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Playing the Synchronicity Game
by Robert Moss

Recognizing synchronicity in our lives can help us to follow our deepest intuitions, even when they run counter to conventional assumptions. When you start paying attention to coincidence, chance encounters, and the play of symbols in everyday life, you are entering the weave of magic. The stream of coincidence alerts us to the fact that we are not alone, that we have invisible sources of support, and that we may be on the right course even when the whole world seems to be going the other way – or alternatively, that we may need to adjust our goals and behaviors to a deeper agenda.

You can invite synchronicity to be your guide by putting your question to the world. Say there is a special theme on which you would like guidance, or a question in your life that needs an answer.

You can carry that question or theme in your mind (and maybe on a piece of paper).

The first unusual or striking thing that enters your field of perception will be guidance to you from the world, a direct message to your soul.

This game generally works best when we are in motion. I especially like to play it when I am in my car. As you are driving along, your message from the world may come through the vanity plate on the car in front of you on the road, or the pattern of traffic, or the flight of a hawk, or first song or commercial that comes on the radio. Once, seeking guidance on a professional relationship, I played this game and noticed within seconds a billboard that read “The Magic Continues” – which certainly seemed to be a vote from the world to continue on that road. Seeking guidance for a friend who was facing immense challenges in her life, I got this message (also within seconds) from a sign on a church: “Courage is fear conquered by love.” What a profound message that was, for her – and for all of us! There is, indeed, no true courage without fear – that is to say, the ability to go through and beyond the fear.

Of course, if we are seeking guidance from a deeper source (in this case the universe) we must be ready to have our ego-driven assumptions overthrown. Still on the theme of motoring synchronicity, which I am tempted to call Moto-Synch, I once sought guidance in the car on three business ventures I had hatched at the same time. I decided that whatever came on the car radio when I first turned it on would be my guidance from the world. What came on, right away, was a commercial for three funeral homes. I go the message: my three projects were dead ducks. By the end of the week, this became entirely clear through other events for which the unwanted radio message had prepared me.

There’s another version of the Synchronicity Game, which I actually prefer to going around with a specific question, because it makes it easier for the universe to put the big questions to us. This is the game of living as a wide-awake dreamer, which means that you make it your pleasure to receive anything that enters your field of perception as a clue to the deeper order of events. When you play this larger version of the game, one of the things you’ll notice is that life rhymes.

Here are a couple of recent examples from this dreamer’s life:

A Thriller is Bound in the Covers of My Dream Book

On a Friday, I announce to friends that I have decided to write a thriller in which the action centers on dreaming and the characters move through multidimensional reality. I use the expression, “I’m going to try putting a dream book inside the covers of a thriller.”

 The following day, I am leading a weekend workshop in Connecticut. A bookseller called Nancy comes up and says, “I have something to show you.” She hands me a copy of my book Dreaming True. I am puzzled as to why she is presenting me with my own book. “Be patient,” Nancy encourages me.

I open the book and am astonished to see that inside the covers is a thriller – a novel by Eric Jackson titled A Cause to Kill For. The logical explanation is that there was some screwup at the print shop that the publishers are using. But that doesn’t account for the amazing, poetic confirmation that has just come through. The day after I was speaking about “putting a dream book inside the covers of a thriller” I am handed a thriller inside the covers of my dream book.

This was more than plenty, but I was greedy for further clues and layers of connection. I leafed through the thriller and found that it is set in Puerto Rico, where I had some powerful spiritual experiences I described in a chapter of Dreamways of the Iroquois titled “The Spirits Fall in Love”.

Then I looked at the author’s Acknowledgments. All the names were unfamiliar to me except one: Susan M. Watkins. I knew someone of that name – a woman who had worked with the gifted psychic and Seth channeler Jane Roberts and had once published a wonderful book on the dreams of a small community in upstate New York. Could this possibly be the same person? I emailed the author. Yes – not only was this the same Susan M. Watkins, but she was about to publish a new book, called What a Coincidence! (Moment Point Press) a lively account of her personal adventures in synchronicity.

Albert’s Hash

As we track the play of synchronicity, we sometimes come awake to the play of forces and personalities beyond the curtain of our consensual reality. Here’s another recent personal experience in which we find dreams, coincidence and the presence of the departed all interweaving.

A friend told me she had been dreaming about her father’s death. More precisely, she had been dreaming beyond his death, previewing family conversations that might take place some days or weeks after the event. The dreams had a just-so quality. Since we were both well aware of how dreams often rehearse families for a death, we agreed to discuss how she might use these dreams to help prepare her father and others in the family for his big journey over breakfast at a popular diner known as the Pancake Corral.

On the way to the diner, I asked whether there was anyone in the father’s family who had already passed over that he might regard as a friend and guide. “Oh yes,” my friend responded at once. “There’s Uncle Albert.” She explained that her father had loved his elder brother Albert, who had died three years earlier, and had been shocked when Albert had showed up – “like a friendly ghost” – in his bedroom a week after his death.

We were talking about Uncle Albert as we entered the diner. The place was crowded, and my friend gave my name to the hostess to put on the wait list. “Albert!” the hostess said loudly, writing down the dead uncle’s name instead of mine.

“I think Albert just gave us a nudge,” I joked.

At my workshop the same day, my friend and I agreed to make a conscious dream journey in hopes of contacting Albert. She had quite a long interview with her uncle. I met him, but he was not especially interested in talking to me since I was not family. He did confide that what he liked for breakfast was corned beef hash, and that he also liked peach brandy.

When I relayed this information to my friend, she was unable to confirm whether these were, in fact, her uncle’s preferences.

We got a message about that when we returned to the Pancake Corral two days later. I told the server I didn’t need to see the menu; I would have what I had the previous time. “You might want to take a look,” she said. “They’ve added a new item for the first time since I’ve been working here.”

I looked at the menu. The new item was titled Albert’s Breakfast. And “Albert’s breakfast” was….corned beef hash.

My friend decided to talk to her father. She did not tell him the whole sequence, and did not say that she had dreamed of his death. She said only that she had been dreaming about Uncle Albert. She asked if Albert had liked corned-beef hash. “Al loved hash!” her father exclaimed. “He asked for it every time he could.” How about peach brandy? “He drank peach brandy every night before he went to sleep.”

What do we say about a synchronicity riff of this kind? What I say is, Thankyou. When life rhymes in this way – and we come awake to it – we become poets of consciousness and enter the play of the larger universe.