In the summertime of 2021, I skilled a cluster of coincidences, a few of which had a distinctly supernatural really feel. Right here’s the way it began. I preserve a journal and document desires if they’re particularly vivid or unusual. It doesn’t occur usually, however I logged one wherein my mom’s oldest pal, a girl known as Rose, made an look to inform me that she (Rose) had simply died. She’d had one other stroke, she mentioned, and that was it. Come the morning, it occurred to me that I didn’t know whether or not Rose was nonetheless alive. I guessed not. She’d had a serious stroke about 10 years in the past and had gone on to undergo a sequence of minor strokes, descending right into a sorry state of bodily incapacity and dementia.
I discussed the dream to my companion over breakfast, however she wasn’t a lot . We have been staying within the Midlands on the time in the home the place I’d spent my later childhood years. The place had been unoccupied for months. My father, Mal, was lengthy gone, and my mom, Doreen, was in a care dwelling drifting inexorably via the superior levels of Alzheimer’s. We’d simply bought the property we’d been residing in, and there could be a couple of weeks’ delay in gaining access to our future dwelling, so the outdated home was a handy place to remain within the meantime.
I gave no additional thought to my unusual dream till, a fortnight later, we returned from the grocery store to seek out {that a} observe had been pushed via the letterbox. It was addressed to my mom, and was from Rose’s daughter, Maggie. Her mom, she wrote, had died ‘two weeks in the past’. The funeral could be the next week. I handed the observe to my companion and reminded her of my dream. ‘Bizarre,’ she mentioned, and carried on unloading the groceries. Sure, bizarre. I can’t recall the final time Rose had entered my ideas, and there she was, turning up in a dream with information of her personal loss of life.
So, what am I to make of this? Right here’s one interpretation. Rose died, and her disembodied spirit felt the necessity to inform me and located its approach into my dream. Maybe she had first tried to contact Doreen, however for one motive or one other – the impenetrable wreckage of a broken mind? – couldn’t get via. Right here’s one other interpretation. The entire chain of occasions occurred by sheer coincidence, an opportunity concatenation of happenings with no deeper significance. There’s nothing in any respect supernatural about it.
When you ask me which of these two interpretations I desire, it will, unequivocally, be the second. However right here’s the factor. There is part of me that, regardless of myself, needs to entertain the chance that the world actually does have supernatural dimensions. It’s the identical a part of me that will get spooked by ghost tales, and that may really feel uneasy about spending an evening alone in a morgue. I don’t imagine the Universe accommodates supernatural forces, however I really feel it’d. It is because the human thoughts has essentially irrational components. I’d go so far as to say that magical considering varieties the premise of selfhood. Our expertise of ourselves and different individuals is basically an act of creativeness that may’t be sustained via wholly rational modes of thought. We see the sunshine of consciousness in one other’s eyes and, irresistibly, think about some ethereal self behind these eyes, buzzing with emotions and ideas, when in reality there’s nothing however the darkish and silent substance of the mind. We think about one thing comparable behind our personal eyes. It’s a essential phantasm, rooted deep in our evolutionary historical past. Coincidence, or slightly the expertise of coincidence, triggers magical ideas which might be equally deep-rooted.
The time period ‘coincidence’ covers a variety of phenomena, from the cosmic (in a complete photo voltaic eclipse, the disk of the Moon and the disk of the Solar by sheer probability seem to have exactly the identical diameter) to the private and parochial (my granddaughter has the identical birthday as my late spouse). On the human, experiential, scale, a broad distinction will be drawn between serendipity – well timed, however unplanned, discoveries or growth of occasions – and what the Twentieth-century Lamarckian biologist and coincidence collector Paul Kammerer known as seriality, which he outlined as ‘a lawful recurrence of the identical or comparable issues or occasions … in time and house’.
