Synchronicity tales: Late on the train, on time for the Savior

I took the train to Manhattan on Tuesday to give a lecture on Jung, Pauli and the development of synchronicity theory for the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology. I allowed for a 2-hour delay on the ride. I arrived at Penn Station precisely 2 hours late, and not on the train I had booked with a 2:00 PM departure time. The 3:00 PM train was opening its doors as the delayed 2:00 PM train shunted in from a long journey from Toronto and - after wavering between the two - I decided to go with the "later" train. We were then stopped for an hour after hitting an ATV [all-terrain vehicle] on the tracks; the kid who had been fooling around on the ATV was - remarkably - unhurt.

At Penn Station, I calculated I had just enough time to walk through the evening rush hour to the brownstone on East 39th Street that houses the C.G. Jung Center.

When I first came here, many years ago, I had to wait at reception while the fellow manning the booth dealt with a telephone call. I heard him say to the caller, "I'm afraid it won't be possible to book a private session with Professor Jung. Doctor Jung died in 1961."

Tickled, I asked, "Does Jung get a lot of calls like that?"

"At least three or four a week."

Reflecting on how Jung used to talk to the dead, I said, "Maybe, given who Jung is, you could manage to arrange some appointments. Of course, this would require a very long-distance call."

With a few minutes to spare before the start of my lecture, I headed for the bookshop at the Jung Center. A dapper, older gentleman came up and introduced himself. "I am Sotiris Kitsopoulos, and I challenge you to say that back to me." I made what I thought was a fair attempt, and was struck by the first name. "Sotiris?" I repeated. My Greek is limited, but I recognized the derivation of the name. "Doesn't that mean Savior?"

His eyes gleamed.

"It's a very Jungian archetypal moment," I observed. "The name of the first person who introduces himself to me tonight is Savior."

"Did you know Pauli?" Dr Kitsopoulos asked.

"I was eleven when Pauli died."

"Ah yes, you are younger. I took a class in theoretical physics with Pauli in Zurich. I have some personal reminiscences. Would you like to hear them?"

Of course. We sat together on a sofa in front of the collected works of Jung and my new acquaintance regaled me with accounts of the performance of Wolfgang Pauli - the brilliant pioneer of quantum physics who won the Nobel Prize and helped Jung develop his synchronicity theory - as a teacher.

Pauli must rank high in the pantheon of those regarded by their students as crazy professors. In front of a class, he would be seized by a violent nervous tic that had him heaving his torso back and forth. He would chalk great arcs of numbers and equations on a blackboard, but as the sequence continued the figures would become vanishingly small so that no one could make out where the process led. He would pause in mid-sentence and stare up at the ceiling for what seemed like an aching eternity.

With his vivid recollections, Sotiris walked me around Zurich with his crazy professor and his fellow-students. Through his eyes, I watched Pauli eating lunch most days at his favorite restaurant, the Sunnehus. Dr Kitsopoulos recalled the day when he saw Pauli crossing a street, heaving his torso back and forth, apparently oblivious to a tram that was rattling towards him. "He didn't see the tram. We held our breath. He just escaped being hit, never changing his pace. Then we saw a second tram rushing from the opposite direction. Caught between them, Paul vanished from view. We really thought we had lost him, but when the trams had passed, there was Pauli, quite unaware. His pace must have been just right."

I caught a little rhyme in the day. At Albany-Rensselaer station, four hours earlier, I had hovered between two trains, needing to decide which to take. I was also tickled by the way synchronicity comes in to play when I speak in public about Pauli. Last year I spoke on a public radio show in San Francisco about how I solved the mystery of the "Chinese Woman" in Pauli's dreams, and as soon as the show was over I found an email from a listener who had known the "Chinese Woman" (the experimental physicist Dr Chien Shiung Wu); you can read the full report here.

My conversation with Pauli's student - a man who went on to make a distinguished scientific career - was interrupted by my hosts. Time to get started. The auditorium was full. I was cautious when I took my place at the podium, because I recalled the Pauli Effect. Wolfgang Pauli was notorious for his alleged ability to make mechanical things go haywire, on a fantastic scale, by his mere presence; you can read about this in "The Man Who Blew Things Up, my chapter on Pauli in The Secret History of Dreaming. The air conditioning wasn't working, they explained. So a fan had been set up in the corner, perfectly positioned to blow any notes I placed on the lectern all over the room. I reverted to my default mode, of speaking without notes.

