Coincidence Theory

Yet another way lucid dreaming is improving my waking life is that I’m making an even greater effort to notice all of my senses—something I do for my meditation practice, anyway—so that my dreams will be more vivid. My dreams seem to be featuring more colors, more smells, more physical sensations, plus of course that much more is experienced consciously in waking life. Also, I periodically reread the list of things I want to do in lucid dreams and many of those things have turned up in non-lucid dreams. (As for the one that was doable in waking life, I just went and did it in waking life.)

Many of my dreams are dimly lit, so I’m making an effort to notice light during the day. Maybe dreams are often dark because they happen while it’s dark, and while our eyes are closed. Theoretically, neither of those should have any bearing, but maybe they do. And I suppose the reason one never sees the sun in a dream (at least, I don’t) is that we don’t see it in waking life, not directly. Maybe that’s part of the reason we are so enchanted by sunsets—it’s one of the few times we can actually look at this flaming thing that is the very source of our being.

Yesterday, while walking down to the Ferry Building farmers’ market to get some Snyders honey—it comes from very nearby and I’m hoping it will have a salutary effect on mild allergies—I paused at Main and Howard just to see what I might be able to see: turns out you can see PG&E’s Embarcadero Substation from there, which I had never noticed.

I also spotted a building that seemed similar in some ways to the building at the southwest corner of First and Mission. Turns out the building at the southwest corner of First and Mission is also visible from this spot, as well as my favorite tall S.F. building, the Millennium Tower.

The night before, I’d had a dream about a young woman known to be a “fluorescent writer,” meaning that her writing was vivid and exciting. The best thing I saw at Main and Howard, therefore, was a beautiful red truck with this painted on it: Fluoresco. It’s a lighting company.

In general, my coincidence life has picked up considerably since I started thinking a lot about my dreams. Not long ago, I dreamed of seeing a big seashell on a wall. As I looked at it, a second one appeared. When I went to visit B. the next day, I noticed a seashell tucked into a plant’s ceramic pot, and when I went into her bathroom, I saw a (or “the”) second seashell.

I very nearly emailed Sir Dave yesterday, the day I saw the Fluoresco truck, to see if he’d like to go to the farmers’ market with me, but in the end decided not to. I haven’t seen him in months—I ran into him by accident in the fall, and before that, I don’t know when I had last seen him, nor have we exchanged more than a few emails in all that time.

After work that day I went to the Zen Center to meditate and have dinner before going to a meeting of my small meditation group, but it turned out there was no dinner for whatever reason. I haven’t quite gotten the hang of their schedule yet. Another member of my group and I thus had 30 minutes to go somewhere, eat, and make it back for our meeting, so we walked down the hill one block to the café at Page and Octavia, and there, of course, was Sir Dave.

Sir Dave has immersed himself very deeply in the subject of 9/11 and can deliver many a heartfelt (or headthought) discourse on this topic. He told me once that “coincidence theorists” is what he and his 9/11 friends call the rest of us.

Lisa and David were here visiting from Seattle for several days, and we had quite a congenial social event last Saturday night at Chef Jia’s and then Caffe Greco: David and Lisa, Paul and Michael, Pete and David, Terry R., Tom and me.