Synchronicity

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Ever have any experiences involving synchronicity? I've had several, personally. I'm pretty skeptical and I don't really think there's enough evidence to conclude that they're anything more than weird coincidences, but..they are weird sometimes.

The most recent example would be a few days ago. I was listening to David Byrne Radio, and some of the songs stuck out to me enough that I researched the band a little more. It was called "The Real Tuesday Weld". Tuesday Weld was apparently a popular actress, long before my time. The next day, I was reading a Fark thread that mentioned an old Michael Douglas movie called "Falling Down", about a geeky engineer who snaps and goes on a rampage in LA. It looked interesting enough that I found a torrent and downloaded it (which isn't something I do all that often). Guess who I saw in the credits? That's right, one of the character's wives was played by Tuesday Weld. Not only that, but it was one of only 4 movies she's been in over the past 15 years.

When I hear a word for the first time and learn what it means, it seems that more often than not, I'll hear it again from a totally unrelated source within the next day or two.

On quite a few occasions I'd stumble across an old rerun of a TV show that I only watched a couple times and I haven't seen in years. Out of dozens of episodes, it'd be one of the very few that I've already seen.

Several months ago I had a lot of unexpected expenses crop up, I overdrew my checking account, I was totally broke, and wondering how I was going to eat for the last week of the month. I had never been that bad off in my life. At the same time, the family who lived in the other half of my duplex was moving out. I almost never talked to them and they had no idea that I was broke, but as they were packing they invited me over to give me a bunch of food. The weirder thing is all of the food was nonperishable (sealed jars of pasta sauce, cans of soup, microwave popcorn, etc) so I have no idea why they decided to give it to me instead of taking it with. Or why they wouldn't give it to any of the several friends they always had friends over, whereas I almost never talked to them. It was enough to keep me very well-fed until payday.

The circumstances of meeting my best friend & business partner, who I'm closer to than anyone else on earth, happened through such a long string of weird events that it's amazing it even took place. I was attending a college 150 miles from home. I was looking for a job, and took the last copy of a certain job posting on the career center bulletin board. Through that job, I made connections with another company about 1000 miles away, and they offered me a job. It was a tough decision considering I'd be moving so far away from my friends and family for some job, but I felt compelled to do it anyway. Just after I moved there, the company had acquired another business, and needed to fly its owner in so he could help them move customers over, train the staff on how to use his software, and so on. My boss asked if he could stay at my house for a month, if he covered half my rent. Normally I would have said "*$*% no!" because I would most certainly not want to lose my privacy to spend a month with a stranger I'd probably not like--having a friend over for a month would be bad enough! But I was broke from just moving, and a little lonely, so I said OK. The guy flew in, showed up at my house, and within 10 minutes I felt like he was a good close-friend candidate. We've been inseparable ever since, 3 years later.

If I didn't go to that college, or if one person before me had grabbed the last posting, if I didn't get either of those two jobs, if I didn't decide to move 1000 miles away (and I came VERY close to not doing it), or if they had bought the guy's business before I moved there, or if my friend had sold his business to any of the other several interested parties, or if I had enough money to refuse my boss' housemate offer, none of it would have ever happened.

A friend of mine had a really strange one. He bought a Buick Reatta, which is an obscure 2-seater made in the late 80s and early 90s. He ended up selling it, and about 6 months later he moved 150 miles to another state. Shortly after moving there he drove past a used-car lot 5 minutes from his new home, and found the exact same car. Although it was looked identical down to having the same exact dings and paint flaws, he was so shocked that he went home and grabbed the key he still had for it because he thought he was losing his mind. Of course it worked. The dealership it was at specialized in VW's, and it was the ONLY non-Volkswagen on the entire lot. Not too much later, he became good friends with two people who lived in the same apartment complex, and both happened to be VW fanatics.

I had another weird thing happen like that, actually. I was living 300 miles away from my hometown. A coworker was looking for a used car, so I went along on my lunch hour to help him find something. We went to some little hole in the wall lot, and an old Taurus stuck out at me as possibly being a good deal. I opened the glovebox to look for any service records. I found a few that indicated the car was originally from a VERY small town (population of about 2000) which was about 3 miles from my home town.

I have a bunch more, too, they happen quite a bit. Has anyone else here had the same experiences? What do you think causes them?

The human mind is built to notice patterns; so we will notice things which are on the extremities of the Bell curve much more readily than the rest of our surroundings.

One of my strangest experiences with such phenomena is this:

I received a package from a friend of mine; and I did not know what was in it. I carried it to my dorm room to open it, and as I did I had this mental dialogue:

"So what's in the package?"
"I don't really need anything; the only thing I wish I really had was a cat, and you can't send that in a package."
"Maybe it's a stuffed cat."
"That doesn't count."
"But it could be a real stuffed cat. Like the sort stuffed by a taxidermist."
"That's morbid. She wouldn't send me something like that."
"Maybe she did."

Anyway, when I opened the package, what did I see? That's right: A small, stuffed cat, made out of real rabbit fur. (I assume it was rabbit or something of the sort, because the cat, the size of a small kitten had obviously, upon closer inspection, been made from pieces of fur, from a bigger animal than a kitten, sewn together over a Styrofoam or cork form. I was greatly relieved it was not someone's kitten that had been stuffed!)

I've had other experiences of strange coincidence; for example, I once dreamed about the first 15 minutes after my stepfather arrived home from jail, and they played out in the exact same manner, including the weather. However, guessing the contents of the package was, by far, the most eerie one.

I have things like this happen to me frequently as well. There are a lot of writings on synchronicity, it's causes and meanings, that are quite interesting. I usually try to avoid making judgements as to why the events happen (on a physical level) because I think the causes are frequently impossible to determine. I do still look for any sort of beneficial information or further coincidences I can gain from them (meaning). Since I look at the situations more closely than others I can usually find something in them, but sometimes I just pass them off as odd occurrences. My most recent experience was: I'm a member of stumbleupon.com, which is a link-sharing and social-networking site and a member of sdf.lonestar.org, which provides web access and shell accounts on 64-bit NetBSD servers. I live in Milwaukee, which is in Southeast WI. At the beginning of January a bookstore down the street started doing renovations, and I saw their new proposed mural in the paper - it was a locust/tank hybrid from Nicholaus Lampert. Anyway, out of the blue I get a message from a stumbleupon user from Germany telling me that there's a SDF group on stumblupon. I assume he saw my SDF website was listed on my stumbleupon page. I went to his stumbleupon page and the first link on it was to Nicholaus Lampert's website with a picture of the mural that was going to go up at the bookstore. That was one of the more one-off and less meaningful ones, but still an odd coincidence.