“Mixed blessing” is a term I have some trouble with. In my experience all blessings are mixed, in that they come with a price tag attached. It’s the ebb and flow of the Universe.
You may not see it right off, but eventually you will. Call it Karma, call it Kismet, call it a kick in the eye, but nothing really comes for free in this world.
A few years back I was disturbed that I didn’t seem to be dreaming anymore. What little dreaming I did remember seemed like a tape loop, an endless road trip on the highway to Boston, stopping in those strange little cities that pop up in the bleary-eyed New England nowhere. Hotels, motels, Holiday Inns; my dreaming life had become the Theatre of Disquiet.
Little did I realize that change would come in the form of my allegedly non-progressive chronic pain condition progressing several notches, quite probably in reaction to the science fiction levels of mold and tree pollen we’ve been seeing (4000+ pollen counts were not unusual this past spring, for instance). My doctor explained that whenever my immune system was challenged that would in turn aggravate the pain/fatigue process, the fatigue itself being aggravated by the medications.
So I began sleeping a lot more and more… I don’t know, deeply? More dreamily? I’ve no idea how the process works.* But I did get my very rich and immersive dream world back.
At one hell of a price.
I used to keep a dream log but I don’t bother anymore. It got to be too much and the dreams were pretty easy to figure, me being an old hand at it. I just live there, the same as I do in my waking life.
The difference is that my waking life is essentially static and routine and my dreaming life is panoramic, widescreen, Technicolor and psychedelic. I was once very possessive of it, and rely on it as a tool in my waking life. Don’t ask me to explain.
I’m sure the several years of hypogogic meditation helped all of this, in that I broke down that brick wall that had grown up between my sleeping and waking minds. One particular example is that I seem to have dramatically expanded my library of exterior landscapes and interior settings for these dreams, something I am sure is a direct result of the meditation.
As I’ve written before, I’ve come to experience what can only be described as bursts of nonlocality in these meditations, moments of extraordinary clarity in which I am no longer lying in my bed but walking in strange rooms, or treading water in an ocean off the coast of a tropical island or sitting atop the ledge of a Manhattan skyscraper, what they used to call “astral projection,” I suppose.
I’m not saying this is always a pleasant experience.
Now, one might reasonably argue that these are themselves fragments of dream reality breaking through to the conscious mind. If you haven’t experienced it for yourself that is certainly a rational counterpoint and one I have no need to quibble with. You can’t argue sex with a virgin.
Although this is based on entirely subjective data, I believe this is related to what the remote viewers (and certainly more serious meditation practitioners) experience and work with more reliably. Being a novice, I’m not controlling the experience but am getting glimpses of nonlocality as if channel-surfing- I just happen to tune into the remote channel now and again during this meditational practice.
So what does this has to do with Synchronicity as misdiagnosed psi? Well, pretty much everything. In moments that we dismissively ascribe to some abstract concept like Synchronicity, we are apparently tuning into the nonlocal, nonlinear channel during our absent-minded surfing, meaning the channel that stands outside both time and space.
Now, we have no idea what causes or drives all this. It would be helpful to find out what exactly is behind them but I have a very strong feeling we will never really understand what exactly triggers these moments. Stress, trauma, and other extreme states seem more likely to unleash these events but not reliably so. A happy, well-adjusted individual might well experience these events more often than your stereotypical doom-laden occultist. The fact is that we simply don’t know.
So as it stands “Synchronicity” seems to be so random and patternless that it’s essentially untestable and as such is dismissed by most of the scientific community, with the notable exception of your more intrepid quantum physicists. It seems forever perched at the edge of respectability but can never quite close the deal.
But everyone experiences it. And does so in a way that the skept-o-bilge that is designed to throw you off its scent comes across not only as weak and desperate but insulting and demeaning. The entire mechanism behind Synchronicity is meaning, not mere coincidence. Coincidences happen all the time. They are the latticework that underlies the whole of Creation.
It’s why I have argued that people should concentrate only on those coincidences that are supercharged with meaning, so much so that they are nearly supernatural in their content. Those usually are the ones that lead to life changes, from the small and curious to the huge and profound.
Throw the rest back.
POSTSCRIPT: This is the part of the program now where I remind you that the most brilliant “Synchromystic” I ever knew ascribed all of this not to the impersonal forces of quanta, but to unimaginably evolved extraterrestrial entities who existed outside of all natural limits and used these symbolic-sync tricks for reasons altogether inscrutable.
* I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and was found to be lacking in slow wave sleep. But this usually means you are stuck in REM sleep instead, so you think I’d be dreaming like a champ. Now that the apnea issue has been addressed I am dreaming more vividly again so the exact science behind all this is a bit above my pay grade. I suppose I was experiencing fairly serious alpha sleep intrusion, which might account for the discrepancy.
