While the words "coincidence" and "synchronicity" define a meaningful conjunction of an outer event and an inner sense of significance in a given moment of time, "reincidence" describes a sequence of conjunctions of the same kind, playing out over time. For example, you might dream of a flamingo, or see one on the side of a van, and then it's flamingos all over - on a suburban lawn, on a beer coaster, in the description of staff officers (with red stripes on their pants) in a thriller set in World War II, on a baby blanket.
Back in April, 2010, I shared my oneiric word invention with a gathering of my frequent flyers on a mountain in the New York Adirondacks where we have been engaging in group adventures in shamanic journeying, mythic theater and dream exploration for many years. I had quite forgotten this discovery, and failed to make use of this handy neologism in my writing on synchronicity, until a friend reminded me about "reincidence" up on that same mountain over the past weekend. As we walked by a mountain lake, she also reminded me that I had cited my experience of a run of threes - as in three redheads, and the Triple Goddess - in Asheville shortly before my dream of "reincidence" as an example of how this phenomenon runs.
I pulled out my 2010 journal and noted the following sequence:
April 15, 2010 - Big crowd at Malaprops for my talk and signing. A woman asks me about the significance of the number 3 in the title of my book The Three "Only" Things. I give her a bit of a lecture about three as the Celtic number, the number of the Trinity and of the Triple Goddess and the Three Fates, ending with the statement, "Three times makes the charm".
April 16, 2010 - I wake from dream feeling super-charged, with a shimmer of possibility all about me. I have learned to associate this shimmer with the play of numinous forces. In my dream, taking giant steps across a beautiful landscape, I feel that each step I take is being taken in more than one world, and is bringing worlds together. I notice three red haired women walking together up the slope towards me. They move so close together that their bodies appear to be joined, and I notice their heads are all enclosed by a single hood. Am I looking at the Triple Goddess? I have seen them before, going a different way. They look at me with intent interest and I feel a stir of excitement that they are in the field.
April 16, 2010, afternoon - I sip a glass of wine at a civilized establishment, the Book Exchange & Champagne Bar, in the former Battery Hotel, and admire the griffins that guard the entrance of The Grove Arcade across the street. Three women, two of them redheads, the third a blonde, take the next table. In jolly mood, sipping margaritas, they strike up conversation with me and prove to be very interested in dreams. I say to the blonde, "If you were a redhead, I would think that the three of you are manifesting my dream from last night." She replies, "Oh, I'm a natural redhead. I colored my hair just last week for fun. I think I'll go back to red."
April 16, 2010 - evening. A cheerful crowd gather for my Synchronicity playshop at Jubilee, a lively community church downtown. I drum for the group, asking them to relax into the rhythm and pull up a dream or memory we can use in a game. My mind turns again to the three redheads of my dream, the many forms of the Triple Goddess and the Three Fates, and the distinctly Celtic quality of all this. Through my stir of images comes the keening of bagpipes. A piper is playing at John of the Wood, the Celtic pub behind Jubilee. The sound of the pipes, skirling over the drumming, is irresistible. When the time comes for us to write on index cards a summary of a dream or memory that came during the drumming, I write: "My ancestors are calling me, reaching through my stir of memories. They want me to honor and celebrate and embody their knowing."
April 17, 2010 - I wake from a dream in which Lady Charlotte Guest, one of the first to translate and make accessible Celtic literature including he Mabinogion, invites me to stay with her at a country house . We discuss how events and opportunities recur in a life or in a day, and how when something recurs three times, we are prompted to pay attention.
Later that spring, in a powerful dream of love and longing, I was presented with a choice of three paths in the greenwoods.
The mountain lake where my friend reminded me that I invented the word "reincidence"
12 comments:
May the Imbas Forosnai be open to you, and may you be thrice blessed in your endeavors at restoring the dreaming to a place of honor in the world.