The biography of the actor Anthony Hopkins accommodates a putting instance of a serendipitous coincidence. On first listening to he’d been solid to play a component within the movie The Woman from Petrovka (1974), Hopkins went in quest of a replica of the ebook on which it was based mostly, a novel by George Feifer. He combed the bookshops of London in useless and, considerably dejected, gave up and headed dwelling. Then, to his amazement, he noticed a replica of The Woman from Petrovka mendacity on a bench at Leicester Sq. station. He recounted the story to Feifer once they met on location, and it transpired that the ebook Hopkins had stumbled upon was the very one which the writer had mislaid in one other a part of London – an advance copy stuffed with red-ink amendments and marginal notes he’d made in preparation for a US version.
Hollywood gives one other selection instance of seriality. L Frank Baum was a prolific youngsters’s writer, best-known for The Fantastic Wizard of Oz (1900). He didn’t stay to see his novel become the long-lasting musical fantasy movie, but he seemingly had a exceptional coincidental reference to the film. The actor Frank Morgan performed 5 roles in The Wizard of Oz (1939), together with the eponymous Wizard. He makes his first look within the sepia-toned opening sequences as Professor Marvel, a travelling fortune-teller. Film lore says that, when it got here to display testing, the coat he was carrying was thought of too pristine for an itinerant magician. So the wardrobe division was despatched on a thrift-shop mission to seek out one thing extra appropriate, and returned with an entire closetful of prospects. The one they settled on, a Prince Albert frock coat with worn velvet collars, was an ideal match for the actor. Solely later was it apparently found that, sewn into the jacket was a label bearing the inscription: ‘Made by Hermann Bros, expressly for L Frank Baum’. Baum had died some 20 years earlier than the movie was launched however the coat’s provenance was allegedly authenticated by his widow, Maud, who accepted it as a present when the movie was accomplished.
Whereas some coincidences appear playful, others really feel inherently macabre
Some coincidences appear to include a component of humour as if engineered by a capricious spirit purely for its personal amusement. Not lengthy after first shifting to Tub in 2016, I made a touch throughout the busy London Street, misjudged the peak of the kerb on the opposite aspect, tripped, fell awkwardly, and fractured my proper arm. Over the subsequent 5 years, I lived variously in Tub, rural Worcestershire and London. Quickly after shifting again to Tub on a extra everlasting foundation, I seen a trendy mahogany chair within the window of a charity store on London Street, went straight in and acquired it. I believed I’d haven’t any hassle lugging the chair again to my flat half a mile away, but it surely turned out to be heavier than I anticipated and awkward to hold. As I used to be crossing the street the place I’d had my fall 5 years beforehand, the chair slipped my grip, crashed to the bottom and splintered its proper arm. Hear the chuckles of the coincidence imp.
Whereas some coincidences appear playful, others really feel inherently macabre. In 2007, the Guardian journalist John Harris set out on ‘an intermittent rock-grave odyssey’ visiting the final resting locations of revered UK rock musicians. About midway via, he went to the tiny village of Rushock in Worcestershire to collect ideas on the gravestone of the Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, who died on the age of 32 on 25 September 1980, after consuming a prodigious amount of alcohol. A Guardian photographer had visited the grave a couple of days earlier to get an image to accompany the piece. It was, writes Harris, ‘an icy morning that gave the churchyard the look of a scene from The Omen’ and, becoming with one of many key motifs of that movie, the photographer was ‘spooked by the looks of an unaccompanied black canine, which urinates on the headstone after which disappears’. ‘Black Canine’ (1971) occurs to be the title of some of the iconic songs within the Led Zeppelin catalogue.
If we image a continuum of coincidences from the trivial to the extraordinary, each the Hopkins and the Baum examples would certainly be positioned in the direction of the unusual and strange finish. My ‘damaged arms’ coincidence tends in the direction of the trivial. Different, nonetheless extra mundane examples are commonplace. You get chatting to a stranger on a practice and uncover you could have an acquaintance in frequent. You’re considering of somebody and, within the subsequent breath they name you. You learn an uncommon phrase in {a magazine} and, concurrently, somebody on the radio utters the identical phrase. Such occurrences may elicit a wry smile, however the weirder ones can induce a powerful sense of the uncanny. The world momentarily appears stuffed with unusual connections and forces.
