As many of you know, I am currently writing a book. I am using, for now, the working title—I’ve changed it a few times already—Synchronicity Journaling: Working with Dreams, Visions, and Meaningful Coincidences. Aside from being a huge project, writing a book is scary business. I’m here to testify that waiting for creative ideas to come is often grueling work. I think most writers can relate to this humorous quote by journalist/playwright Gene Fowler: “Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.” Because of this, there have been times over the past two years when I’ve found it easier to abandon the writing altogether to focus on the 1001 other things in my life that need tending.

That being said, for the better part of two months, the writing has been flowing. This is due, in large part, to the opportunity I’ve been given by generous friends to take up temporary residence in a private space they own in East Texas. I’m finding it to be a delightful space in which to write, away from my own milieu with its endless, albeit often attractive, distractions. The writing was flowing, that is, until I began obsessing a few days ago that the material in the book might be too far out for some readers to handle. After all, I’m asking people who have been brought up in a world governed by scientific materialism to believe in visions of Higher Sense Perception, non-locality of mind, and an external world that can mirror inner states of consciousness. In essence, to accept consciousness as the ground of being and matter—animated or not—as alive and imbued with spirit. Even though I’ve been recording events of meaningful coincidence for the past 9 years and supporting my own experiences with extensive reading and research, my inner critic began to convince me that my writing might be viewed as nothing more than unsubstantiated bunk. I then had, in quick succession, two dreams and a meaningful coincidence that helped to dispel these doubts and get my writing moving again.

I am ever grateful for dreams and meaningful coincidences. Because of them, I’m given the opportunity to work through the stuff that my ego would have me believing or disbelieving, based on fear or vanity. I can, and often do, ignore dream messages, but I can never forget the ‘big’ ones completely, because they keep coming back in different forms until I pay attention!

Over the past six years since my husband has died, one of my recurring dream themes is about having my purse stolen. In one such dream, soon after Harold’s death, I caught the person who had taken my purse. But he had already emptied the contents and, as he laughed in my face, was tearing up my I.D. and credit cards, throwing the pieces to the four winds. It didn’t take long to figure out what that dream was about: Fate, that miserable bugger, was showing me in no uncertain terms that my life as I knew it was over and that it was no use trying to pick up the disparate pieces. There was nothing to do except reinvent my life. Since that path has been more or less circuitous, rather than linear, the stolen/lost purse scenarios have continued but changed in content over time. When they began, I felt my identity had been stolen from me due to no fault of my own. In later dreams, I began leaving my purse behind out of neglect and forgetfulness, not bothering to pay attention to where I’d been when I lost it, making it difficult or impossible to find. Recently, the dreams include a young girl who is often my helper in finding and keeping the purses safe until I return to retrieve them. In the dream I had a few nights ago, that I titled “Owning the Largest Purse.”

I was making my way to my car when I realized that I didn’t have my purse with me. Luckily, I did remember my way back to the classroom I had been in (another common dream theme of mine) and went inside to find it. There, sitting at my desk was a young girl. She was holding three different purses that all looked like the one I’d left, except that they were all different sizes. I reached, first, for the small one. The girl shook her head, so I withdrew my choice. I reached for the next size up. No deal. As I reached for the largest purse, I finally recognized it as my own, and found my I.D. and other contents inside. (End of Dream)

The dream was a little puzzling, but I knew that on some level, I had not been willing to ‘own’ up to my full potential. Perhaps, i needed to own a bigger image of myself. The next morning I woke from another dream, followed by a synchronicity that supported that hunch about my self-image. In the dream, I titled “Enjoying My Skating Prowess,”

I am skating on old-fashioned roller skates around the outside of a restaurant. The ground in the area close to the building is smooth enough for me to do spins and other skating tricks, which I am skilled at. The rest of the ground is rough and hard and difficult to skate on, so I stay on the surfaces closest to the restaurant. I am feeling happy and free, not self-conscious at all that I am the only one skating. People eating at outside tables are enjoying the show. (End of Dream)

Later that day, a friend on Facebook shared a picture of two women who are skating on old-fashioned skates exactly like the ones in my dream. The women are gliding down a sidewalk in a city, holding hands and each carrying a bunch of books in her free arm. They have big smiles on their faces. The caption in the meme reads: “Whatever makes you weird is probably your greatest asset!”

As soon as I saw that meme, I experienced what we call in dreamwork circles an “Aha!” moment and knew what those two dreams and synchronicity were telling me. In essence, I realized that I’d been trying to tame down, make smaller, what I know to be true because people might not believe it. As a young girl I was confident about who I was—an imaginative child who believed in magic and the mystery of life—so, it is fitting that the girl in my first dream helped me to retrieve that bigger sense of Self I’d lost somewhere along the way. In the second dream, I have a certain amount of skill that I have honed through practice and am feeling good about sharing it even though other people aren’t doing it with me. As for the meaningful coincidence, I was reminded to celebrate my weirdness. Who knows, as the meme says, it might prove to be my greatest asset!

Ciao for now,

Jenna