Time as a Red Herring

Bev was visiting a friend and they were discussing the forthcoming seventy-fifth anniversary of the high school they had all attended forty or fifty years ago. The name of one of the prefects came up and Bev said, 'Oh, I remember her, she gave me some lines to learn for not wearing my black gloves.' Anyway, a couple of weeks later Bev went to visit her son who showed her an old tin trunk he had bought at a swap meet six weeks earlier. Bev’s husband decided to take it home and do it up. When they looked inside they found it was lined with two sheets of newspaper dated 11 November 1933. One sheet carried four birth notices: one announcing the birth of the baby girl who later became the prefect who gave Bev her lines!*

(* Radio talkback transcript)

Although we are not privy to Bev's inner thoughts at this time, all the talk of the school reunion must have sparked much reflection. No doubt in reminiscing old times and old school friends, some deaths were noted, but Bev's synchronicity revolved around reunion, birth and renewal ('doing up' the trunk). Reunion and birth, as noted earlier, are two of the most common synchronicity themes. I would guess that reminiscing over old times triggered, for Bev, a time of inner rebirth and renewal which was being reflected in her outer world.

What is most interesting here, though, is the way past and future are drawn into the one synchronicity. At the time of reminiscing about the prefect, Bev’s son had already bought the trunk containing the birth notices, yet this did not come to Bev's attention until several weeks later. Although no precognition was involved, shades of future events pervade this synchronicity story.

It is similar to the Mike and Elizabeth story told in Chapter 1, where my dreams overlapped with their encounter with murder and the aftermath of the traumatic event, as well as possibly with the pain and thoughts experienced by the murdered man on that Central American hillside. The intriguing factor was, again, the timing. Sometimes my dreams seemed precognitive because the dream details matched future events in Mike and Elizabeth's lives. Sometimes they seemed retrospective, matching events which had occurred a day or so earlier in Central America, although I knew nothing about it, consciously, at the time.

The whole episode made best sense when I viewed the time factor as a red herring. If you take any analysis of past, present and future out of the picture, you are left with an overlapping of my inner world, as viewed through my dreams, with Mike and Elizabeth's outer world experiences.

I interpreted my dreams as they arose and was satisfied that I understood their relevance to my life, acting on them accordingly. The dreams dealt with my inner feelings about the risks of mentally travelling beyond previous limitations, particularly in exploring new territory with the hypnosis project. I knew that risks went with adventure but I wondered about the dangers of knowing too much, of discovering knowledge that could be considered dangerous in the wrong hands. I knew I had to surrender to my quest, but I was finding the results, as I understood them at the time, hard to stomach. I was feeling ill and considered quitting. Maybe I didn't need to go the full distance. Ultimately I considered killing the project before it killed me, but above all my dreams showed me it was fear alone that I feared. So I resolved to face the fear and do it anyway. If I hadn't interpreted the dreams, I might have called the whole hypnosis project quits.

By acting on such dreams you align with the unconscious to resolve a conflict at an early stage. According to my understanding of synchronicity, if I had not resolved these issues, I would have expected to see them mirrored back to me in my outer world. By dealing with them through dream interpretation, my outer world reflected resolution instead. In actuality, I eventually went back and finished the hypnosis project and ultimately discovered that my fears were unfounded.

What seemed to happen instead was that Mike and Elizabeth experienced the type of the outer world events my unresolved dream conflicts might have met. Why?

I am close to Mike and Elizabeth. Mike and I are both writers and I have lived in South America where they were heading for a six-month stay. Before they left on their travels Mike and I experienced some synchronicities: one night, for example, I dreamed he went up in a space rocket, dressed in ‘spaceman' gear. I told him about it a couple of days later and he showed me an old black and white photo which had arrived around the time of the dream. It was a childhood photo from his father, showing the young Mike dressed as a space-man with the inscription 'Space cadet' on the back of the photo. We could have labelled this incidence precognition or telepathy but it was, in my opinion, a shared synchronicity. The stuff of my dreams was reflecting in my outer world in the shape of Mike. From his point of view, I was reflecting the stuff of his thoughts, as he pondered memories evoked by the arrival of the photo. After a number of such synchronicities it became obvious to me that we were similar people going through similar things and reflecting it all back to each other: perfect mirrors.

