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I came across the following in a novel:
"What's the opposite of deja vu, when you see something that hasn't happened yet?"
"I don't know--avant verrais?"
"That's it."
does this have any basis in anything?
(besides, everyone knows that jamais vu is the opposite of deja vu! : )
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old hand
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does this have any basis in anything? - Who knows.. - but not in French.
jamais vu is the opposite of deja vu! - In this sense, I'd rather suggest "pas encore vu" (not yet seen).
when you see something that hasn't happened yet - if it happens really afterwards, I'd call it a premonition.
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Carpal Tunnel
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If deja vu is a feeling that you've already seen something that you've never seen before, then what would be the opposite? The normal answer seems to be the feeling that something you should be familiar with is totally unfamiliar. This might be interpreted as seeing something you don't expect or as not seeing something you do expect. How you'd say either of those in French is beyond me. Maybe to complete the oppositity you should say it in German.
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The normal answer seems to be the feeling that something you should be familiar with is totally unfamiliar.Would this be avant verrais, deja vu or something else, I wonder: I remember meeting an old guy, long and lean and hardy, up north in cottage country who had a "Tea Room" and an obsession with the symbol "0" [zero]. ["0" flew everwhere: on a flag atop his "Tea Room", on his outhouse wall, on the grocery basket strapped to the handlebars of his bicycle.] Esmond believed "0" is the key to the universe, explaining that in bookkeeping, the debits and the credits always cancel one another out to produce "0". [So it is with the universe, he averred.] Any way, this old guy, who's name was Esmond - [who sold his own truly ungainly oil paintings to Tea Room customers who bought them because Esmond was a true original, not an artist - I used to call Esmond "Esmondo" and actually bought one of his paintings on condition that he sign it "Esmondo", which he did] - returning to my storyline - Esmond told me once, as I drank his tea and listened to his piano playing and ate his butter tarts baked over his wood burning stove, he told me that he had hitchhiked up to this country many years ago, and when he stood on a rock outcropping looking over the land, he realized that this was his home. For him it was meant to be. It was all laid out for him in the cosmic scheme of things. In short, "Esmond's Tea Room" was avant verrais. Or was it deja vu? Or was it simply Esmondo-as-he-was-meant-to-be [Esmond-before-the-incarnation-of-Esmondo]? People used to arrive from all over to visit Esmond to soak up his wisdom [his joie de verrais?]. He didn't believe in sickness, it was all psychosomatic, he said. [In the summer, he bathed in the lake, a short distance away. In the winter, he bathed in a snow bank.] When people asked Esmond for his keys to the Cosmos and an eternity of bliss on another plane of existence released from repeated resurrections in an earthly shell, he always told them this: "When you come here, you can drink from my well. But, when you go away, you must dig your own well." I still think $35 wasn't too much to pay for my original "Esmondo". 
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Carpal Tunnel
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I came across the following in a novel What novel, please, if you don't mind?
what would be the opposite? The normal answer seems to be the feeling that something you should be familiar with is totally unfamiliar. Faldage, I'm glad I went off to reply to a PM between reading this for the first time and now. I had "marked" it mentally to come back and disagree with, but upon second (and more careful) reading, I do agree. I believe you are saying that when someone sees something/someone they used to know, now they don't. And I would call that amnesia. [only half joking e]
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The normal answer seems to be the feeling that something you should be familiar with is totally unfamiliar.
jamais vu[Fr. “never seen”] the sensation that familiar surroundings are strangely unfamiliar; the illusion that one has never seen anything like that before.
- Dorland's medical dictionary & Chopped liver review
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On a humorous note: in one of his comedy routines, I once heard Robin Williams say that he was experiencing vu jade: the strange feeling that none of this has ever happened before.
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veteran
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the strange feeling that none of this has ever happened before
And then there is vu incroyable - the feeling that this can't be happening at all.
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Carpal Tunnel
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re: The normal answer seems to be the feeling that something you should be familiar with is totally unfamiliar.
jamais vu[Fr. “never seen”] the sensation that familiar surroundings are strangely unfamiliar; the illusion that one has never seen anything like that before.
- Dorland's medical dictionary & Chopped liver review
i remember this sensation when i was a child, if we went away for a few days, or a week (to camp) when i came home, everything looked new to me, it was as if i had never seen my parents apartment or the furnature before..
i hadn't forgotten the apartment or the furnature, its just it was a surprize to see it.. i would notice the grain of the wood, or details of upholstry pattern, or just the way the sun light pattern the shadows..
this persisted till i was in my 20's or so.. its been years now since i have experienced the sensation.
maybe sharing more than i should about my psycological state than i should)
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when i was a child, if we went away for a few days, or a week (to camp) when i came home, everything looked new to meReminds me of T.S. Eliot's famous words, of Troy: "We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and see the place for the first time." BTW I am certainly not fluent in French, but it looks to me like the phrase "avant verrais" translates into "before the truth", at least roughly. So it suggests to me that "avant verrais" is a glimpse of something before it happens, or precognition, or "premonition" as wseisber has already mentioned. "deja vu", on the other hand, is the sense that you 'have already been there', as tho in another dimension, or a parallel dimension, of time and space, or in a past life. One does not have to believe in such things to experience the sensation, altho it might give one reason to be curious about the possibility. Now that I think of it, Esmond's sense of "home" was clearly avant verrais. At least, it was clear for him.
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