It’s a way of thinking resembling apophenia – an inclination to understand significant, and normally sinister, hyperlinks between unrelated occasions – which is a standard prelude to the emergence of psychotic delusions. Particular person variations might play a component within the expertise of such coincidences. Schizotypy is a dimension of character characterised by experiences that in some methods echo, in muted type, the signs of psychosis, together with magical ideation and paranormal perception. There may be evidence to counsel that, inside the common inhabitants, individuals who rating excessive on measures of schizotypy may be extra vulnerable to experiencing significant coincidences and magical considering. Maybe schizotypal people are additionally extra powerfully affected by coincidence. Somebody scoring excessive on measures of schizotypy would maybe be extra spooked by a loss of life dream than I (a low scorer) was.
I have set naturalism and the supernatural in binary opposition however maybe there’s a third approach. Let’s name it the supranatural stance. This was the place adopted, in several methods, by Kammerer and by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence (1972) launched Kammerer’s work to the English-speaking world and was influential in reviving curiosity in Jung’s concepts. Kammerer started recording coincidences in 1900, most of them mind-numbingly trivial. For instance, he notes that, on 4 November 1910, his brother-in-law attended a live performance, and quantity 9 was each his seat quantity and the variety of his cloakroom ticket. The next day he went to a different live performance, and his seat and cloakroom ticket numbers have been each 21.
Kammerer’s ebook Das Gesetz der Serie (1919), or ‘The Regulation of Seriality’, accommodates 100 samples of coincidences that he classifies when it comes to typology, morphology, energy and so forth, with, as Koestler places it, ‘the meticulousness of a zoologist dedicated to taxonomy’. The second half of the ebook is dedicated to concept. Kammerer’s large concept is that, alongside causality, there’s an acausal precept at work within the Universe, considerably analogous to gravity however, whereas gravity acts universally on mass, this common acausal pressure, as Koestler places it, ‘acts selectively on type and performance to carry comparable configurations collectively in house and time; it correlates by affinity.’ Kammerer sums issues up as follows: ‘We thus arrive on the picture of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, despite fixed shufflings and rearrangements, additionally takes care of bringing like and like collectively.’ This appears far-fetched however Albert Einstein, for one, took Kammerer significantly, describing his ebook as ‘unique and on no account absurd’.
The speculation of synchronicity, or significant coincidence, proposed by Jung follows the same line. It took form over a number of many years via a confluence of concepts streaming in from philosophy, physics, the occult and, not least, from the wellsprings of magical considering that bubbled within the depths of Jung’s personal prodigiously inventive and, at instances, near-psychotic thoughts. Sure coincidences, he suggests, should not merely a random coming-together of unrelated occasions, nor are the occasions causally linked. They’re related acausally by advantage of their which means. Synchronicity was the ‘acausal connecting precept’.
The coincidence of the dream and the insect’s intrusion was the important thing to therapeutic progress
In keeping with the physicist and historian of science Arthur I Miller’s book Deciphering the Cosmic Quantity: The Unusual Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (2009), Jung thought of this to be among the finest concepts he ever had, and cites Einstein as an affect. Within the early years of the Twentieth century, Einstein was on a number of events a dinner visitor on the Jung household dwelling in Zurich, making a powerful impression. Jung traces a direct hyperlink between these dinners with Einstein and his dialogue, some 30 years later, with the Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a dialogue that introduced the idea of synchronicity to fruition.
Jung’s collaboration with Pauli was an unlikely coalition: Jung, the quasi-mystic psychologist, a psychonaut whose deep excursions into his personal unconscious thoughts he deemed essentially the most important experiences of his life; and Pauli, the hardcore theoretical physicist who was influential in reshaping our understanding of the bodily world at its subatomic foundations. Following his mom’s suicide and a short, sad marriage to a cabaret dancer who left him for a chemist (‘Had she taken with a bullfighter, I’d have understood, however such an unusual chemist…’), Pauli suffered a psychological disaster. At the same time as he was producing his most vital work in physics (formulating the ‘Pauli exclusion precept’; postulating the existence of the neutrino), he was succumbing to bouts of heavy ingesting and stepping into fights.
