Synchronicity and coincidences

      A practical note: the word ‘we’ refers to my wife and myself.

On Nov. 8, 1979, my brother came for dinner. He drops in for a surprise visit every four or five years, and on this occasion he wanted to hear about our trip to Scotland. I mentioned ospreys which breed at Loch Garten. Immediately afterwards my wife turned on the TV where a nature film had just begun. It was about ospreys and their life and breeding near Loch Garten.

Towards the end of May 1980, I had reached p. 79 in Montague Ullman’s "Dream Telepathy" where he describes an experiment, undertaken by Dr. Johann Stoyva at the University of Chicago. Subjects were given dream instructions before sleeping, and an Egyptian student was told to dream of climbing a tree. When the EEG showed that he was dreaming, he was woken up and reported as follows:

"We made a, an outing trip, and I don't know where we went; we went through the woods. We marched and marched and marched. Oh, it was very colorful, very much so .... Mmmmmhh, I'm walking, I don't know, with people. I'm going places in woods and then we climbed on an apple tree to pick some ripe, beautiful apples.…I was dreaming about .…Egypt, my beloved Egypt!….".

The following day we visited a friend, E.P., who had an art gallery, and he asked us if we intended to come to the opening of his exhibition of Egyptian  picture rugs, kelims. If so, he would give us the invitation, on a postcard, right away. On the front was an Egyptian kelim in colours. It showed a wood or, rather, a fruit plantation and four Egyptians, of whom one rides a mule and another has crawled to the top of a tree and is stretching his neck after a red fruit at the top of the neighbouring tree. The postcard shows an additional three mules.

On Nov. 20, 1979, I put the book by Per Draminsky, ”Relativitet og Gravitation”, back in the bookshelf after having attempted to read it for some time. I had never met Per Draminsky’s name before I bought the book on a bargain sale a few months earlier. Later the same day I read a  letter in my daily paper:

 “In reference to the feature article by Ole Bom, MA, in Berl. Tidende on July 26, I take the liberty to remind you that it has long since been shown by the late Per Draminsky that there are errors in Einstein’s field equations. Yours, etc.,  A. E. Bang, Højbjervej 10, 2730 Herlev.”

On July 28, 1985, I read a feature in the paper about the small town of Tournus in Bourgogne between Beaune and Macon in France. The same afternoon two friends, N.G. and B.G., came for tea, and we told them about our recent vacation to Germany, France and Switzerland. I mentioned Bispingen in North Germany where we have often stayed the night. They had, they told us, a similar favourite overnight town on their trips from and to Spain, namely Tournus! They had not read the article in the paper about Tournus.

On July 31, 1985, I was reading a textbook on anatomy and physiology in connection with a back injury, and I got the idea to measure my height, possibly to see if I had shrunk in the joints. Last time I measured my height was 2 ½ years earlier. Less than two hours later the main character in a Swiss movie on TV had his height measured by some doctors.

On Oct. 16, 1985 I told my physiotherapist A.H. about the psychiatrist Stanislau Grof’s book “The Inner Travel” and his LSD research. Four days later Grof was on TV, and next day there was an interview with him in the paper.

On Oct. 17, 1985 I read in Stanislau Grof's “The Inner Travel” about the natural course that an illness takes. It was illustrated by the Gaussian bell-shaped curve of natural distribution. On the same day I consulted dr. T. about the probable course of my back injury, and he argued for a normal progress, illustrating it by drawing the bell-shaped, Gaussian curve.

On Oct. 18, 1985 there was an item in TV about pensioners in USA, especially in Florida, and among those interviewed was a Mr. Sol Press (pronounced ‘sole press’). The physiotherapist A.H. who I visited that day has lived several years in Florida, and during the treatment she used the technical term ‘sole press’.

On Dec. 20, 1995 I read an article in a magazine about an Afro-Indian girl who had become the girlfriend of the well-known builder A. J.-J. Her name was Laxmi which, she says, was the Goddess Laxmi, the wife of the God Vishnu in Bhagavadgita. The same day a Dutch friend came with a copy of the Scientific American from March ’92. On p. 66 was an article with a new interpretation of the figures on ‘the Gundestrup Cauldron’, an Iron Age silver vessel unearthed in Denmark; the author Timothy Taylor identifies one of the figures as the Indian Goddess Lakshmi, Visnu’s wife (Laxmi = Laksmi = Lakshmi).

On Sept. 11, 1998, in a popular magazine I read an article, “The Expeditions of All Times”, about Alexander Humboldt’s travels to Venezuela and other countries. About an hour later, I read in another magazine L.K.’s account of a journey through Venezuela with a detailed description of Humboldt’s expeditions to Venezuela.

      I must limit myself to these personal experiences. There exist thousands upon thousands of recorded coincidences, some much more improbable. If we are in fact talking about psi phenomena here, then one question urges itself upon us; what, if any, is the purpose? If the answer seems to be ‘none’, what at least is the mechanism behind them?

      The first incident mentioned above is simple and typical. Let us take a look at it; the first ‘osprey’ and ‘Loch Garten’ ones were vocal, that is, sound waves initiated by some conscious inclination in my brain and carried forward through well-known physiological and neurological channels to the vocal chord etc. In case of the second ‘Osprey’ and ‘Loch Garten’, I was the recipient of an audio/visual output, a purely electromagnetic signal of a presumably video-recorded program from a TV station. In short, the same information was emitted by sound waves, and later it was emitted and received as electromagnetic waves. I cannot conjecture any causal, physical link between the two; the first did not and could not have produced the second which will, moreover, in all likelihood have already been planned by the TV station at the time when the first happened.

      Perhaps a closer look at another psi phenomenon, precognitive dreams, will bring us nearer a tenable hypothesis.

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(The Japanese/Chinese characters in the background read “chooshizen” in Japanese, which means “supernatural”)  

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