Dejavu?

While driving to work this morning, I decided to listen to a radio station's morning broadcast. It was one of those call-in thingys. The topic was Dejavu, and the DJs invited people to call in and talk about their dejavu experiences. I thought this was pretty interesting, so I listened. Their experiences were rather interesting. But what shocked me the most was the fact that these people didn't actually understand what dejavu meant.

Déjà vu is a word derived from French which carries the meaning of "already seen", is the experience of feeling sure that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously (an individual feels as though an event has already happened or has happened in the near past), although the exact circumstances of the previous encounter are uncertain. The experience of déjà vu is usually accompanied by a compelling sense of familiarity, and also a sense of "eeriness," "strangeness," or "weirdness," The "previous" experience is most frequently attributed to real life, although in some cases there is a firm sense that the experience "genuinely happened" in the past.

During the radio show, what the callers were describing were not dejavu. Instead, the descriptions were premonition, the ability to get a glimpse of what will happen in the future. I guess the DJ was also not aware of the difference between the two. Dejavu is 'seeing the past', while premonition is 'seeing the future'. It is not a continuum, but separate entities in the dominion of time.

Let's do examples. Let's say you were walking down a road and you suddenly get this feeling that you've walked this same road before but in a different time in the past. That's dejavu. If while continuing your walk, an image suddenly flashes in your mind that you will see an accident at the junction right in front of you, that's a premonition. Savvy?