Reincidence and the Rule of Three

I dreamed a new word for a run of coincidence: re-incidence, or reincidence. Waking, this seems to me to be a very useful term to describe a run of coincidence.
     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"

The Triple Goddess Rules in Asheville

I dreamed a new word for a run of coincidence: re-incidence, or reincidence. Waking, this seems to me to be a very useful term to describe a run of coincidence.
     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"

Dreaming at Malaprops

Asheville, North Carolina

-

"I'm a dreamer," Emoke B'racz, the owner of Malaprops bookstore in Asheville, greets me when I slip through the door behind the three wild sculpted ladies on the sidewalk. I respond that it seems to me that everyone who has the passion and fortitude to run an independent bookstore in current economic conditions is a dreamer. "Maybe so," she agrees, "but I learned to dream with my grandmother in a village in Hungary. She learned from her grandmother. And we've dreamed together long-distance." She recounts, with a wistful smile, a dream from many years ago in which she was trying to find her grandmother and give her a bathrobe. She had a great sense of blessing and relief when she succeeded. Later she learned that at the time of her dream, her grandmother had been in a hospital and was feared to be close to death. After the dream, she recovered and was allowed to return home.

Emoke's mother named her after the favorite concubine of Attila the Hun, and she has wonderful fight in her. When she came to Asheville in the early 1980s and opened Malaprops on downtown Hayward Street, there wasn't much going on around the store. Emoke's vision coincided with a cultural and economic resurgence in this lovely little city nestled among the mountains.

We had a large and lively turnout for my talk at Malaprops that night. When someone asked about how to break a dream drought, I was able to recall an incident from my first visit to Asheville, back in 1997. I gave a lecture at the local campus of the University of North Carolina. Afterwards, a distinguished professor in his mid-60s approached me and said graciously, "You are a wonderful speaker. I could listen to you all night. However, I have no direct evidence that I can trust anything you say because I have never remembered a dream in my life. So I have no personal proof that dreaming exists."

"That changed tonight," I told him. "You spent the evening with more than a hundred people who are all passionate about dreams. This kind of enthusiasm is viral. It's gotten into you and tonight you'll go home and dream up a storm."

The professor left with his eyebrows crawling toward his hairline. But in the morning, he reappeared at the door of my workshop. "I've got money," he cried, waving a check. "You have to let me in. I don't know how you did it, but I had a doozy of a dream last night and I've got to share it." That workshop was fully booked, but of course we magicked up space for the professor who had remembered a dream for the first time in his life.

I asked him to tell us his dream, like a story, and he took us on a magic mystery tour that began with the professor riding in the back of a long black limousine driven by a chauffeur named Spirit. They stop for gas at a service station where he recognizes everyone he knows who has died. They proceed to a strange multi-level building that proves to be a ferry boat with a mysterious pilot on top that is preparing for a crossing.

This was all too rich for us to sit around merely analyzing it. "Let's turn it into dream theatre," I proposed. The professor, naturally, had no idea what this meant. I explained that I would help him to cast the members of our workshop in the roles of every character and element in his dream - including the gas pumps and trash bins at the service station, the wheels of the limo, and the "beefy" friend who had died. Soon the man who had never recollected a dream was watching with delight as 45 workshop participants brought his dream alive, in every detail, all around him. He got to interview his dream characters, and clarified the nature of the crossing and the way in which the dream might be preparing him - in a generous and inspiriting way - for a big journey that lay in his future, into life beyond this life. The whole experience filled him with courage and joy. He wrote to me afterwards that this was one of the greatest experiences of his life.

Cheered by this tale, the person who had complained of a dream drought at Malaprops left - with a couple of my signed books in hand - promising to ask for a juicy dream that night. I know she succeeded, since she turned up at my subsequent workshop, eager to tell the dream that had come.