And may yours be gthe gift of goodly speech, Justin. I'm smiling over your use of the term "imbas forosnai". In some of the stories of Finn, its practice is the ultimate form of thumb-sucking and/or finger-licking, as when Finn sticks a thumb in the closing door of a sid (hollow hill; fairy realm) and finds afterwards that when he sticks his thumb in his mouth he can see what is otherwise hidden from human sight. Departing from the obscurities of Cormac's Glossary, Kuno Meyer (about whom I write in The Dreamer's Book of the Dead) settled on "Knowledge which illuminates" as his preferred translation for imbas forosnai, and placed it in a fraternity of three gifts of poetic seership, of which the others are tenm laida("illumination of song") and dichetal di chennaib ("extempore incantation"). There we go with that Celtic hree again...
Llevo unos años observando y aprendiendo de mis sueños y de las coincidencias en mi vida y me he llevado una gran sorpresa al encontrarme con usted.
Siento no poder escribir en inglés pero algún día si usted me entiende le contaré un sueño que implica al resto de la humanidad y no sé como interpretar ni seguir para poder hacer algo al respecto.
Muchas gracias por sus cooncimientos y sus maravillosos libros!!
Thank you!!
Hi Robert, In this reading, the ash in Ashville strikes me--the Easter season past, phoenix ashes--may your new venture rise!
Deva - me alegro mucho sus palabras. Siento no poder escribir bien en espanol, pero entiendo perfectamente.
Lou - If you leave out the E you get to your poetic reading, and there is certainly living poetry on all sides on Asheville. Due diligence, however; the city is names after an early bigwig named Ashe.
Hi Robert,
What a great dream and life experience.
A few nights ago I dreamed I had red hair. I woke up deciding to dye my hair red this summer. This will be the 3rd time I've dyed it red :-)
Keep enjoying those grand adventures!
Steffani - I was surprised by the recurring redheads in my Asheville Dreaming. There are several more installments to this story, which I may report here. I am reminded that in Scotland, the land of my father's people and a place where witch-trials were conducted later than in most other Western countries, red hair (along with possession of a cat) was held to be a sign that someone was a witch.
In a chapter titled "Angels" in my book, I invoke the quote "...and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a
dusty world." In my life story, Wolfe's angels - or my own southern version of them - found their way again and again into the miracle of chance in personal encounters with great wooden angels carved into doorways and in encounters that seemed fated and unlikely in the same breath. For years I had a recurring dream of an old southern porch draped in clematis - there was a familiarity to it that made it mine although I have yet to find it in waking reality. In waking from that dream I would sit on that porch in my imagination and, when I did, I inevitably went to Wolfe's porch and felt the heavy pounding of Wolfe's darker angels walking in repetitive circles, seeking inner peace. I would open the screen door and invite them in - and that simple act gave the angels their own miracle.
Wanda - Thomas Wolfe's angel now stands in Oakdale cemetery in Hendersonville NC, very near the site of my workshop last weekend (which I may report in another blog). In "Look Homeward, Angel" he also writes:
"...by the door, he put the heavy simpering figure of an angel...it had come from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore a smile of soft stone idiocy."
Hello Robert - Your composite experience of the Goddess very much reminds me of a dream I had some years back which still haunts me. The dream was of a women with three heads. She was dressed in a long black robe and each head was covered with a black hood. But it was possible to make out some wisps of rich red hair peeping out from under the hood of the first head. The second had red hair plied with grey streaks peeping out from hers, and the third had grey hair coloured a very pale strawberry. I don't know if there is such a colour as strawberry grey - but that would be it.
The women spoke one word and that was 'Moithernan' - which could be a play on mother, nan, her etc - but which certainly left me a feeling of having been visited by the Goddess. There was also a sense of destiny about this dream. In the women's hands were a spindle and some wool. Your dream and the play of synchronicity that followed brought this back very powerfully.
Dear Helen - Thanks for that very powerful dream image of the three-headed woman. The objects she/they are holding evoke the Greek conception of the three Fates, which continues to play on through the Celtic imagination. "Strawberry grey" is an interesting hair color option!
The night after my "three redheads" dream, I dreamed I met Lady Charlotte Guest and she invited me to stay at her country house. This has me on the trail of the Triple Goddess - and other things - in the Mabinogion, which she was first to make accessible in English translation from the Welsh.
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