The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (13 page)

This bin Laden videotape received extensive play in the media, but the discussion of dreams was generally ignored and received no headlines in the mainstream press, even though it occupied half the transcript and — for the terrorist chief and his interlocutor — was the heart of the matter.

Dreams of a paradise of martyrs and dream visitations from suicide killers who have died have been a major factor in the recruitment and motivation of subsequent al-Qaeda fighters, according to the movement's own propaganda videos. A Saudi member of al-Qaeda who died in Iraq reported three dreams of “black-eyed women in paradise” that made him “passionate” to enter the afterlife. A Yemeni car-bomber who killed himself in an attack on an American military post in Iraq appeared in a comrade's dreams after his death, urging himto “come and joinme in paradise.” He had made a pact with fellow jihadists prior to his death, promising to visit them from the other side. Such appointments for a dream visitation by the dead have a long pedigree in the history of Islam.

It has been reported that the daily practice of al-Qaeda leaders prior to 9/11 was to share dreams after dawn prayers. How manyWestern leaders do anything comparable?We are now able to gauge how much they are missing by
not
making room for dreams.

DREAMS SHOW US HUMANITY'S PATH

It may be that just as babies rehearse for walking and talking in dreams before they have developed the corresponding physical abilities, humanity rehearses for new phases in its development through dreaming. We are on the edge of grasping what this mightmean when we talk about ideas that are “in the air.”We see one facet of it when we learn that artists and science fiction writers have frequently anticipated new technologies by decades or centuries.

Dreaming takes us to a spiritual depth of understanding of our contemporary challenges. It shows us the consequences of present actions and policies, on every scale from individual to planetary. Through dreaming, we can enter the mindset and circumstances of people who are profoundly different and see through their eyes. This can give us the ability to move beyond entrenched prejudice and obsessions about enemies.

As we become
active
dreamers, and share the gifts of dreaming with others, we help to weave webs of peace and healing for our world. The need is very urgent.

I think of the “dream webs” of the Andaman islanders, who got out of the way of the terrible tsunami of December 2004 because their dreams and their intimate connection with the animals and the earth told them it was coming. The Indian government, finding the islanders' coastal fishing camps deserted after the storm, thought they must all have perished. When the Indian government sent reconnaissance helicopters over the highlands, islanders reappeared, shooting arrows at the choppers to indicate that help from New Delhi was
not
wanted or needed. By tradition, the fierce Andaman islanders are group dreamers who gather at night in their community “big houses” to dream the means of survival and progress for the whole community. They picture themselves weaving a dreamweb across which their dreamscouts can move rapidly to gather and bring back information vital to the common interests of the group.

Dreaming expands our options and our sense of possibility as members of the human condition.

A Polish woman told me that during the long years of Soviet dominance and oppression in her country, her dreams were her “films of freedom,” encouraging her to believe that she and her people could enjoy a better life.

Our dreams help us to step outside the boxes we put ourselves in or allow others to build around us.

I once dreamed I was strolling around a zoo and became disgusted by the behavior of a crowd of people who were gawping and poking fun at a maned lion through the bars of his cage. Suddenly one of the tourists screamed, “The gate is open!” All the people fled the scene, terrified the lion would get out and attack them. I stepped through the open gate, and the lion jumped up, put his paws on my shoulders, and licked my face like a friendly dog. He wanted me to turn around in order to understand the true situation. When I turned around, I noticed that in this scene it was the
humans
, not the animals, who were living behind bars. The place of the lion was a place of nature, freedom, and unbounded horizons. The lion instructed me in his gravelly lion voice, “You see, humans are the only animals that
choose
to live in cages.”

In one way or another, according to our understanding, dreams take us to the place of the lion, the place of freedom. These “films of freedom” not only mentor us on what is possible for us as individuals; they can help to liberate whole communities.

Harriet Tubman's story is a remarkable example. As a young girl in tidewater Maryland, she was badly hurt when an angry overseer threw a two-pound lead weight that hit her in the forehead. This terrible incident seems to have helped open her “third eye.” In dreams and visions, she saw herself flying over farmlands and rivers she had never seen with ordinary sight. When dream allies encouraged her to make her break for freedom, she was able to take the aerial pictures from her dreams and use them as maps to get herself safely to freedom. She was inspired by later dreams to return to the South to help others escape to liberty, and again her dreams gave her specific guidance on the roads and river fords and safe houses to use. As the most celebrated conductor of the Underground Railroad, she got three hundred escaping slaves to freedom, never losing one to the posses — because she trusted and worked with her “films of freedom.”

The great French observer of the patterns of change and the requirements for political freedom, Alexis de Tocqueville, made this observation in
Democracy in America
: “In times when passions are beginning to take charge of the conduct of human affairs, one should pay less attention to what men of experience and common sense are thinking than to what is preoccupying the imagination of dreamers.” Paying attention to “the imagination of dreamers” requires us to track what is developing in the collective mind and in the group mind of specific movements and communities that may produce new events. We need to know what is (or is not) in the vision of leaders and potential world changers. And we want to work for the cause of humanity through our own active dreaming and active imagination.

Part 2
ONLY COINCIDENCE

For all that meets the bodily sense I deem
Symbolical, one mighty alphabet
For infant minds, and we in this low world
Placed with our backs to bright Reality
That we may learn with young unwounded ken
The substance from the shadow.
— SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE,
“THE DESTINY OF NATIONS”

CHAPTER 5
WHERE MIND and MATTER MEET

W
hen do you say, “What a coincidence”?

You think of someone, and they call you on the phone a minute later.

