Maybe everyone gets this illusion — that when you meet someone, or hit some particular moment, your brain flashes “wait, have I seen this scene／this person in a dream before?” Plenty of people have researched and argued this phenomenon, and most land on a few possibilities: memory misplacement, an illusion of similarity between scenes, or some blurry subconscious memory of a scene. One of the Steins;Gate games even explains it as “déjà vu across worldlines.” And then there’s the one factor that’s never certain but can’t be ruled out: dreams. Which is to say, it’s entirely possible that the familiar thing you just ran into really was something you saw in a dream. Dreams are funny like that. Humans can never control their dreams, yet the dream is something the person themselves created. So when we go adventuring in a dream, the dream is something we wrote ourselves. There’s a bit of “playing with yourself” to it. Some say a normal person creates one to three dreams every night, and over the course of growing up, all those assorted dreams pile up to a terrifying number. Among them, one or two scenes are bound to resemble something you run into in reality, and that produces the so-called “déjà vu.” This is probably the most reliable explanation for the “I keep seeing it in dreams” feeling — but compared to that cold reality, we’d rather accept the romantic explanation: “You and I are connected by something heaven ordained, so we met in a dream long ago, and that dream scene guided us to meet in reality…” Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? uh?