Well, sight affects your taste. The color of the plate, cup or whatever utensil you use for your drink or food affects your taste perception. A granita served in a pink glass will seem sweeter to you. You will find a chocolate drink in an orange cup more aromatic. A soft drink in blue packaging will make you feel more thirsty.

This is also the reason why your coffee seems tastier when it is in your favorite mug and this is probably also the reason why you insist on eating from the same plate for years.

  • Your brain is playing games

How a color changes your perception of taste is the first level. Then come the more mysterious ones. Let’s say, confirmation bias. You make an assumption, assume it’s true, and then whatever information you receive, you subjectively evaluate it to confirm your initial belief. And you do it with people too. When it’s out of your hands, you tend to have around you those who confirm your way of thinking and agree with you.

One more game, the self-fulfilling prophecy. You initially assume that a situation will have a certain outcome, generally negative. And even though your prediction could be wrong, it will eventually come true because quite simply you yourself cause it. Since your every thought and behavior that you subconsciously choose and adopt, leads the situation exactly where you had imagined, while everything could have unfolded differently.

Mind games. After all, the human brain is – according to studies that human brains themselves have conducted – the most powerful organ in nature. We said, if you don’t dance your house will fall on you.

  • One level further, Déjà Vu

One step deeper into brain games, we encounter déjà vu. That is, the already seen. It’s that sudden feeling of familiarity you feel in a place you’re visiting for the first time. When you meet someone, but you feel like you already know them. When you smell something that looks familiar when it really isn’t.

Déjà vu it is what we feel when we think we have experienced the present situation again. And it’s not rare at all. It decreases over the years, increases in times of stress and overwork. However, 2 out of 3 people state that they have felt it at some point in their lives, most with a frequency of 1 to 2 times a year.

Before you start speculating about parallel universes and past lives, give neuroscience a chance. Déjà vu is more likely to happen to you, he says, when your attention is impaired and you are fully fixated on the lids.

Say you go to unlock the door of the house to leave and suddenly you hear a loud noise inside the house. You scare, you are removed. Within a split second you realize it was the dear upstairs neighbors – who alas you knew how they manage to make such a fuss – and you focus back on the door and the key.

Just then, you are most likely to experience déjà vu. Because of the abrupt shift of distraction and immediate engagement, the first time you went to unlock will seem like a distant memory, but it will be the exact same image.

And so is memory. During the day, you receive countless information. It is not possible to pay attention to all of them. But these are imprinted in your memory. So some details of an otherwise new experience of yours may be familiar, without being able to recall where you know them. And that’s how your new experience looks like you’ve lived it before.

  • And if Déjà Vu scares you a little, where to see Déjà Rêvé?

Even after all the possible explanations, it’s a little scary when it happens to you, it’s true. It is probably the realization that time, space and consciousness, perhaps, do not have the linear form that you are “comfortable” to consider them to have. And that’s where Freud comes in with the unconscious, the subconscious and the conscious. And in case you weren’t confused enough, Carl Jung comes along to add the superconscious mind. So, to finally “burn” our brain once and for all.

Now, if you’re one of those people who laughs at the sudden thump in a thriller when the popcorn drops on others, you can bear to learn that there are tougher games our minds play.

So one step further – and we probably ended it here – we reach déjà rêvé. As déjà vu is the already seen, this here is the already dreamed. It is the feeling that a situation you live in the real world, you have already experienced in the past in a dream.

Think of Cassandra, the princess of Troy. The woman made her prophecies and not only was she not believed to be human, she was also considered cursed. And think of Abraham Lincoln, too. That a few weeks before his murder, he dreamed of his death. And the British painter David Mandell dreamed not once, not twice, but three times of planes crashing into the twin towers. And so in 1996 he decided to paint the image of his dream.

  • Is Déjà Rêvé scientifically explained or are we going completely crazy?

First, calm down. In the end, you were warned about the popcorn phase, you chose to continue. Second, there is a study, yes. 6 scientific groups from France collaborated and published their results in the Brain Stimulation Journal.

Because their brains seem to be very capable of running in many different areas that overlap at times – a function that activates the déjà rêvé phenomenon more strongly – the research involved people with epilepsy or seizures.

Based on the hypothesis that our brains have special memory systems for storing dreams, the researchers tried to recall their dreams to participants through electrical brain stimulation.

As a result, three types of déjà rêvé were found, one more mysterious than the last.

1. Episode

Here, participants were able to pinpoint, or at least very closely approximate, the day they had their prophetic dream and could recall a chilling amount of detail. Most of these dreams, they had seen many years ago.

2. Familiarity

Things are more confusing here. Participants recall blurred dream images of the current real condition. These images include locations, scenes and characters, in great detail. But they cannot determine whether everything they live recalls from a particular dream, nor can they determine the date of that dream.

3. Dream state

Here, shock. Participants live the real condition, but feel as if in a dream. And they are unable to separate the real from the dream. They come to wonder if what just happened actually happened or if they are still dreaming.

  • And the other side

Ancient tribes of Australia and South America spoke of the “dream time”, claiming that we can change the world with our consciousness. And if it were possible to travel back in time and they could meet Aristotle, they would certainly discuss with him his “On the Prophecy of Dreams” texts.

And if we include the latest developments in quantum physics in all of this, we might finally wonder if all our psychic experiences are an extension of our ability to change reality, experiencing it in multiple time frames. What happened he says now?

And anyway, if it has happened to you or will happen to you in the future, now you know. You are not lost and you are not alone. This is some momentary quirk of your brain. If the dream persists and repeats, note it just in case. Is your own self trying to draw your attention to something?