
There are coincidences, then there are surreal experiences I can’t explain.
Last week, before dawn, I had a dream. I was at Griffin’s Grocery picking up a few items when, walking past the refrigerator, I decided that I also needed eggs. At home, before placing them in the fridge, I opened the carton to find one egg, furthest to the right along the fold, broken. I hadn’t checked before I left the store.
Later that same morning, now wide awake, I reach into my actual refrigerator for a carton of eggs, its blue and green label same as the one in my dream, to find an egg—in the exact same spot—cracked in half around its middle, top leaning over, leaking gooey whites onto the glass. It appears to have just happened, the spill not even dried. For a few moments I stand there in shock, door wide open, staring. I checked these eggs, I’m sure of it.
The term synchronicity was coined by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who took seriously dreams as a window into the psyche. "The unconscious helps by communicating things to us, or making figurative allusions," he wrote. "It has other ways, too, of informing us of things which by all logic we could not possibly know." In his book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung defines synchronicity as the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear meaningfully related but that have no discernible causal connection. Jung held that such experiences were a normal and healthy function of the mind, ones he had had himself.
Once, in the middle of the night, Jung awoke with a start "by a feeling of dull pain," he writes, "as though something had struck my forehead and then the back of my skull.” The following day, he received a telegram saying that his patient had committed suicide. “He had shot himself. Later, I learned that the bullet had come to rest in the back wall of the skull.” Or another time when, riding on the train, Jung was overcome with the vivid recollection of an accident he had witnessed during his military service, wherein a man had drowned. Upon arriving home, he found his grandchildren upset; the youngest boy had fallen into the water in the boathouse and nearly drowned. “The unconscious had given me a hint,” Jung writes.
Jung recounts another particularly poignant example:
A certain M. Deschamps, when a boy in Orléans, was once given a piece of plum-pudding by a M. de Fortgibu. Ten years later he discovered another plum-pudding in a Paris restaurant, and asked if he could have a piece. It turned out, however, that the plum-pudding was already ordered—by M. de Fortgibu. Many years afterwards M. Deschamps was invited to partake of a plum-pudding as a special rarity. While he was eating it he remarked that the only thing lacking was M. de Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened and an old, old man in the last stages of disorientation walked in: M. de Fortgibu, who had got hold of the wrong address and burst in on the party by mistake.
These occurrences leave us feeling uncanny precisely because they are so eerily and confoundingly inexplicable. The otherworldly, they seem to suggest, lurks below the surface of the everyday, just beyond the limits of ordinary perception. If indeed, as Rebecca Solnit writes, "ordinary is the busy absorption with the practical and petty details of everyday life,” they have the power to knock even this trained scientist, naturally skeptical of such things, onto his heels.
Throughout history, eggs have been associated with fertility and eternity. According to the University of Michigan's Dictionary of Symbolism, eggs represent “a primeval embryonic form from which the world later emerged. [An egg is] an image of totality enclosed within a shell,” a tiny kingdom encapsulated, sealed from its surroundings, a world unto itself. At first our worlds are built for us, by parents and teachers and other authority figures. Later, we put on gloves and start hauling bricks ourselves, through work and play, rewards and punishments, culture and media, and the myriad uncountable experiences that constitute an elaborate model of our surroundings, of boundaries and limits. This is me. That is you. This is how the world works. Finally, "higher" education, the pinnacle of learning, offers the tallest vantage point with the furthest view from which, it is purported, the landscape of reality can best be apprehended. But there are times when these rigid and brittle structures become compromised, when they fail and crumble, shattering on the floor.
Humpty Dumpty is one of oldest nursery rhymes in the English language. The term "humpty dumpty" originally referred to a 17th century drink of brandy boiled with ale; it was also slang for a short and clumsy person, perhaps drunk. Now known as a children’s song, Humpty Dumpty was originally posed as a riddle, a puzzle to be solved. Featured in many works of literature and pop culture, the character is usually described as an anthropomorphic egg. In Lewis Carroll's 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice again enters a fantastical dreamworld, this time by climbing through a mirror. When she encounters Humpty Dumpty perched atop a high wall ("such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how he could keep his balance"), Alice finds him pompous and aloof, quick to irritation.
Since the book's publication, "through the looking glass" has become synonymous with entering a strange or bizarre world, an unfamiliar setting where things are seen from an altered perspective. The frame through which we describe and communicate these experiences is creativity. Among its influences: The Beatles, whose "I am the Walrus", from their LSD phase (I am the eggman/ They are the eggmen/ I am the walrus/ Goo goo g’ joob) was inspired by chapter four's poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter", and The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley's account of his experiments with mescaline, itself the namesake of Jim Morrison’s psychedelic band. “The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm,” writes music producer Rick Rubin in The Creative Act: A Way of Being. “Art is our portal to the unseen world.”
The word psychedelic means "mind manifesting". During a psychedelic experience, the subconscious rises to the surface of ordinary perception, blending the real and unreal, a waking dream when the past and future drop away and one is immersed in what Solnit calls the "saturated present". A passage about life-fracturing moments from Solnit's The Faraway Nearby could just as well apply to the paradoxical nature of psychedelics: "Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door."
The Faraway Nearby is itself an exploration of paradox, starting with its title, which comes from how Georgia O'Keeffe signed letters to her husband and friends from her desert home in New Mexico: "From the faraway nearby..." Part memoir, part travelogue, part free-associative ramble, Solnit’s prose is rhapsodic and lyrical, proceeding in loops and swirls, a Russian nesting doll of stories within stories. “What’s your story?” Solnit asks in the opening line of the book. “It’s all in the telling.” In poker, a tell is a giveaway to be seen through when bluffing. To recite a story, then, is to reveal its imprint on us, the mold that defines a province of one’s internal landscape. Drawing heavily from fairy tales, folklore, fantasy, world literature, Greek myth, art, arctic expeditions, and political revolutions, Solnit weaves a rich tapestry that explores struggles with her mother’s Alzheimer’s and her own breast cancer.
