Susan M. Watkins - What a Coincidence!

Copyright 2005 Susan M. Watkins

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Cover design: Susan Ray and Metaglyph Design

Typesetting: A & B Typesetters & Publishing Services

Printing: McNaughton & Gunn

Distribution: Red Wheel / Weiser

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Watkins, Susan M., 1945

What a coincidence! : the wow! factor in synchronicity and what it means in everyday life / Susan M. Watkins1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 987-1-930491-07-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-930491-07-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Coincidence. I. Title.

BF1175.W38 2005

130dc22

2005012273

Printed in the United States on recycled acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of Evelyn Cizek Storch, lost comrade in all things mysterious.

Also by Susan M. Watkins

Conversations with Seth, books 1 & 2

Speaking of Jane Roberts

Garden Madness

Dreaming Myself, Dreaming a Town

. I'm standing by the register in the local organic foods store in Watkins Glen, New York, talking with co-owner Bob about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday as he bags my purchases. He says that he and his wife are going to stay home and take a much-needed day of rest. I tell him I'm going to stay home myself, and watch a couple Woody Allen movies. Bob says, that's funnyhe's been thinking all day about his favorite Woody Allen movies, especially Sleeper. Laughing gently at himself, he says, you remember Sleeper, don't youwhere the guy wakes up in the next century and the health foods are sugar and cigarettes?

Instantly, as if on precise cue, as Bob says the word cigarettes, the door opens and a girl sticks her head in the store and asks, Have you got cigarettes?

Bob gapes at her, can barely stammer out the word, No. The girl scowls, goes away. The irony is so pointed that Bob and I just stare at one another, speechless. This is, after all, an organic foods store, clearly marked, unmistakable for what it is, the antithesis of the Sleeper settingexactly what director Woody Allen had in mind as an object of satire. Like a spontaneous dovetailing of ideas or a direct comment, conjured up bywhat? Our conversation? A universe with a sense of humor? Mere chance, nothing more?

2. I see an ad on television for the VHS-DVD issue of Robert DeNiro's movie Ronin. As when it first came out, the movie's title is a mystery to me and I wonder what it means, but for some reason I don't bother to look it up in the dictionary. Then later that same evening, I'm reading Kim Stanley Robinson's alternate history epic The Years of Rice and Salt, and lo there's a speech by a Japanese sailor who describes himself as a ronin, a warrior without a tribe. Hey, thank you Kim Stanley!

Fast-forward a year and a half: I'm reading through my notes to put this book together, combing for examples of how coincidences from the past often connect with the present in a strange wormhole-like manner, and I come across this quirky little business with the word ronin. It's not one of those past-present connections, but it's neat anyway and so I decide to include it in a list format I have in mind for the opening chapter. So later that same evening, I'm surfing through the TV channels at a friend's house and there's Ronin scheduled on the movie package my friend just happens to subscribe to. It's such a little coincidence, really, that most people probably wouldn't spend a millisecond thinking about it, but then I turn to CNN and there's a news report about a huge car crash in Fresno, Californiaand how funny that this morning, the same morning I came across my old notes about the ronin thing, I had also read notes I'd written up two years ago about a chain of coincidences involving a big car crash in Fresno, California!

What just happened here? Did I invoke something? Did these events rise up out of the past, come back to life somehow, in response to my focus on them? Or am I just noticing patterns that mean nothing outside of the fact that I'm inclined to notice patterns?

3. My friend Kay tells me this story: Her teenaged daughter has been staying overnight several times a week at a girlfriend's house in a nearby hamlet, where that family had recently moved. For some reason, Kay starts having recurring nightmares that this friend's house catches fire and burns to the ground while her daughter is in it. These dreams (understandably) distress Kay so much that whenever her daughter is at the friend's house, Kay sets her alarm for 2 or 3 A.M., dials the family's phone number and lets it ring until somebody answers and Kay hangs up. You know, so if there's a fire, they'd see it, she tells me. I don't do things like that, but those dreams are too real! I even see the front of the house fall over in flames! Do you blame me for making those calls?

Well, I certainly don't. Two weeks after Kay confesses this little transgression of manners to me, her daughter is staying overnight at the girlfriend's place and the house next door burns to the ground! No one was home, and no one was injured in the fire, which was discovered by a passing motorist at 12:30 A.M. And according to news reports, the front of the house did indeed fall over, engulfed in flames, exactly as Kay had seen it happen, night after night, in her dreams.

So what does this mean? That Kay saw what was going to happen because the fire might endanger her daughter, sleeping next door? Did her protective instincts prowl into the near future and send back a warning, though slightly off-target, of trouble to come? Or is this just a coincidence, meaning nothing in itself, since mothers everywhere worry about their children even when, as is usually the case, no bad things happen to them?

4. I'm looking over my checkbook and come to the rueful conclusion that I'm going to be a tad short of money this month. Obviously, I need to do something about this, but instead of going out and looking for a job like a normal person, I pretend that money comes to me in some unforeseen way. I do this by imagining myself walking down to my mailbox, opening up the mailbox, pulling out an envelope, opening the envelopeall this in as much detail as I can musterand finding therein a check for an amount that covers my temporary deficit. I run through this imaginary scenario once or twice, and then, typical of me, I get involved with something else and the whole unpleasant matter slides right out of my head.

Next morning I walk down to the mailbox, open it up, and pull out an envelope with a return address from a small online bookstore that carries hardcover copies of my book, Dreaming Myself, Dreaming a Town, by now at least five years out of print. Inside the envelope is a check for an amount that very nicely and then some covers my temporary deficit, as I'd so optimistically described it to myself. How about that! I hadn't heard anything from this bookstore in a long time and I'd consciously forgotten the deal with my book; we have no formal royalty payment schedule, no semi-annual reports, nothing like that at all. The check justarrived. By chance? By ESP? This isn't the first time I've noticed that coincidence and precognition are often intertwined. On the other hand, maybe my unconscious keeps better track of book sales than I do. Or had my imagination influenced this somehow? Had I nudged myself into an event (the earned royalties, the check's precise timing) that from yesterday's perspective had been one of infinite possibilities in a wideopen universe?