Synchronicity

Yesterday "Jodie" (referred to earlier in this post) slept over at my house and upon waking she told me about a dream she had the previous night. It had something to do with her taking a vacation to Jerusalem. There was a song playing in the dream but she couldn't remember which one it was. Many of her recent dreams have featured songs and they sometimes have seemingly pretty pointed messages. I've observed this with great interest since I've had relatively little music featured in my dreams. I think about the thousands of songs most of us have listened to and wonder how Psyche would select from this library for a particular night. Songs often replay themselves in dreams with remarkable clarity too, which makes me wonder how much music affects us on an unconscious level that it sets itself so readily in the mind. Perhaps that's a little scary.

The morning Jodie awoke with this dream on her mind we went to breakfast at an upscale restaurant downtown and while we were waiting for our food a song came on: "Babylon" by David Gray. She suddenly realized that this was the song from her dream. Interestingly, Babylon could be thought of as an opposite of Jerusalem. In particular, the dream featured these lyrics:         

 If you want it
Come and get it
Crying out loud
The love that I was
Giving you was
Never in doubt
Let go your heart
Let go your head
And feel it now

We were only at that restaurant because someone had given me a gift card for use there. We had delayed going there several times but this day just worked out and the card was even expired. Would she have remembered that song if she hadn't had the memory cue right there at a confluence of events? Maybe, maybe not, but I find some reassurance in these synchronicities that arise out of our field of existence.

I once had an odd dream featuring a person I worked with at summer camp and then the next day I was walking through a crowded area in a park and my path intersected with this person. I hadn't seen them in many months. For whatever reason, I had decided to take a different path than what was entirely logical. Maybe synchronicity needed my thinking and moving a little differently in order to make itself known. If Jodie and I had used the gift card before it expired we might not have learned what song was in her dream and certainly not in such an interesting way. Maybe synchronicity asks us to do something a little differently each day so that something timeless and acausal can manifest into our realm. We need to stay out of the rut of normality and cold logic and ease into the flow of life and psyche.
Later on, Jodie also told me that when she was a teenager she had a number of experiences where she would have a dream with a song and then hear it on the radio the following morning. These often weren't Top 40 type songs but more obscure numbers. I wonder what this pattern is trying to communicate. These odd little synchronicities seem like a concert of sorts. We are playing, conducting, and being played by the universe.

(Originally published 8/25/14)