One of the great questions in dreamwork comes up when we try to explain how and why elements from our sleep dreams literally appear in waking life. Some of us know this as synchronicity, Carl G. Jung’s concept referring to apparent chance encounters or coincidences that are loaded with meaning due to their psycho-physical correlation. We may have heard of Jung’s golden scarab story (Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, 1952) illustrating synchronicity as acausal, because the meaningful coincidence does not have an ordinary cause-and-effect explanation. In the anecdote, Jung’s patient relates a dream of a golden scarab while Jung happens to hear a noise from the window, take note, open the window, and catch an unlikely, live scarab he presents to the patient, and the astonishing event offers the necessary breakthrough that allowed the patient to desist intellectualizing her therapy.
If we’ve experienced something of the unlikely sort in our waking life coming straight from dreamtime, the acausal connection becomes significant to us because it reflects a blatant coincidence between a psychical, imaginal experience from dreams, visions, or intuitions and a literal, tangible experience in waking life. It is a meeting between inner and outer life, between sleep and waking existence, and it challenges the way we make sense of our reality. It feels otherworldly in its awe-inspiring impossibility, extraordinarily proven possible.
The experience of having an element from our dream show up absolutely and indisputably in waking life presents us with something of the miraculous. This now mystical phrase, object, or event, contains a breadth of meaning we discover and recognize, latent in our breathtaking surprise. These often inarticulable coincidences cannot be explained in the usual terms, and yet it is undeniable they reflect something of purpose in our quest for making sense of ourselves, our lives, and experience.
But our interest here is not so much in the acknowledgment and denotation of acausal connections, but rather in what to make of them when they touch our reality so personally. In the case of Jung and his patient, the magical appearance of the live scarab immediately following the telling of the golden scarab dream provided an unexpected and irrational event that dissolved his patient’s resistance to the therapeutic work. So, what of the blue Volkswagen Beetle, the pink donut, the silver bracelet, the blast-from-the-past encounter, the revealed unannounced pregnancy, the gray dead pigeon, the word-for-word statement, and every other faithful waking life appearance of a dream element? The notable point here is that synchronicities arise when we require inexplicable and otherwise inaccessible encouragement in order to move forward in our personal growth and evolution, or to consciously claim the integration that has already taken place in our unconscious process. Synchronicities help us to believe in ourselves, to surrender and to trust our progress.
The first thing to heed in exploring our own synchronicities is that while we recognize they were predicted by our dreams the moment they happen, we would never have considered the source dreams predictive of the future when we first had them. Frequently the elements in our dreams that appear in waking life on a regular basis are not the ominous ones but rather the banal, often overlooked ones. When these elements emerged in a dream, they seemed insignificant or lackluster, and they gain value only when they shamelessly appear in waking life. As a start, they appear to invite us to ponder their purpose, as alluring incentive to reach the deeper meaning of the source dream, the answers buried in the dream’s own questions.
What we are exploring here has little to do with dreams’ ability to predict the future, even when the phenomenon evidently touches on that possibility. We cannot spend our dreamwork time trying to figure out what of our dreams might be predicting something about the future. There is even an implication in this phenomenon that affirms we are unable to prevent whatever is meant to happen and thus our energy would be wasted there. In line with the adage that we cannot save, change, heal, or fix anyone other than ourselves, what we can do is notice when something of a dream appears in waking life, and consider what the waking life experience is elucidating and pointing back to about the dream it came from. Our work is in unraveling meaning from the coincidence to enrich the sense we make of ourselves, our lives, and our experience.
When we look back at when, where, and under which circumstances the element appeared in our dream, we get more insight as to what we are being asked to pay attention to. Generally, there was a question, a doubt, a confusion, an uncertainty about the emergence of the element in the dream to begin with–one that we either dismissed in the dream or in our subsequent dreamwork. The apparently neglibible conundrum suddenly highlights an essential life question, which is worthy of the quest to answer it. And it is frequently the case that when, where, and under which circumstances the dream element appears in waking life generously addresses the inquiry. Synchronicity, then, serves as self-awareness tool, revealing answers to questions we were not yet conscious we had been asking.
The more we pay attention to our dreams, the more we expand our capacity for enhanced perception in waking life. The more we train ourselves to experience and sense the symbolic in dreamwork, the more we experience and sense it in waking life. The more open we are to the wisdom and messages from our dreams, the more receptive we inevitably become in waking life, and so the more acausal connections we notice and take pause with, and the blurrier the veil between the sleep and waking worlds becomes. This means that the abundance of unconscious foresight and its integration is all the more present and accessible to us. We are more able to intentionally dip into the vastness of the unconscious and come out with triumphant discernible, embodied, results.
So what if we have yet to experience acausal connections? When we talk about honoring our dream after dreamwork–actively making, performing, assuming, seeking or acquiring some aspect of our dream–we are creating an intentional synchronicity to further our evolution, affirming that the change and the insight has already been achieved, even if we cannot yet grasp it.