‘He knew the scarred jaw the moment he saw it. There was, however, something else about the man’s face, something in his eyes that he recognised. It was more than just a passing familiarity.’

We Men of Ash and Shadow

You’re looking at a person across a crowded room. Catching their eye, you feel a sense of familiarity and recognition that you can’t place. Maybe you’ve met before? Perhaps you’ve seen their picture in the paper? Suddenly you feel like, not only have you seen this person before, but you’ve already had this experience. History is repeating itself. Seventy percent of people have had a deja vu experience at least once, if not multiple times.

What a lot of people don’t know, is that is more than one type of vu.

There are, in fact, a multitude from which your mind can choose at any given time. If you’ve ever had a conversation and tried to recall a piece of information or word that you just can’t seem to find, you may have described it as ‘having something on the tip of your tongue’. What you are experiencing is actually known as presque vu.

Essentially, it is the sensation of being on the brink of a mental breakthrough but being unable to fully express it. Personally, I love this term. Let’s be honest, saying ‘it’s on the tip of my tongue’ is nowhere near as sexy and mysterious as woefully exclaiming ‘I stand on the edge of epiphany, curse this abominable presque vu!’

Distortion of Perception

In contrast to deja vu and presque vu, jamais vu, (also known as ‘never seen’) is the psychological phenomenon in which something that should be familiar, isn’t. These events are known as ‘distortion of perception’.

Less common than deja vu, jamais vu is still reportedly experienced by between forty and sixty percent of the population. An example that most people can probably relate to, is that of seeing a commonly used or repetitive word and feeling like either you’ve never seen it before, or that something about it just doesn’t look right. Try writing the word ‘ridiculous’ on a piece of paper fifty times. If, by the time you get to the fiftieth time of writing it, the word no longer looks like it is a real word, then you are experiencing jamais vu. Your mind has become so overexposed to the repetition of stimuli that you subconsciously disassociate from it.

I stand on the edge of epiphany, curse this abominable presque vu!

Whilst most occurrences of jamais vu have little effect on day-to-day life, there are more extreme examples of phenomena believed to have their roots in, or be linked to, the jamais vu experience or similar feelings of memory disassociation. For example, Capgras Delusion’, the phenomenon in which people believe friends or family to have been replaced by imposters.

You may not want to incorporate vu literally into your writing, but exploring its different types, their consequences and impacts can make for fascinating character work. Using vu to change your character’s perspective allows you to look at things like self-perception and sense of identity through another lens, questioning what it means for a character when they suddenly become unrecognisable to themselves or others.

You can find We Men of Ash and Shadow, my gaslamp grimdark low fantasy here.