Deja vu?

My theory on deja vu.

Some studies say that sleep helps the brain absorb and digest information. Sleep also helps the memory process. So during the time we sleep, our brains will take all the new information from the day and file it in with all the old information from the past keeping it nice and organized for our convenient recollection.

My thoughts: our brains are so awesome that in addition to organizing and storing information, it utilizes its abundant resources to make predictions. This idea fits in perfectly, at least to me, with the idea that we sleep for the purpose of helping our minds sort shit out and make sense of the world. In trying to predict the future, it'll take information from the past and combine with things like our likes, our dislikes, addictions and other behavioral patterns, people we know, people we see on TV, our secrets, etc, and "paint" the most probabilistic future in the shape of a dream.

More specifically, our brains are capable of cross referencing a situation in the past with the conditions surrounding that situation and environment. Then it will recall the specific outcome and see if there are any similarities between other situations or outcomes from the past. This, then, is how our brains create templates and forecasting models to apply to current situations. An extremely simple example: if we have conditions A, B, and C, then based on previous instances where A, B, and C were present, we dream that something like D will happen since that's what happened last time.

So what's deja vu? We have these dreams that try to predict the future, most of them totally futile while some are incredibly accurate, so we think. However, humans have a tendency to fill things in more perfectly than truth. Details get skewed or dropped. Dreams are no different in how we remember them. We have a feeling of deja vu when our brains remember a specific dream that we once had. Everything feels so natural and seems so perfectly familiar only because we fool ourselves to believe it.

Every night we sleep we have several dreams. I find it incredibly likely that sometimes our brains get it right and "predict" the future.