The main difference was that I was adventuring within as a source for my writing while he was heading for overseas adventure as a source for his. In reality, our separate journeys were likely to teach us similar stuff, as I believe they probably have. I have travelled across borders, seen different perspectives and met joys and conflicts within, while Mike has done the same on his outer world travels.

My feeling is that handling conflict at the inner level, through interpreting and acting on dreams, empowers you to resolve issues before the inner shit hits the outer fan. The inner level is unconscious thought and all thought is potential matter, but it has to be at the right resonating strength to form those standing waves which are the outer world. My dream thoughts went out there, but they never did build sufficient strength to materialise in my outer world. Mike, on the other hand, less adept at catching and interpreting his dreams, saw his less resolved conflicts played out in his outer world. In essence, he saw what I nipped in the bud. Yet undeniably our worlds collided.

A similar experience with Beth reveals how. I have met Beth only a handful of times, but we exchange letters, dreams and phone calls from time to time and discover that our lives frequently overlap. Beth's understanding of dreams is very close to my own and she carefully records and acts on them. She is also a writer. She has come to see, as I do, that the outer world is a reflection of the inner world, and she has learned the comforting art of interpreting her outer world in times of trauma so that she can come to terms with the experience or act on her understanding to control the outcome. She says that just as understanding a nightmare transforms a frightening experience into a beautiful enlightening dream, so the same applies to conscious reality.

"Even in traumatic situations there is now a most profound inner calm," Beth reflected in a letter following an event which she described as a living nightmare of the first degree.

"I was returning home from the hairdresser when I saw great billows of smoke emanating from a region which would roughly approximate to my home. I put my foot down and got home fast, but I couldn't enter my driveway because of a raging bushfire. The children were at school, luckily, but my pets are my babies. I parked my car on the main road and ran down my long driveway lined with searing hot, eighty foot high flames and got my pets out the house, back up to the car and away from danger. It was a huge drama all round. At one stage Mum and I thought we'd lost both our husbands and our homes to the fire. I thought Mum was going to have a heart attack.

"Our husbands survived with minor burns and all our pets survived. The house was saved except for a tiny bit of scorching and I keep a back up copy of my book in my handbag at all times, so I only lost three pages of my story. It's a miracle really. At one stage our homes were completely encircled by fire.

"But even though I experienced this fully there was a solid centre of inner calm. I knew that, whatever happened, I would be left with what I need."

In her calmness Beth was able to interpret the living nightmare while also experiencing it. Instead of the shock and trauma of it all, she said, it became a revelation.

"I processed the trauma while it was happening, there were no residual anxieties left after the fire was over. I didn't do any processing in my dreams. While other family members are still dealing with the fire damage in their dreams I am free, completely untouched by the incident apart from a most helpful insight."

The revelation concerned Beth's feelings about the land which she and her husband were subdividing.

"The surveyors had been walking around the properties. I saw them from the verandah, chopping down a tree for the surveyor's line and I must admit I felt as if I was being violated. Strangers on this virgin land! I wondered how I would cope when they selectively cleared some of the forest. How would I feel when it was all changed? Maybe we had made the wrong decision. Maybe it wasn't our right to change nature by chopping her trees. Then the fire came to take the decision right out of our hands. The fire burnt all of our six acres and changed it completely. And I realised the lesson is: change is the nature of life."

The outer world gives perfect feedback, through reflection, on what you need to understand about your life - if you can interpret the event. Faced with the same reality, Beth has coped with the fire in a different way from the rest of her family, because she could extract meaningfulness from the event rather than fear. Seeing our thoughts manifest, as in synchronicity, can be an incredibly powerful lesson, more powerful perhaps, than the processing of a dream.

Was Beth's experience a synchronicity, a 'death of the old, birth of the new' insight that the whole family was struggling with? Certainly Beth describes her inner conflict, prior to the fire, as resistance to change. As her unconscious worked on the problem and got close to delivering the 'change is good' message, her outer life reinforced, through mirroring, the same picture. Lastly, it exhibited several of the common synchronicity themes again: death, renewal, change. In Beth's mind the whole episode was a beautiful example of a deeply meaningful synchronicity, an outer world reflection of an inner world thought.