I ran out of time before I came to the last recorded exchanges between Jung and Pauli, which had been much on my mind since I reviewed the extraordinary 26-year correspondence between these two intellectual giants whose minds worked together on the quest to understand the interweaving of mind and matter, psyche and physis, in the larger reality. In his last letter to Jung (August 5, 1957), less than a year before his sudden death from pancreatic cancer, Pauli reported that in dreams, he was spending a lot of time in the constellation of Perseus, in the vicinity of the "demon star", Algol, a variable star that blinks off and on, from an earthly observer's perspective. In his response, Jung spoke to Pauli with deep respect and gratitude, and edged towards a perspective on synchronicity that - contrary to his previous insistence on the "acausal" nature of this phenomenon - allowed for the possibility of "an independent causal chain of events" hidden from the comprehension of contemporary science.

As I rode the night train home, I remembered that Jung once remarked that he was not a Jungian. If he were still with us, I am confident he would be surprising us with new models and definitions of synchronicity, and much else. To check on that would require a long-distance call.

Synchronicity Tales: Spirit Level

At the end of a marvelous weekend of dream theater and group journeying in Portland, I caught a redeye flight back to the East Coast. The airline bumped me up to first class, which would have been more of a bonus had I not had the bulkhead in front of me, crowding my legs without allowing the possibility of sliding my feet under a seat in front. My rowmate was a well-traveled older guy who confided - after a few glasses of wine - that he had just fulfilled one of his big life dreams by flying a little Piper Cherokee across the continent, following the route of the explorers Lewis and Clark. He waxed poetic as he described the joy of viewing the changing landscapes from just 6,000 feet up. Where was his plane now? "I'm not crazy. I gave the keys to a friend to fly it home to Florida for me."

He was a pilot in Vietnam, he confided. When we shared memories of that wretched, doomed war (I visited Vietnam as a reporter) we found we had known some of the same people.

Now he had tracked Lewis and Clark from the air, what were his remaining ambitions? "To go round Tierra del Fuego, following the route of Magellan," he said without hesitation. Then, after a pause, "And to make my peace with God." He revealed that he had been raised in Alabama by fundamentalist parents and has been in recovery ever since. I asked if he remembered his dreams. He seemed startled. To encourage him, I quoted Jung's statement, written near the end of his life, that "It is an age-old fact that God speaks, chiefly, in dreams and visions." "Jeez," my rowmate reached for his glass. "I hope it's not God that's speaking in my dreams. I'm scared of my dreams."

I didn't press the theme. There are many men in this world who are bold adventurers on land and air and sea, but shy away from the fields of dreams. The talk released a boyhood memory from my companion.

"When I reached my teens,my grandfather gave me a spirit level and told me the secret of life. Keep the bubble in the middle. A few years ago I found a place in England that makes these neat little teak wood spirit levels. I give them to friends with a plaque that says Keep the bubble in the middle."

Good advice. I wonder what counsel this wise grandfather will have to offer now, if the grandson is ever ready to listen his dreams.

Awakening to dreams in Portland

Portland, Oregon

Dreaming is not fundamentally about sleep, though I greatly value the sleep dreams that come spontaneously and offer us an objective view of ourselves and our place in the worlds. Dreaming is essentially about waking up to a larger reality and a secret logic of events that are often hidden from the everyday conscious mind. So it seems fitting that my Active Dreaming workshop in Portland this weekend is unfolding in a lovely center called Awakenings. The sun smiled on us all Saturday, which is already a dreamlike event in this rainy city.

I asked the dreamers who joined our circle to introduce themsleves by sharing their intention for the weekend, and the title of a dream or image, which enabled us gto taste the flavor of each other's imaginations right at the start. I noted some of the intention:

"I want to learn how to bring the energy of my dreams into 3D reality."

"I want to make closer links between my dreaming and my writing."

"I'm here to deepen my practice of dreaming."

"I want to use dreaming to integrate my inner child into my adult world."

"I'm here to acquire tools to re-vision education for children, to help them and their families bring back soul and to make them safe with their dreams."