You dream of a bear, and a black bear walks out in front of you on the country road you're driving on.

You are wondering how to get through a harrowing phase of your life, and you look out your car window and see a sign in front of a church that says, COURAGE IS FEAR CONQUERED BY LOVE — and
know
this is for you.

You are remembering, with deep emotion, a time when you wore a beautiful pink dress — and you walk into a boutique where the theme (written in pink lipstick on a mirror) is FANCY GIRLS DREAM IN PINK.

In my personal lexicon, a coincidence is a meaningful convergence of inner and outer experiences. The sense of meaning comes from the observer. That sense may be so strong it is
thrilling
.

Coincidence may be wildly funny. A guy wondering how to handle a date noticed the following bumper sticker on a red sports car in front of him: “Your body is a temple. Mine is an adventure theme park.”

Coincidence can inspire a sense of awe, a feeling we are in the presence of the numinous. I was standing in a very clean park — no litter to be seen — talking on my cell phone about how in the Middle Ages the Christ energy came to be identified with the stag. (Yep, that's the kind of conversation I have on the phone, if that's where my head is.) And I glanced down and right at my feet was a round piece of cardboard that might have been a coaster. It displayed a stag with immense antlers with the Calvary cross between them. I have yet to find out who produced this disk — presumably a religious sodality — but I had that unmistakable sense of something reaching through the curtain of the obvious world to give me the message,
Right on
.

I think it's like this: When we go dreaming, we go beyond the curtain of consensus reality. We get out there. We operate outside the rules of a three-dimensional reality, in a spacious Now. We enter parallel and other worlds. Conversely, when coincidence is in play, the powers of that deeper universe — let's call it the multiverse, as scientists often do — come pushing or poking or tickling through the curtain of the obvious to wake us up to the moreness of
everything
.

THINGS THAT FALL TOGETHER

The great psychologist Carl Jung
lived
by coincidence. He achieved a profound understanding that through the study of coincidence we will come to grasp that there is no real separation between mind and matter at any level of reality — a finding confirmed by the best of our physicists. He taught that the incidents of our lives and the patterns of our world are connected by
meaning
, and that meaningful coincidence may guide us to the hidden order of events.

Jung was so fed up with the reflexive dismissal of coincidence as
only
coincidence that he labored heroically to give us a new vocabulary with which to describe both the phenomenon and its character. He coined the word
synchronicity
and defined it as “an acausal connecting principle.” These may not quite be house hold terms, but they have achieved wide circulation, not only within Jungian circles.

The problem is they are not really satisfactory, for reasons Pauli noted with razor-sharp acuity in his extensive correspondence with Jung while the psychologist was working on early drafts of his famous paper on “Synchronicity.”

If you go to its Greek origins,
synchronicity
refers to incidents that are
simultaneous
: syn + chron, or happening at the same time. But the most interesting couplings or clusters of coincidence are not necessarily simultaneous. They are patterns of inner and outer events that often play out over time. We may notice a ripple effect of apparent connection over days, weeks, or even years. Jung himself cited a dream, followed by a later waking event that resembled it, as one of the most important instances of “synchronicity,” but this is plainly not an example of a simultaneous pairing. Pauli suggested the word
is omorphy
as an alternative to
synchronicity
. He dreamed that a mathematician told him, “We need to build cathedrals to is omorphy.” An is omorphy, in this application, would be a pairing or clustering of similar shapes or structures, reappearing in different objects and events. The stress would be on the resemblance of shape, rather than on contiguity in time. It's an attractive idea, but I doubt that
is omorphy
will ever be catchy enough to become an everyday term.

Pauli also liked the old word
correspondence
(as in “meaningful correspondences”), as poets and mystics have always done. “As above, so below” runs the famous hermetic motto. Things here “correspond” to things above (or below). In the world around us, things also resemble and “correspond” with each other.

Personally, I see no need to give up on the word
coincidence
just because we have fallen into a bad habit of dissing it; habits can be changed.

In its root meaning (from the Latin), a coincidence takes place when two or more incidents “fall together.” The word does not specify that these events happen at exactly the same time. But the events are related.

Think of what happens when you toss a set of pick-up sticks. Slow down the motion in your mind's eye, and imagine the sticks coming down very slowly, over an extended period of time. Now imagine a minuscule being who experiences long gaps between the arrival of objects that seem to be falling from thin air and who cannot see where they are coming from. When the observer sees two or more of these objects arrive at the same time, he is amazed and says, “What a coincidence!” When he travels a great distance and finds an object resembling the ones he has just seen, his surprise deepens. When similar objects continue to appear, over variable time intervals, he is astounded. From where he stands, the fall of each stick (or clumping of sticks) is an independent occurrence. It resembles something that happens before or after, but is not causally connected in any way that he can see. He does not know what the game player (a giant invisible to him) knows: events that manifest at discrete points in space and time, as experienced by the minuscule observer, are the result of a single movement on another plane.

Grasp this, and you are on the edge of grasping a very big secret about time. We'll return to this, in time.

I want to reclaim the word
coincidence
because I like the notion of things “falling together” with the implied action of a hidden hand. Coincidences are homing beacons. They are secret handshakes from the universe. They are extraordinary sources of guidance and direction.

We are going to count the ways.

Let's pause for just a moment to note that the idea that coincidences are important is troubling to some in the psychiatric community. Determined not to be overawed by Jung's learned borrowings from Greek, a Swiss psychiatrst named Klaus Conrad made up the word
apophenia
to describe a psychotic condition he defined as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness.”