The Age of Synchronicity
The scarab appears to me again and again, with ungainly flight and improbable angular limbs, its iridescence a wink from God.
‘There are no coincidences’ is the mantra of Detective Inspector Darren Swift, the protagonist of my crime fiction series Reprobation. Coincidence is a risky device for crime authors, a lazy solution to innumerable plot holes. However, Reprobation is not a straight police procedural but a supernatural series, and when Darren Swift opens his mind to ‘acausal connections’ it sometimes leads to interesting truths, about himself as well as his murder cases.
Recently I have been thinking and reading a lot about synchronicity. What’s the difference between synchronicity and coincidence? The best explanation comes from psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who coined the term in the early twentieth century. Jung was conducting one of his regular psychotherapy sessions with a wealthy lady who had suffered from depression for a long time. She was in the middle of telling him about a dream she had in which she had been given an expensive piece of jewellery, a golden scarab beetle brooch. While he was listening to her recount her dream, he heard something tapping at the window from outside. He opened the window and in flew an iridescent beetle, with the same gold-green colour as that in the woman’s dream. Jung caught the beetle, handed it to his patient and said “Here is your scarab.” She made a full recovery after that - something about the beetle representing metamorphosis, that her unconscious was calling out for transformation, and here was the universe giving her a hint. For Jung, some coincidences were more than chance. Synchronicity happens when people see a meaningful connection between external events and their own internal states. So most synchronistic events are reflections of what people are thinking and feeling.
It’s a way of explaining paranormal intrusions into everyday life, it’s a little bit magical, very unnerving, and rather wonderful, I think. When it happens it gives me a surge of ephemeral courage. The universe pointing me in the right direction.
Jung’s ideas were surprisingly popular with the scientific community – particularly physicists such as Wolfgang Pauli and even Einstein, who found Jung’s insights worthy of consideration. It’s no coincidence (ahem) that this happened around the time when physics itself was becoming a bit mystical, with the advent of quantum mechanics - the discovery of hidden forces in the universe that humans will never comprehend.
Many scientific writers have tried to rationalise and even prove the theory of synchronicity. For example the biologist Paul Kammerer obsessively collected examples of coincidence, and came up with the theory of seriality – that all events are connected by unknown forces, waves of seriality that sometimes peak into coincidences. The Cambridge University psychologist Rupert Sheldrake proposes the theory of morphic resonance, which is essentially telepathy between all living organisms, a collective memory in nature. It’s responsible for things like dogs knowing when their owners are coming home, people knowing when they are being stared at.
A recent example of synchronicity in my own life is the Frankenstein-Arve-Tpau connection. Around Halloween I had an urge to read something spooky and I chose Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – I had read it thirty years ago so couldn’t remember anything about it. As I read I realised that, of course, Frankenstein is set in Geneva where I live, and Victor Frankenstein pursues his monster all the way along the river Arve to its source at Mont Blanc. My heart fluttered a little, because I had been planning to do a solo hike along the length of the Arve. That very week I had been looking at maps, wondering if it was a silly, self-indulgent idea. And that same week, just after I finished the book, I was driving when the 1980s T’pau song ‘China In Your Hand’ came on the car radio. I had loved this song as a child, but had never known what the obscure lyrics meant. Now as I listened with adult ears I wondered - what on earth is this actually about? So I looked it up on Wikipedia, and lo and behold, it’s about Frankenstein.
(“It was a theme she had/On a scheme he had/Told in a foreign land/To take life on earth/To the second birth… Eyes wide/Like a child in the form of man/The curse of a vivid mind”)
Did I already know that, somewhere buried in my subconscious? I really don’t think so…
And I felt as if the universe was telling me – yes, go do your walk along the Arve!
But in these algorithmic times, has coincidence ceased to exist? Whenever I open Instagram, I am immediately hit with a sponsored post showcasing some product that’s perfect for me. Wow, I do absolutely want to buy that guitar pedal, it’s exactly the sort of thing I’ve been thinking about - thank you very much Instagram! I go onto Facebook and wow, there’s a new post by that person I really like, and it’s right at the top of my feed, perfect! But there’s no wow about it – the algorithms have been tracking my every search and scroll, my every like and comment, perhaps even the things I say out loud. It’s just as unnerving as real synchronicity, but far less magical. It’s manipulative and rather depressing. I am being told what I want to hear, not by the universe but by the shadowy marketing ether.
Nowadays people often talk about ‘manifesting’. Seeing is believing – conjure your dreams into reality. You see inspirational quotes about it over social media, and it feels like insipid bullshit. However, without using the term itself, I have often done this. Imagined myself doing something so powerfully, with such ‘want’, that eventually it happened. Is this all part of the same process? Does synchronicity happen when humans tap into one of their many destinies out there in the multiverse?
As I said, synchronicity is a dangerous tool for a crime fiction writer. Of course police detectives work by looking for patterns, signals in the noise, but using coincidence as a plot device is a lazy get-out. Apophenia, on the other hand – the tendency to see meaningful patterns where there are none – is a fascinating concept to explore, and a great way to add red herrings to a whodunnit. And many novelists have written about synchronicity with spectacular effect, notably Thomas Pynchon, whose maddening, labyrinthine novels are filled with paranoia and bizarre almost-conspiracies. My favourite novel about synchronicity is Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco. It’s about a group of bored academic publishers who invent a global conspiracy, which then becomes true. Foucault’s Pendulum had a profound influence on my fourth crime thriller, Lamb of God, and my latest manuscript Buried Lightning. Buried Lightning is a cosmic horror-romance, about particle physics, impossible geometry, and loneliness. Stylistically it’s a departure for me, but I know where it came from.
It’s no coincidence, in these times of acceleration, that I think of deep time, Planck seconds, and relativity. That I try to make sense of my ageing body and mind within the context of billions of years.
It’s no coincidence, in these times of breaking chains, that I think of gravity. As I try to spread my wings in a life defined by constraint, I feel the weight of responsibility as a personal gravitational anomaly.
It’s no coincidence, in these post-apocalyptic days, that I think of particle physics. If I can comprehend the tiniest quark or boson, then my little creations might mean something.
It’s no coincidence, in these post-sacrificial days, that I think of cosmology. That if the universe is so vast, each tiny star a million times larger than our own sun, then maybe my transgressions don’t matter.
And it’s no coincidence that I wrote a character who has a lot in common with me, even if I didn’t realise it until the manuscript was finished. I am heading towards a period of self-knowledge, and I feel guided by some hidden force.
So is the universe giving me signs, or have I just been spending too much time on Instagram? Perhaps both.
If you have any examples of bizarre coincidences in your life – comment below!