"I'm here to move beyond getting weireded out when my dreams turn into real events in waking life."

"I'm here to find new direction for my painting, and my life."

These generous statements of intention gave us a vivid sense of expanding horisons of possibility. I demonstrated our quick, high-energy dream sharing process - Lightning Dreamwork - with three volunteers who undertook the assignment to tell us a dream as a story, and to hold the attention of the audience. One of the gifts of dream sharing is that, when we do it right, we find our voice and develop our skills as storytellers. An even greater gift, especially for newcomers, is that when we are heard with deep attention and given the right kind of feedback, we receive vital validation of our inner lives and our soul quests.

Stephani told us a dream of being back in her former home, trying to sort out old clothersm when a pirate ship appeared on a body of water at her door that doesn't exist in the regular world.

Jaya's dream took us into deep ancestral territory. She found herself riding in the back of a van by a river. She witnessed a mysterious ritual in which seven people clad in wolfskins performed a sacred dance around the bodies of dead wolves. As they danced, light rose from them, forming a cone shape that then opened out and produced the head of a wolf among the stars. The dreamer urgently wanted to stop the van and see more, but was unable to influence the driver. She woke with a profound sense of longing. She leaped at the suggestion that she might be able to reenter the dream, with the help of shamanic drumming, and get out of the van and ask the wolf people for permission to learn the nature of their ritual and of their connection with the Wolf Star.

In a dream of equal mythic power, a man stepped into a river carrying a sword. In the water, his sword became a chalice. On the far side of the river, he saw a family of bears. He became alarmed when they stared at him fiercely, and he turned away though he felt the object of his quest lay beyond the bears. "I feel the bears are gatekeepers, and that I need to face them and go beyond them." He welcomed the idea that he too, could reenter his dream, wide awake and conscious, and confront the bears and seek to discover what lay beyond them.

So here we had two excellent plans for dream reentry and group dreaming - for an exercise in what could be termed shamanic lucid dreaming. The wolf dreamer and the bear dreamer gave permission for the whole group to travel with them, back into their dreams and to explore beyond the remembered scenes and carry the action forward. In two group journeys powered by shamanic drumming, we shared extraordinarily powerful and moving adventures.


As a lunchbreak assignment, I asked everyone to be alert for anything striking or unusual that entered their field of perception as they roamed the town - to be open to receiving symbolic popups from the world. Waiting for coffee on my way back from lunch, I noticed Stephani, who had dreamed of pirates, standing in front of a corner bar, a block away from our workshop site, talking on her cell phone. The sign above her head, apparently unnoticed until now, read "The Jolly Roger". Life rhymes, and there are dresms that want to come into the surface world, some singing pirate songs.

Synchronicity Tales: Library Angels on the Plane

Portland, Oregon

I boarded the plane bound from Minneapolis to Portland with my in-flight reading in hand: Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, an excellent study of how Shakespeare rose from obscure origins to become the greatest writer in the English language. When I found my aisle seat, the fellow by the window asked how I was enjoying the book. Quite soon he was telling me how he was in Statford last year when the news broke that a hitherto unknown portrait of Shakespeare had been identified in an Irish country house and was then on its way to the bard's birthplace.
    My literate rowmate proved to be an artist and glass-blower. He gave me his card, which bears the following inscription:

MARSHALL HYDE
artist
pilgrim
bon vivant


I am a keen student of how people define themselves, and I told Marshall that this was one of the best three word self-definitions I had come across.
    Asked to define my own work, I spoke about how I help people to use dreams as a source of guidance and imagery for self-healing, and as the royal road to identifying our essential stories, the ones we want to remember and enact.
    He wanted to know more about the application of dreamwork to healing. I told him a little of the story of my friend Wanda Burch, a twenty year survivor of breast cancer who gives her own account of her use of Active Dreaming techniques in her brave and beautiful book She Who Dreams. Marshall took note of the title, explaining that he was on his way to Portland to support a family member who was recovering from cancer.
    Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a young man who took the seat between us. More introductions ensued. The young man told us he recently graduated from St Olof's with a degree in music. He is a vocalist who sang with the St Olof's choir all over the British Isles, and in many other places.
     I asked him whether it is true that composers tend to look down on librettists to the extent suggested in Robertson Davies' novel The Lyre of Orpheus, which I had finished the night before. He was unfamiliar with the novel, so I explained the plot, which turns on the creative pains and misadventures of an unlikely crew who set about trying to make an opera out of sketches by Hoffmann, with an entirely new libretto, while the long-dead composer watches from the limbo of composers who are waiting for someone to complete their unfinished work.
     "E.T.A. Hoffmann?" the new graduate echoed. "We studied him in my last semester." He gave me a rundown on Hoffmann's musical oeuvre, and asked about Hoffmann's second career as the author of dark fantasy stories, which were based in no small degree on his dreams and nightmares and sightings of apparitions, including several versions of the double or doppelganger.
    He spoke of a piece his choir had sung in his last concert, with lyrics from Goethe. His face fell when he added that the brilliant young composer was struggling with cancer. He had heard the tale end of my account of Wanda's use of dream imagery in helping to heal cancer, and asked me to repeat the details of her book.
    I think we were accompanied on that flight by angels who were both literate and caring.

Where to find missing dreams

What happens to the dreams we don't remember?

I asked myself that question one morning, when I awoke with little dream recall, though I could feel that my night had been highly active. I decided to go back to bed, focused on this intention: I would like to visit a place where forgotten dreams are kept.

I drifted into the following conscious dream, which I titled

THE COSMIC DREAM VIDEO STORE

I arrive in a space that looks like a neighborhood video store. I don’t walk through the door. I am simply there. There do not seem to be other clients, or any of the regular clerks.

There is a strange creature among the shelves. Its head is birdlike, with a single eye, and – like its long neck and upper body – is chromium-plated. I notice this thing is next to the Horror section. I wonder whether it is simply a display, then see that it is alive, moving slowly on multiple feet or pads. I give it a wide berth.

The videos on this level are organized according to familiar categories – Drama, Comedy, Family, Adult etc. There is a large Adult section most of whose content is quite unfamiliar to me. I realize that a block has been placed on some of this material, so that it did not reach my conscious mind, or – in cases where the film has been rated I (for Intrusion) was not allowed through during the night.

Beyond the first room, I see a space devoted to Diagnostic Imagery.

I also discover sections devoted to my dreams of individual people. I have only to focus on a name or title, and the movie begins to play all around me, so I can enter it at will. There is no need here for a DVD player. You simply select a movie, and it starts playing.

I see an unremembered dream of a woman who had disappeared completely from my remembered dreams. In the dream movie she tells me, “I want to give you a life of exquisite beauty.” She changes from a sarong to the flowing evening gown of an older woman; its gauzy fabric floats about her.

I am surprised to find a fairly large section devoted to another woman who has only appeared in my remembered dreams once or twice, and equally infrequently in my waking thoughts. I sample one of these dream movies. In it, she shapeshifts back and forth between the forms of a woman and a flowering vine.

I realize I have a guide available, a woman in a sky-blue uniform, rather like a flight attendant’s outfit. She shows me a staircase leading down, through an opening that is doughnut-shaped, padded with blue upholstery. I go down, and am surprised to find myself at a bus stop. I wait at the bus stop for a time, then realize that just as a bus is a shared vehicle, so this bus stop is a portal to the realm of shared dreams.

I am excited by the prospect of exploring dream adventures I may have shared with other people, and may not have remembered. I focus on three women who are central to my life. In each case, I ask to view the dream movie that presents our initial encounter (whenever and wherever that may have been). I find that there is an immense archive of shared dreams involving each of these people. One is as large as a great gothic cathedral, with shelves rising to the high roof many stories above. I watch several dream movies in each location. They take me deeply and vividly into scenes of other lives and other times - of leopard people in Africa, of Celtic voyagers in a coracle on a cold northern sea, of a turning castle in a high desert landscape where everything is the color of sand except for the pretty star-shaped flowers, blue and purple, on a terrace. The dream movies reveal a hidden order of connection in all these relationships, transcending our present lives.

I know now that there is no limit to the entertainment and instruction available in this Cosmic Video Library. I note again that some of the unremembered dreams were not merely forgotten, but blocked. There is an operating censor who tries to shut out psychic intrusions and projections.

I decide to make a quick scan of materials available for the history of dreaming. A new movie starts playing. It involves an ancient battle in China. In the time of the Tang dynasty, guided by a dream, a general deploys his troops in a mountain pass to crush an enemy.