Pauli turned for assist to Jung who occurred to stay close by. His remedy concerned the recording of desires, a job at which he proved himself to be remarkably adept, with the ability to keep in mind advanced desires in beautiful element. For his half, Jung noticed a chance. Not solely was Pauli a unprecedented chronicler of desires, however he was additionally a prepared information to the arcane realm of subatomic physics. In the meantime, Pauli noticed synchronicity as a approach of approaching some basic questions in quantum mechanics, not least the thriller of quantum entanglement, by which sub-atomic particles might correlate instantaneously, and acausally, at any distance. From their discussions of synchronicity emerged the Pauli-Jung conjecture, a type of double-aspect concept of thoughts and matter, which considered the psychological and the bodily as completely different facets of a deeper underlying actuality.
Jung was the primary to carry coincidences into the body of psychological enquiry, and made use of them in his analytic observe. He presents an anecdote a few golden beetle as an illustration of synchronicity at work within the clinic. A younger lady is recounting a dream wherein she was given a golden scarab, when Jung hears a delicate tapping on the window behind him and turns to see a flying insect knocking towards the windowpane. He opens the window and catches the creature because it flies into the room. It seems to be a rose chafer beetle, ‘the closest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes’. The incident proved to be a transformative second within the lady’s remedy. She had, says Jung, been ‘an awfully tough case’ on account of her hyper-rationality and, evidently, ‘one thing fairly irrational was wanted’ to interrupt her defences. The coincidence of the dream and the insect’s intrusion was the important thing to therapeutic progress. Jung provides that the scarab is ‘a traditional instance of a rebirth image’ with roots in Egyptian mythology.
Whereas Kammerer hypothesised impersonal, acausal components intersecting with the causal nexus of the Universe, Jung’s acausal connecting precept was enmeshed with the psyche, particularly with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. In Jung’s wider theorising, these archetypes are primordial buildings of the thoughts frequent to all human beings. Resurrecting an historical time period, Jung envisioned an unus mundus, a unitary or one world, wherein the psychological and bodily are built-in, and the place the archetypes are instrumental in shaping each thoughts and matter. It’s a daring imaginative and prescient however the place, we’re sure to ask, is the proof for any of this? Past anecdote, there’s none. Pauli saw archetypal affect within the scientific theories of Johannes Kepler, the daddy of recent astronomy and, because the evolutionary psychiatrist Anthony Stevens argues in Non-public Myths (1995), a case will be made for grounding archetypes biologically by analogy with the innate releasing mechanisms recognized by ethologists. In that case, there’s greater than a grain of plausibility within the suggestion that archetypal buildings have an affect in shaping thought and behavior. However the whole Universe? Pauli apart, the thought of synchronicity obtained little assist from the broader scientific group.
Up to date cognitive science presents a safer, if much less vibrant, conceptual framework for making sense of the expertise of coincidence. We’re predisposed to come across coincidences as a result of their detection, it could be mentioned, displays the essential modus operandi of our cognitive and perceptual programs. The mind seeks patterns within the stream of sensory information it receives from the world. It infuses the patterns it detects with which means and generally company (usually misplaced) and, as part of this course of, it varieties beliefs and expectations that serve to form future perceptions and behavior. Coincidence, within the easy sense of co-occurrence, informs pattern-detection, particularly when it comes to figuring out causal relationships, and so enhances predictability. The ‘world’ doesn’t merely current itself via the windowpanes of the eyes and channels of the opposite senses. The mind’s perceptual programs are proactive. They assemble a mannequin of the world by frequently trying to match incoming, ‘bottom-up’ sensory information with ‘top-down’ anticipations and predictions. Uncooked sensory information serve to refine the mind’s finest guesses as to what’s taking place, slightly than constructing the world afresh with every passing second. The mind, merely put, is consistently looking out for coincidence.