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When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp amounts to indescribable awe sometimes… Have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your mental vision, except in a few hallowed moments?
– Charles Kingsley, Anglican priest (1899)
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Unlike the messy world of hospitals, failing memories, tests and prognoses, stories are clean. We love and remember stories for their clear delineation of heroes and villains, for their comfort and ultimate resolution, the happily ever after. The trouble is that the real world is nothing like that. Our truths are partial. We live in paradox, the liminal zone between – benign or malignant, six months to two years, life or death. Stories, Solnit insists, are how we navigate paradox, how we frame and reframe our lives, how we contextualize and give them meaning. Stories determine what we pay attention to, what we deem important, what we choose to believe and disbelieve, what we think possible and impossible, what we see and are blind to.
Sometimes, reflexively, to shield ourselves from pain, loneliness, shame, or an inconvenient truth, the stories we tell ourselves calcify and become cages. “The narrative we’ve constructed about life—what the world is like, how we must behave, where we fit in the scheme of things—forms a bubble that cuts us off from life as it really is,” explains psychotherapist and meditation teacher Stephan Bodian in his series The Direct Approach. We become bound by recursive thoughts and self-destructive patterns of behavior, wobbly edifices that seem in our clinging to be all that stands between us and oblivion. The power of psychedelics lies in their reliable capacity to topple these constructions, to shake us from confinement or complacency. In clinical trials, where psilocybin is showing promise in treating addiction and trauma as well as soothing terminal cancer patients staring down their own mortality, participants frequently recount the experience as among the most meaningful of their lives. Pharmacologists would describe the drug’s effects by suggesting it increases activity between areas of the brain that don’t normally communicate, as if during sleep. But is it too much to think what's happening is more than intoxication, or "hallucination"? What if instead it were a tool, a gateway to something essential? The freedom, in other words, to imagine a new story.
Last fall, after many years of interest and intrigue, I mustered the courage to try psychedelics myself. In separate sessions over a few weeks, I ate psilocybin mushrooms whole or ground and steeped in ginger tea. For six hours at a time I sat quietly alone, focused on my breath. While impossible to describe in words, the experiences were nevertheless undeniable in their import – the storm surge rushing over the breakwall, the glittering decadence of even the simplest form, convinced me beyond a doubt that there is no substitute for "pristine, direct experience", as Solnit puts it. Clarifying, invigorating, unmistakable was the feeling that I'd been given a task to complete, something I’d been avoiding.
For one, the experiences forced me to confront the degree to which I'd become an egghead, the caricature of liberal intellectual. My default attitude was to treat synchronicities, if I noticed them at all, as uninteresting, as anomalies without any particular significance. After all, writes Gary Zukav, "Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of western science." For so long I had accepted this paradigm without question that I had ceased to notice it for what it was—a story. I had begun to forget that my motivation in science was always, first and foremost, a sense of wonder. Zukav, in his book The Dancing Wu Li Masters, about new discoveries that point toward the marriage of physics and psychology, highlights a common misunderstanding. "When most people say ‘scientist’, they mean ‘technician’,” he writes. “A technician is a highly trained person whose job is to apply known techniques and principles. He deals with the known. A scientist is a person who seeks to know the true nature of physical reality. He deals with the unknown."
Just as the body needs a varied diet to stay healthy, so too does the mind wither without proper stimulation. This stimulation is most useful when it comes in the form of a challenge to our assumptions, rapping on and testing their integrity. “The spiritual world provides a sense of wonder and a degree of open-mindedness not always found within the confines of science,” writes Rick Rubin. By ‘spiritual’, Rubin means more than the strictly religious, including all phenomena that defy easy classification. “If you prefer to think of spirituality as simply believing in connection, that’s fine,” he writes. “If you choose to think of it as believing in magic, that’s fine too. These things carry a charge regardless of whether they can be proven or not.” Patterns, Rubin might say, are messages we can choose to either ignore or accept. The upshot of noticing, of suspending disbelief, is the ability to make something from nothing, to pull the rabbit from the hat.
Whereas eggs are a symbol of life, mushrooms are decomposers, consuming and breaking down dead organic matter into its component parts so it can be recycled into new forms. Due to their sudden appearance (sometimes overnight), they represent rapid growth, and are a sign of good fortune. Mushrooms, however, are only the fruiting bodies of a vast underground fungal network—fibers and tendrils, most too small to see, that permeate the soil and infiltrate the roots of plants, where they perform one of nature's most vital symbioses. Fungi absorb and supply soil nutrients plants wouldn't otherwise get; in return, the fungi get a share of photosynthetic sugars. This relationship, research has revealed, is integral to the success of both organisms, indeed to life on Earth.
My specialty is ecology, a science whose fundamental lesson is the inextricable relatedness of all organisms and processes. In this sense, synchronicities are not a one-way transmission but a circle, a cycle, a conversation.
“Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of will,” Carl Jung writes. “They are pure nature, they show us the unvarnished, natural fruit, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.”
They’re a peek below the surface, an opening to dialogue with the unknown, an invitation into ambiguity. The word dream, for instance, can refer to something imaginary or real—a nebulous figment during sleep; or an aspiration or ambition, a deeply held wish for the real world.
“Such phenomena,” noted Jung, “demonstrate that premonitions or visions very often have some correspondence in external reality.”
The word coincidence, Rebecca Solnit points out, “is often used to mean the accidental but literally means to fall together.” I don't know what a dream about a broken egg is trying to tell me, other than perhaps my world is not as sturdy as I thought. All I needed was a nudge.
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