I will watch no more dream movies on this visit, because my female guide in the sky-blue uniform is telling me it's time to get up and write things down. Time to re-member the forgotten dreams.

Living by story

Australian Aborigines say that the Big stories are hunting the right people to tell them, like predators stalking in the bush. The trick is to put ourselves in a place where the Big stories can find us.

All of us are living a story. If we don't know what it is, it is likely to be a little story, a limiting one, woven from past disappointments and stitched tight by the people who are forever telling us who we are and what we can and cannot accomplish. If we fail to define ourselves, we let ourselves be defined by others.

As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observes in After Virtue, "We are story-telling animals who must ask ourselves, "of what story or stories do I find myself a part?' in order to answer the question, 'what am I to do?'"

When we are seized by the Big story, we step beyond limiting definitions and beliefs. Great healing becomes available because we can now draw on the immense energy that becomes available when we know we are serving a larger purpose. We gain courage and stamina to get through the ups and downs of everyday life, aware that we are acting in a deeper drama.

This summer, I'll lead a weekend workshop devoted to "The Healing Power of Story" in a marvelous octagon building in the midst of blueberry fields in Ashton, Maryland. We'll explore and perform some of the Big stories from myth and literature that can heal and empower: the Japanese story of the sun goddess who hid her light because she was abused, and how she was coaxed back; the Gnostic story of the forgetful envoy who was sent into this world on a vital mission but forgot what it was; Dante's story of how we approach our truest life teacher by knocking on the heart. From dreams and shared journeys, spontaneous theater and entertainments, we'll harvest personal stories, charged with energy and meaning, in order to become the authors of our own life scripts.

The image is of the torchlit path to the meeting yurt at one of my favorite retreat centers, Mosswood Hollow in Duvall WA (think Wind in the Willows in the midst of the evergreen forests of the Pacific Northwest). I am leading my Dream Teacher Training here in July and a weekend of Imaginal Healing in October.

The truth may be a walk around a lake

Shaver Pond, Rensselaer County, New York

"The truth may be a walk around a lake," wrote Wallace Stevens. When I need to get rid of the clutter of negative thoughts and everyday worries, there are few things better than a good long walk around a lake in the woods near my home in upstate New York. As I get back in sync with the rhythms of the natural world, I both lose myself - that is to say, my little self - and return to my deeper self.

There are several phases to a walking meditation.

As in sitting meditation, I start by paying attention to my breathing. I try not to interfere with its flow, though the most immediate effect of this refocusing of awareness is to produce longer, more regular inhalations and exhalations. My breathing changes as I set off at a faster clip across open ground. After a time, I find I am following my breath without trying to regulate its autonomic flow. When I reach the awareness that my breath is breathing me, I have already released many of the burdens I brought with me.

Now I extend my awareness into my body's movements over the rough ground. The play of light across leaves and lake water is beguiling, but it is still outside myself. I am not yet at one with it, My efforts to find stillness in gentle motion are threatened by the return of troubles and calculations that were with me before I came here. They gesture and snicker, pressing for my attention.

Separated from the natural forest by my jungle of thoughts, I focus on one thought. It rises spontaneously: I will follow the flow of light, within me and around me.

I speak a simple affirmation at the water's edge:

I give thanks for the morning. I give thanks for the day. I give thanks for the gifts and the challenges of this lifetime. I will follow the Light.

I am humming, then toning, letting the vowel sounds soar to higher and higher pitch. A song bubbles up in me, and I smile when it bursts free. I sing aloud all the way to the beaver lodge at the eastern edge of the lake, and for another mile more to the abandoned jetty on the far side. The effect of my off-key warbling is to open a space at the center of my consciousness. At its distant periphery, I can observe old images of fear and worry and confusion, looming up then falling away like blown leaves as I choose to deny them the energy of my attention and belief.

As my inner space continues to expand and deepen, I feel again, blessedly, in contact with that still small voice you know you need never question.

I celebrate and join in the sparkling beauty of the natural world around me. I breathe with the swaying branches of the evergreens. I shrug off my clothes and splash and swim in the lake. I am at one with everything around me. I could stay here all day, but words come flocking and I must go home and write.