You drive a distinct automobile for the primary time, and all of the sudden the identical make and mannequin appears to be in all places
From a wide-ranging survey of psychological and neurocognitive analysis, Michiel van Elk, Karl Friston and Harold Bekkering conclude that the overgeneralisation of such predictive fashions performs an important half within the expertise of coincidence. Primed by deeply ingrained cognitive biases (self-attributional, confirmational, attentional, and so forth) and ill-equipped to make correct estimates of probability and likelihood, we’re innately inclined to see (and really feel) patterns and connections the place they merely don’t exist. ‘Innately inclined’ as a result of, in evolutionary phrases, the tendency to over-detect coincidences is adaptive. Failure to detect contingencies between associated occasions – for instance, rustling within the undergrowth/proximity of a predator – is usually extra expensive than an misguided inference of a relationship between unassociated occasions. One other driver of coincidence is what the linguist Arnold Zwicky calls the ‘frequency phantasm’, a time period originating in a weblog post however that has since discovered its approach into the Oxford English Dictionary:
frequency phantasm n. a quirk of notion whereby a phenomenon to which one is newly alert all of the sudden appears ubiquitous.
You may encounter a phrase for the primary time, after which learn or hear it later the identical day. Or, you drive a distinct automobile for the primary time, and all of the sudden the identical make and mannequin appears to be in all places. This is because of a mixture of two well-understood psychological processes: selective consideration (homing in on salient objects and occasions); and affirmation bias (seeking out objects and occasions that assist our beliefs and perceptions, whereas ignoring proof on the contrary).
Van Elk and colleagues weren’t the primary to sign the unreliability of intuitive judgments of likelihood as an element within the notion of coincidence. Numerous authors earlier than them – eg, Stuart Sutherland in his book Irrationality (1992) – have advised that paranormal beliefs, together with the assumption that some coincidences are supernatural, come up due to failures of intuitive likelihood. The so-called birthday downside or paradox, a staple of introductory lessons in likelihood concept, reliably exposes the issues of our intuitions. It asks what’s the probability that two individuals will share a birthday in randomly chosen teams. Most individuals are stunned to be taught {that a} gathering of solely 23 individuals is required for the possibilities of two of them sharing a birthday to exceed 50 per cent. I’d been which means for a while to strive a easy empirical train involving ‘deathdays’ to reflect the birthday downside (an concept impressed by a dialog with the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey). Since I discovered myself as soon as extra staying briefly at my dad and mom’ outdated home, a brief drive from Rushock, I made a decision I’d pay a go to to St Michael and All Angels’ churchyard and use the Led Zeppelin drummer’s grave as the place to begin for my analysis, for no motive aside from the imprecise pull of that black canine story.
Bonham’s gravestone is straightforward to find on the north aspect of the church, festooned as it’s with drumsticks and cymbals left as choices by the various pilgrims who make their solution to the shrine from around the globe. The grave lies within the shade of a spreading, blue-needled conifer and, to the precise, there’s a row of three different graves. So simply 4 graves in complete (there’s additionally a small, sandcastle-like monument on the base of the tree trunk, which I discounted for lack of identify and dates). The plan was to conduct a self-terminating search. Beginning with Bonham’s gravestone, and with my pocket book in hand, I’d examine the opposite graves within the row after which the rows behind and in entrance, working my approach methodically across the graveyard, till I discovered any two matching dates of loss of life, however my mission ended virtually as quickly because it had begun. I wanted to go no additional than the 4 graves (with 5 occupants) in Bonham’s row. The occupants of the 2 on the precise shared 29 September as their date of loss of life (21 years aside). I want I might report that the mysterious black canine made an look, but it surely didn’t.
Turning to the likelihood of dream coincidences, suppose for the sake of argument that the likelihood of a dream coincidentally matching real-world occasions is 1-in-10,000, and that just one dream per night time is remembered. The likelihood of a ‘matching’ dream on any given night time is 0.0001 (ie, 1-in-10,000), which means that the likelihood of a ‘non-matching’ dream is 0.9999. The likelihood of two consecutive nights with non-matching desires is 0.9999 x 0.9999. The likelihood of getting non-matching desires each night time for an entire yr is 0.9999 multiplied by itself 365 instances, which is 0.9642. Rounding up, this implies that there’s a 3.6 per cent probability of any given individual having a dream that matches or ‘predicts’ real-world occasions over the course of a yr. Over a interval of 20 years, the percentages of getting an identical/precognitive dream could be higher than even.
