowledge that has hitherto remained unconscious, that knowledge may reach consciousness; the event is then recognized as a déjà vu, and one remembers a pre-existent knowledge about it.