The Secret Lives of Highly Connected Minds: What Premonitions and Déjà Vu Might Say About You
Thursday, May 15, 2025.
You’re sipping coffee, thinking about an old friend, and the phone rings—it's them. You dream about a place you’ve never been and then end up there a year later. You feel someone watching you before you turn around—and you're right.
Coincidence? Imagination? Or something more baked into our wiring?
According to new research published in Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice (Palsson, 2025), these so-called anomalous experiences—premonitions, déjà vu, out-of-body events—aren’t fringe occurrences.
They’re part of being human, especially for people with a curious trait: subconscious connectedness.
What Is Subconscious Connectedness?
Subconscious connectedness isn’t some mystical gift.
It’s a measurable personality trait, developed and validated by Dr. Olafur S. Palsson, professor emeritus of medicine at UNC Chapel Hill.
It describes how interwoven your conscious and unconscious minds are—how much your gut feelings, dreams, and flashes of intuition leak into your waking choices.
You can score high, medium, or low on the Thought Impact Scale, a standardized psychological tool Palsson created to measure this trait. People with high scores tend to:
Experience more vivid dreams
Feel creative urges often
Respond strongly to hypnosis
Have more somatic complaints (like IBS or migraines)
And—they report more frequent anomalous experiences
Déjà Vu Is Just the Beginning
Across three large studies totaling over 2,200 adults, Palsson found that people high in subconscious connectedness were three times more likely to report repeated anomalous events than those with low scores. These weren’t just one-off moments. They were persistent patterns.
Some highlights from Study 3 (a nationally representative U.S. sample of 1,500 adults):
86% had experienced at least one type of anomalous event more than once.
60% reported recurring déjà vu.
Nearly half reported sensing they were being stared at (correctly), or having a dream that predicted the future.
Many mentioned physical objects vanishing and reappearing in strange places—classic signs of what clinicians might call a “non-pathological dissociation.”
In plain English? You are not alone. You're in the statistical majority.
Who Has These Experiences—and Why?
The research uncovered more than just subconscious connectedness. Several other traits correlated with frequent anomalous experiences:
Absorption: Getting fully lost in music, books, or daydreams
Dissociation: A mild detachment from self or surroundings (not the disorder)
Magical Ideation: The belief that thoughts can influence reality
Fantasy Proneness: A tendency toward immersive imagination
Faith in Intuition: Trusting your gut more than your spreadsheets
These aren’t symptoms of mental illness. They’re part of a cognitive style that leans intuitive, immersive, and emotionally reactive.
Still, a caveat: people with more anomalous experiences also showed slightly higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms. But the correlations were modest, and there was no strong link between these experiences and diminished quality of life.
Are You Crazy, Or Just Connected?
Palsson puts it gently: if you have lots of strange experiences, it may not mean you're unwell.
It may mean your mind is just more permeable, more attuned to patterns others filter out.
Or to use his terms, your conscious and subconscious minds are unusually in conversation.
This trait doesn’t predict psychosis.
It predicts creativity. Hypnotizability. A deep pull toward the arts. Even gastrointestinal reactivity.
In other words—high subconscious connectedness isn’t a problem. It’s a profile.
Why It Matters in Therapy
As a couples and family therapist, I’ve seen this play out in the consulting room more than once.
Let’s revisit my clients Ivy and Ben.
Ivy is highly intuitive. She senses energy shifts, has dreams that disturb her for days, and often knows what Ben is feeling before he says it. Ben, on the other hand, prides himself on being rational and stoic. He doesn’t remember his dreams and is suspicious of “woo.”
Conflict erupts not because one is right and the other is wrong, but because they live in different perceptual universes.
Once Ivy took the Thought Impact Scale, she finally had a name for her lived experience: high subconscious connectedness.
Once Ben realized this wasn’t a delusion but a well-researched trait, something shifted. He didn’t have to agree. He just had to respect it.
What If We Took Anomalous Experiences Seriously?
The Western mind tends to split reality: real vs. unreal, conscious vs. unconscious, science vs. story.
But Palsson’s research suggests that many human beings inhabit a porous middle space where the unconscious plays a starring role in daily perception.
What if we stopped dismissing that space as irrational?
What if déjà vu, synchronicity, and predictive dreams were seen not as failures of logic but as invitations to explore how our mind organizes meaning?
To quote Carl Jung (who loved this topic, and would be giddy reading Palsson’s research), “The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semi-human, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, ‘divine.’”
Bottom Line: You’re Not Weird. You’re Just Wired More Overtly.
Anomalous experiences are not rare. They're normal. Especially if you're a highly sensitive, intuitive, or creatively inclined person.
If you've ever dismissed your own strange moments—or had them dismissed by others—this research offers a reframe: maybe it's not brokenness. Maybe it's a connection between levels of awareness most people keep separate.
And in therapy? That kind of self-understanding can be a quiet revolution.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Palsson, O. S. (2025). Anomalous experiences are associated with high subconscious connectedness. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice.
https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000382