Rose, the lady within the loss of life dream I skilled, was 90 years outdated, and the possibilities of a 90-year-old lady within the UK dying earlier than her 91st birthday are round 1-in-6, which is to say, not unlikely. Given her medical historical past, the probability that Rose would die earlier than her 91st birthday was most likely a lot higher than that. However why ought to I dream about her within the first place? It’s true, I hadn’t been consciously interested by Rose however, staying in my childhood dwelling, there would have been many implicit reminders. She used to stay shut by and got here to our home usually. Additionally, visiting my ailing mom extra usually than ordinary at her care dwelling would have me interested by loss of life at each aware and unconscious ranges, and maybe (unconsciously) about her friendship with Rose.
Makes an attempt at understanding coincidence thus vary from extravagant conjectures conceiving of acausal forces influencing the elemental workings of the Universe, to sober cognitive research deconstructing the essential mechanisms of the thoughts. However there’s something else to contemplate. Outstanding coincidences occur as a result of, nicely, they occur, they usually occur with out inherent which means and independently of the workings of the pattern-hungry mind. Because the statistician David Hand puts it, ‘extraordinarily inconceivable occasions are commonplace’. He refers to this because the improbability precept, one with completely different statistical strands, together with the regulation of really massive numbers, which states that, ‘with a big sufficient variety of alternatives, any outrageous factor is more likely to occur.’ Each week, there are numerous lottery jackpot winners across the globe, every with odds of successful at many millions-to-one towards. And, in defiance of really phenomenal odds, a number of individuals have received nationwide and state lottery jackpots on a couple of event.
Set squat on the again of my armchair was a golden beetle, just like the one in Jung’s consulting room
I’m a naturalist, however coincidences give me a glimpse of what the supernaturalist sees, and my worldview is briefly challenged. Quickly, although, for good or unwell, I’m again on my ordinary monitor. One closing coincidence story from my private archive illustrates this level. It considerations a meta-coincidence, that’s, a coincidence a few coincidence. It was a heat afternoon in mid-June, and I used to be feeling sorry for myself. My companion had walked out on me simply the week earlier than, and I believed a great way to take care of self-pity could be to launch into a brand new venture. I’d perform a little research into the psychology of coincidence. So, there I used to be, settled in an armchair surrounded by books and articles on the topic, together with Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence. Amongst different issues, I’d been studying his account of Jung’s golden scarab story.
In want of espresso, I set Koestler apart and went to the kitchen, returning to seek out, set squat on the again of my armchair, a golden beetle, a rose chafer just like the one which had made its approach via the window of Jung’s consulting room. It should have flown in via the wide-open balcony door. I rapidly took an image in case the insect took flight once more, after which nudged it onto my palm to return it to the wild, but it surely merely rolled onto its again and lay immobile. Lifeless.
I despatched the image to my ex, and requested how she was doing. She didn’t reply, however later that night known as with unsettling information. Zoe, an acquaintance of ours, had that afternoon hanged herself from a tree in her ex-partner’s backyard. My mind by now was in magical considering mode, and I mentioned I couldn’t assist however hyperlink Zoe’s loss of life to the looks, and loss of life, of the golden beetle. I didn’t imagine there was a hyperlink, in fact, however I felt there could be. Believing and feeling. There was one thing else in the back of my thoughts. In Greek mythology, all that king Midas touched turned to gold. His daughter’s identify was Zoe, and she or he too was turned to gold.
Ah, however rose chafers are fairly frequent within the south of England; they’re energetic in heat climate; the balcony opens out on a water meadow (a typical rose chafer habitat); et cetera. And it has since been advised to me that the beetle was fairly seemingly ‘enjoying useless’ slightly than really useless. Maybe, after I’d thrown it again out onto the meadow, there was a ‘rebirth’ of the sort these creatures are mentioned to symbolise.
Bizarre, although.
