I have had 4-10 deja vu experiences, starting when I was in high school and occurring over the next 5-10 years. The deja vu experiences I have had were a convincing feeling in my mind that I had previously lived through the present circumstances. It was the feeling that in my mind was an exact memory of a short period of time (20 seconds to a minute or so). The first occurred when I was in high school

In every one of my deja vu experiences, I knew that I had never lived though the events which were currently happening. The deja vu always terminated before I had a chance to predict what was going to happen next.

It is my nature to be to want to be as rational as possible, and I attempt to understand anything that seems potentially important. These experiences bothered me. Since I do not believe in the occult, clairvoyance, et cetera my instinctive interpretation was some brain malfunction.

As is my nature, I started researching the experience. I did not know a term for the phenomena. The best I could do was describe the experience to friends, teachers, et cetera. Finally somebody came up with the term deja vu, which allowed me to research it in a library. I was relieved to discover that the experience was not unique to me, and was not considered a symptom of any serious mental disorder.

Many years after my last experience, I read an article that made sense to me. It claimed that while the brain is making a record of what is happening, it gets momentarily confused and thinks it is remembering instead of storing data. Kind of like cross-talk between the read & write circuitry for your hard drive.

I do not believe that anybody really knows what deja vu is, but that explanation was the best guess I ever encountered.

It is my nature to flat out dismiss ESP-like explanations, so I have accepted the above idea in the absence of anything that looks more plausible to me. If anybody has a better explanation, I will be interested. I will be amused by, disbelieve, and not comment on occult or ESP-like explanations.