Now take another look at the situation from my point of view. As I read Beth's letter which was dated 3 December, a thought crossed my mind. Although I could see the relevance of burn out and change in my own life at the time (Beth being an outer world symbol for me too), I vaguely remembered dreaming about a fire engine and I had a niggling feeling that it might have been a precognitive dream. Beth's letter had given me no indication of when the fire had been, so with all the excitement of a detective at work on a case, I consulted my dream journal.

My dream entitled 'Fire Engine', was recorded as, 'Can't recall, just know I dreamed of a fire engine'. A little disappointed with myself for the distinct lack of detail, at least I had a date. My dream had occurred during the night of 13/14 November. I had interpreted the dream as 'beware burn out'. I checked back through my diaries and my memory and estimated that I'd probably only remembered around three or four dreams of fire engines in my life, so it wasn't as if they were regular features in my dreams. I wrote back to Beth confidently predicting that the date of her fire was around the date of my dream. I was right. The fire had occurred on 14 November, only hours after I awoke from sleep.

Now we seem to have a labelling dilemma. Although my dream recall lacked detail, my level of confidence in replying to Beth indicates a strong connection between my dream and her reality. My dream could have sat snugly in Chapter 1 as a simple example of a precognitive dream, albeit a tiny one. Yet from Beth's perspective, the fire was a synchronicity in the now. Precognition and synchronicity begin to intertwine, the definition dependent only on the point of view of the observer. The timescape model of a timeless, futureless, pastless world of now springs to mind. What appears to be the future already out there on a different grid reference on the timescape map is, in reality, an illusion, since there is only now. Time is in the mind of the beholder. We overlapped and shared the same moment, one in dream reality, one in waking reality, because our similar inner thoughts coincided. We are thought. Where thoughts coincide, we do too. The moment was the same, but our individual perceptions of the time differed.

I believe this is indeed the point. Perceptually we are, as human beings, a pretty deluded lot. Illusion is our daily bread. We believe we distinguish a difference between precognition and synchronicity, whereas in fact the difference is an illusion based on our inability to rid ourselves of the concept of linear time.

In this one ever reflecting now moment that I believe life is, my own inner observation of potential burnout and change was a thought form captured in a dream yet also out there in the ocean of thought. My thought, partially resolved through attention to my dream, was not strong enough to create the material fire in my own life but it coincided with Beth's thoughts which were sufficiently resonant to materialise as a bushfire in her own back yard. Imagine a set of crystal glasses shattering in unison as a perfect high-pitched note is played, resonating the crystal to breaking point. So it is, I believe, that similar thoughts, like crystal glasses, resonate at a similar pitch. The purest crystals, the strongest thoughts, may materialise. For example, burnout thoughts may materialise as fire. The less pure thoughts, burnout tinged with survival perhaps, are violently shaken but do not eventuate. The concept of tuning in to someone else's thoughts when you are going through similar circumstances may be an extremely accurate metaphor!

You are thought, indeed myriad thoughts, each with its signature frequency, each pitched to resonate in unison with similar frequencies, be they conscious or unconscious, another person's thoughts or your own. Where resonance reaches a critical threshold level, thought energy becomes matter. Your thoughts materialise. Your physical body together with the outer world that you perceive in this now moment is the material flip side of your strongest thoughts. What is coming up from your unconscious, especially at times of change, emerges with sufficient energy that it frequently and multiply materialises in your outer world as synchronicity. The upcoming energy is often expressed first as a dream, so understanding the dream empowers you to accelerate the blossoming of the thought and its materialisation in your outer world, or to defuse it by making appropriate changes in your conscious world.

In the same moment we are all interconnected, and prematerialised thought knows no geographical bounds. We share one ocean of thought, hanging our individual hats on the different waves we call our bodies and daily reality, but really, underneath it all, we communicate on the one collective unconscious net. Where similar thoughts are shared, we resonate at the same frequency and tune in to each other's mirrored reflections of ourselves. Our lives overlap in the one everchanging now, be they dream worlds or waking worlds, be they labelled as precognition or synchronicity. We are thought and where thoughts coincide, we do too, with or without the physical body, with or without the illusion of time.