In the summer of 2021, I experienced a cluster of coincidences, some of which had a distinctly supernatural feel. Here’s how it started. I keep a journal, and record dreams if they are especially vivid or strange. It doesn’t happen often, but I logged one in which my mother’s oldest friend, a woman called Rose, made an appearance to tell me that she (Rose) had just died. She had had another stroke, she said, and that was it. Come the morning, it occurred to me that I didn’t know whether Rose was still alive. I guessed not. She’d had a major stroke about 10 years ago and had gone on to suffer a series of minor strokes, descending into a sorry state of physical incapacity and dementia.

coincidences real? | Philosophy | The Guardian Are coincidences real? | Philosophy | The Guardian

The word “Coincidance,” is a Joycean word and signifies the dance of coincidences in nature similar to the Jungian concept of synchronicity, or an acausal event unlikely to occur by mere chance. [...]

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Explores the range of explanations for coincidences, including the psychosphere as the medium through which many coincidences take place But one thing about coincidences is certain: they are all around us. In our daily lives, on the internet, radio, and television, and in our entertainment; but like the gorilla in the room, we often don’t notice them, or do so only briefly, in passing, and often without giving them a second thought. The survey I conducted while at the University of Missouri in 29 found that at least a third of the general population frequently notices coincidences.7 That’s a good start and suggests to me that perhaps it’s time to create a new field to explore how these unexpected conjunctions of events can be understood. To this end, I have proposed the establishment of The Coincidence Project, which includes the transdisciplinary field of coincidence studies (see appendix 1 for more on this).

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Patriarchy is so nervous of rivals in the West that the poet has come under considerable suspicion at many times, is often thought of as “queer” in one sense or another and, in the most anal cultures, often seems to be deliberately ignored or starved into submission. Each of us has more to do with creating coincidences than we think. In this broad exploration of the potential of coincidences to expand our understanding of reality, psychiatrist Bernard Beitman, M.D., explores why and how coincidences, synchronicity, and serendipity happen and how to use these common occurrences to inspire psychological, interpersonal, and spiritual growth.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her.” It’s a state of mind resembling apophenia – a tendency to perceive meaningful, and usually sinister, links between unrelated events – which is a common prelude to the emergence of psychotic delusions. Individual differences may play a part in the experience of such coincidences. Schizotypy is a dimension of personality characterised by experiences that in some ways echo, in muted form, the symptoms of psychosis, including magical ideation and paranormal belief. There is evidence to suggest that people who score high on measures of schizotypy may also be more prone to experiencing meaningful coincidences and magical thinking. Perhaps schizotypal individuals are also more powerfully affected by coincidence. Someone scoring high on measures of schizotypy would perhaps be more spooked by a death dream than I (a low scorer) was. A 2015 study published in New Ideas in Psychology reported that coincidences are “an inevitable consequence of the mind searching for causal structure in reality.” That search for structure is a mechanism that allows us to learn and adapt to our environment.