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Chapter 27
Synchronicity:
Got the Message?
To Hold A Dream In Your Hands
Imagine bringing something physical back from a dream!
I dreamed, or astral travelled, flying around the
caravan park. I slowly drifted towards the hills where I started to fly down into the
trees and found a clearing. I walked around and through a marijuana plantation. I remember
picking a leaf in the dream. Next thing I knew it was morning and I awoke to find a
marijuana leaf in my hand. I told a friend about the dream later that day. He was
sceptical but agreed to come with me for a look. I was able to find my way from the dream
and found it to be just like the dream. I have not been able to bring anything back from
astral travelling before or since that time.
(Ian, unemployed chef)
Like many others, Andrew (see Appendix B) has set
himself the task of bringing back something from one of his lucid dreams. We often bring
experiences back from our dreams that later become physical realities, such as ideas for a
business, words for a poem, colours and images for a surrealist painting, spiritual
learning or truths that change our lives, or a lingering warmth from being with an old
friend that physically lasts all day.
What if, instead of making your dream happen, and
instead of waking with something in your hand, that dream object actually appears the next
day?
The Gold Leaf Bedroom
I thought I’d woken up in my own room after having a really
vivid dream. I’m going through the dream, trying to recall it, lying there
in the pitch black. I stretched and my feet touched the footboard. I thought,
‘Oh, that’s strange, I haven’t got a footboard on my bed.’
Then I realised I was lucid and I thought, ‘Great, now I’ll go and
follow the rules in the lucid dreaming book. I can make anything happen that
I want to happen.’ So I said, ‘Lights on!’, and they did. They
came on very gradually and I saw I was in a huge chamber with gold leaf on the
walls, the bed and everywhere. It was a beautiful bedroom.
Anyway, a couple of weeks later a truck driver at
work, who I didn’t think would be interested in dreams, leaped out of his truck and
right out of the blue said, ‘Would you like to borrow a book?’ Well, a couple of
months earlier I had lent him a Playboy, so I was expecting to see a girlie book as
we had never discussed dreams. The book he lent me turned out to be on Tibet! Right on the
middle page was a bedroom similar to the one in my dream. I won’t say it was the same
bedroom. I don’t think dreams are intended to be absolutely perfectly right, but it
was so similar: the gold leaf, the bed and so on. It happened to be the bedroom of the 13th
Dalai Lama of Tibet.
That’s what I’m going through now. I think there’s
more to life than coincidence on many occasions. You have to work out what is
not coincidence and what is somehow trying to tell you or warn you of something.
(Alex, clerk)
The Book of My Dreams!
I dreamed I was telling my sister’s fortune through palmistry.
The next day someone offered me a palmistry book on loan. I hadn’t mentioned
the subject to her.
(Carly, home maker)
Gemstone and Diamond Rings
I dreamed I was packing bare essentials to go on an expedition
to Antarctica, when I opened my drawer and saw two beautiful gemstone rings,
each a slightly different, but unusual colour, and each with a specific diamond
setting. Apparently these were my mother’s rings, but she didn’t have
the courage to wear them. Someone was shouting at me to hurry up and get ready
but I decided to take my time and told Mum that if she didn’t have the
guts to wear her rings I would wear them until she was ready to take them back.
By now my fingers could hardly bend for all the rings I threaded onto them,
and I decided not to go to Antarctica after all.
The day after the dream a friend visited me, and it intrigued
me to see that she was wearing earrings of the same colour, design and style
as one of the rings in my dream. I thought I must have unconsciously noticed
them in previous meetings with this girl, although it didn’t escape my
attention that her birthday was the same as my mother’s (though a different
year). I thought nothing more about it until the following day when I was visited
by Lainey, a lady on the dream survey, whom I had not yet met in person. She
wore the other ring.
I had only half-heartedly thought about my dream until the
experience of seeing the two rings and noticing the ‘coincidence’
of the birth dates. The effect of all this was to send me back to the dream,
since the daytime events were clearly showing that I had not credited my dream
with the importance that it, and I, both deserved.
When I interpreted my original dream I saw that I had been
feeling under pressure to conform to the demands of others and was feeling ‘frozen
out’ by it all. I saw shades of my mother in this response and determined,
in the dream, not to take the same attitude. If my mother didn’t have the
courage to let her own light shine, then I didn’t have to be tarred with
the same brush. In the dream, my mother represented the mother aspect of myself,
and I won the struggle between acting as my mother would have done, giving away
her rings and her power, and taking back my power and charge of my own situation.
Realising this I had no further need for retreating to the emotional ice and
snow of Antarctica!
As a result of the daytime synchronicity and my closer attention
to my dream, I changed my attitude.
(Jane Anderson)
Notice that in each of these cases, the dreamer
was sufficiently inspired by the daytime coincidence to take an action or change an
attitude. Are these simply examples of precognitive dreaming, where we see waking life
objects or events beforehand in our dreams? Are these just coincidences? Do we make these
objects physically manifest in our waking life just because we have powerfully dreamed
about them? Did God or some higher being place the object there to alert us to the dream,
or to something else?
When this happens again and again, do we reach a
point where regular manifestation of our dreams moves beyond coincidence?
Synchronicity: Beyond Coincidence
Coincidence is ‘a remarkable concurrence of
events or circumstances without apparent causal connection’ (Concise Oxford
Dictionary). Carl Jung labelled the phenomenon of being presented with an
overabundance of meaningful coincidence, either in everyday life or relating to
dreams, as ‘synchronicity’. The difference between coincidence and
synchronicity, at this level, lies in the meaningfulness of it all. The more meaning the
coincidence seems to have, the more it becomes a synchronicity.
