I’ve just been immersed in five days of dream workshops, symposiums, and connections with gifted, insightful dreamworkers at the “International Association for the Study of Dreams 2014 Conference” in Berkeley, CA. I’ve discovered that this conference is a place where meaningful coincidences abound! Since I’m writing a book about synchronicity and dreams and have been keeping journals of meaningful coincidences for over eight years, I have a good working knowledge of the ways that dreams, visions, and synchronicity happen in my life. However, experiencing multiple meaningful coincidences happening during contact with others who believe in the ways that mind and matter are united, my perspective has deepened. I’m beginning to see that the meaningful connection between mind and matter is easily bridged through interaction with others who are immersed in a similar consensual paradigm. For instance, during a workshop at the conference about ‘using mental imagery and expressive art tools for exercising imaginative faculties…” I just ‘happened’ to sit next to two people who wound up being my partners in an exercise that the universe had seemingly orchestrated for us, with the hope that we – having free will – would choose to participate. Participate we did. Thinking about this story, as if it were a waking dream, the title that came to be is “Three Are Brought Together for Healing.” Well, of course!

But before I begin our story, I’ll tell you something you already know if you’ve ever attended one of the IASD conferences: that other people in the room and in other workshops had synchronistic experiences of their own that were just as remarkable as ours. Unfortunately, in service of brevity, I am unable to share those in this blog post.

 

Entering liminal space, we begin…

 

Our workshop facilitator gave the group instructions to relax into a meditative state and to conjure up a scene from a vision or dream that had a ‘threshold’ image in it – such as a portal to another dimension, state of mind, or way of being – and to be with it without actually crossing the threshold. We were to use all of our senses to make the imagery as real as possible in our minds and to, then, draw what we had envisioned. After this, we paired up with one or two other people sitting next to us and took turns describing what the scenes and thresholds in our pictures meant to us.

The imagery that came to me had to do with a dream/vision I had shortly after my first husband Gene died in 1993.

In the dream:

Gene and I, our friend Monty, and his wife Rebecca (not their real names) were at Lake Michigan, dancing around a blazing fire we’d built at the shore. Soon Rebecca leaves us and goes off in the direction of another fire down the beach (she was in the process of divorcing Monty in waking life), and Gene heads off in another direction. I follow him to where he enters a large blanket of fog to the left of where our fire is blazing. When I try to enter, too, the fog holds me back. I pound and pound on the opaque, dense wall of grey, trying to enter to no avail, and wind up falling down and sobbing on the beach. After a while, I dry my eyes and look up just in time to see a beautiful red-tail hawk flying above the fog in the direction of the water. I know it is Gene (Red-Tail was his totem when he was alive) and that he is free. (End of Vision)

When I get to the end of the explanation of my drawing, based on the dream, a young man in our triad tells me and our other partner that his sister died in a drowning accident. This admission prompts the other man to share that his own sister died when he was 13-years old. Quiet, ‘reverential sharing’ is the only way I can explain the discussion and feelings about this meaningful coincidence surrounding our little group in the next few minutes of our time together.

I am grateful for this experience. That I was prompted to share a vision of hope and resurrection that had been given to me as solace in my own grief. That we three were gifted with a moment of grace and experienced healing that carried with it the knowledge of being held in a ‘sea’ of intelligent love that surrounds all life on this plane of existence – when/if we are willing to pay attention.

Ciao,

Jenna