Meaningfulness implies purpose, and purpose
implies the existence of a motivating force: a cause. Today the word synchronicity has
come to imply a coincidence of grand and purposeful design, perhaps presented by God, a
higher being or the universe itself in order to enlighten the observer in some way.
During the research period for this book, I was
receiving completed questionnaires, letters and phone calls continuously for some nine
months, and I noticed that these would often arrive in batches of themes. One week the
emphasis might lie with precognitive dreams, for example, whereas the next week every
communication might relate to lucid dreaming. I noticed that phone calls to my radio
talkback segment often focused on the topics I was mulling over for the next chapter. An
example of how specific this synchronicity tends to be was given in Chapter 23, which
described the phone call I received from Jayne S., a lucid dreamer and migraine sufferer,
at the exact minute I was reading about the possible relationship between migraines and
lucid dreaming. (Jayne had phoned me only once or twice that year.)
A man who later became a contributor to the dream
survey came to one of my dream lectures in 1992, more interested in accessing other
dimensions of the mind than in dream interpretation. He arrived early and went into a
bookshop where he happened to see a book on dreams. He flicked it open and saw an entry on
the symbolic meaning of insects in dreams. It was the only symbol he read. During my
lecture, as he recounted the story later, I talked about dream interpretation books and
used one example to illustrate my point: insects. This remained in his mind, and he has
since spent an extraordinary synchronicity-packed year.
Synchronicity: Linking the Inner and Outer Worlds
When the outer word produces a synchronicity with
the inner world, whether the world of waking thought or the dream world, the observer
often experiences a sense of meaningful continuity between his outer and inner worlds.
When my waking life shows synchronicities to my dreaming life, barriers between the two
realities crumble:
My dream reality and waking reality seem to be
merging. I might think of something and wonder, was it from a dream or from waking
reality?
(Serena, administration officer)
Synchronicity shows me that my dream and waking
lives are both part of the one overall reality, and that this universal reality is one of
design and meaning, speckled with symbols for my further self-understanding and guidance.
Since writing the first edition of this book in
1993, my understanding of Synchronicity has deepened. I have come to realise that
Synchronicity as defined in many of today’s popular books is extremely misleading
– sometimes dangerously so. This worries me. For further in-depth discussion,
I refer you to my 1998 book, The Shape of Things to Come.
Practical Guidance
Living, moving and breathing in a world of human
earthly experience, as we are, how can we put daytime synchronicity to our dreams to
practical use?
Look out for symbols in your waking life which
connect with your dreams, and use these to add to the overall picture. If objects or
situations arise that seem connected beyond coincidence with your dreams, look more
closely at how you interpreted your dream. Concentrate on the symbol that appeared in
waking life, and make that the focal symbol of your dream interpretation. A symbol from
your dream encountered in a positive way in waking life (like my gemstone and diamond
rings, for example) may be there as a signpost, a confirmation to ‘follow your
dream’, a great elbow nudge to interpret the dream seriously, or perhaps even a
message from God.
What about the less desirable synchronicities
which turn up? If you had dreamed of a car crash, for example, this might have been
symbolic of losing your motivation or losing control over your life. If, a day or so
later, you crash your car in waking life, perhaps the dream message is spilling out into
your waking life to get more immediate recognition. Synchronicity becomes a waking dream
shouting in your ear, playing dramatically in front of your eyes, physically and
emotionally affecting your waking life until you finally get the message. If this happens
to you, try treating the waking life situation as a dream, looking at the main symbols
(for example, ‘car’ and ‘crash’), and interpreting it as if it were a
dream. Then look for the message behind the ‘dream’/daytime experience, and
consider what action you could take to improve your life.
If such events in our waking life are sometimes
spillovers from unheard dreams, just as a diseased physical body can be a manifestation of
an ignored dream too, then where does this leave the apparently precognitive dream? Do we
see the ‘future’ in a dream because we roam timeless realms in our dreams,
because we experience similar events in our parallel lives which resonate with us in our
dreams, or because we have ignored the original dream and needed a waking life revision
lesson? I feel all these possibilities occur, and I personally enjoy seeing the
‘positive’ synchronicities that might cause me to recognise a precognitive dream
and feel good about the direction I am taking. At the same time though, I think it is
ultimately wise to heed the deeper messages behind our more ‘negative’ dreams,
to give us time to take early action and avoid a symbolic or literal waking life reminder.
Synchronicity and Quantum Physics …
The ‘Science’ of God?
In the subatomic world of quantum physics, pairs
of particles are observed to ‘behave’ according to the whereabouts and condition
of their subatomic particle ‘partners’. If particle behaviour were totally
predictable, there would be nothing amazing in this statement. Remember, though, that in
quantum physics (see Chapter 25, Philosophy: The Soul and the Spiritual Causes of
Dreaming) everything seems to be indeterminate, or, at least, it defies description
according to classical physics. A subatomic particle may appear, disappear, be in one
place, in several places or not be at all, apparently at random. Yet, at the same time,
pairs of particles, even if separated by any distance (be that metres, kilometres or light
years apart), behave simultaneously as if they are connected or in instant communication
with each other, with no need for time to send a signal.
Imagine, then, this web, this inextricably
balanced, simultaneously inter-communicating, yet somewhat unpredictable, unity of
subatomic particles that make up this universe, and possibly other universes too. All
forms of energy are related to all other forms of energy. What happens here affects what
happens over there, simultaneously. If I do this, how does that affect you?
Just as I perceive my body, mind and soul to be
different levels of the same energy, so I perceive my waking reality and my dream reality
to be different dimensions of the same whole. Your waking and dreaming realities are
interdependent with mine as we live and dream our apparently individual ways towards the
ultimate experience: liberation from time and space and a return to the freedom of unity.
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