EDITOR'S NOTES, 2019

Jung uses cases like this to argue that the traditional (if controversial) view of ESP as a sense is wrong; if I understand him, he proposes it's an acausal shift in odds, a principle of physics that favors patterns meaningful to observers more frequently than chance, convincing us we have a sort of mental radar or radio--when, Jung thinks, it's not a sense but a resonance between observer and observed. Or, better, a tendency for chance events to crystallize in forms already "in the air"--one snowflake doesn't cause the next, but one implies conditions favoring more. But is that true here? This isn't a man promised a trip to Spain dreaming of Spain and later finding a street, church, carriage & horses like his dream. What happened was two-stage. Our traveler wanted to enter the cathedral; but, prompted by the dream, turned aside to test if that particular carriage was in the next street round the corner--at that moment and no other. Seeing two cream horses pulling a fancy carriage sometime on his Spain trip seems quite possible by chance; but the odds on seeking and finding one right where and when the dream predicted, that's a horse of a different color. Well, two. His dream changed his path. Now let's inject some Darwinian thrills. Say the young man dreamt he was killed by a runaway carriage in Spain, and, seeing that nightmare street, stepped back just before the horses thundered round the corner. In that case, would you argue that he didn't die as foreseen, so the dream wasn't predictive? Even his real dream has survival value. It steers him to test his recognition of street and church, and confirm he can dream predictively! He'll heed dreams, hunches and déjà vu, now, perhaps saving his life in the future. So even non-warning predictive dreams are useful in the Darwinian sense. Our traveler can effectively see around corners, if only now and then.

That's second sight. Too superstitious a term for you? Call it luck. Call it sticky rice. Whatever you call it, it's a far cry from Jung's picture of synchronicity as passive, the universe impersonally generating similar images both physical and mental, unaware we attribute cause & effect to them. Now, synchronicity may well exist--as a theory, it's no more exotic than two particles sharing states, indifferent to time and distance; indeed it seems like such linkages, just on a human scale. Earlier in Synchronicity Jung does give examples fitting his impersonal-link theory, like Superimposed and Pudding and Fortgibu. They're bizarre, and not ESP. But half Jung's own examples, like this and Scarab, look to me more like evidence for ESP as a naturally evolved sense--baffling in mechanism, yes, and weak, perhaps vestigial, but evolutionarily useful and thus unsurprising--even if physicists howl. Denying evidence just because it's theoretically awkward only means we're unimaginative. Would a blind species understand light? A sighted creature "clairvoyantly" sensing events a mile off, or magically "foreseeing" the future--say, the terrain ahead on one's path--would violate tetrasensory physics exactly as ESP violates pentasensory physics. It's still physics not mysticism--if your world includes light. Or ESP. Or gravity, that "spooky action at a distance"! It's only spooky if you make it so. Jung at least proposes a non-mystical physics model to explain what he and other dreamworkers, including me, routinely face. I think his model does fit weird events like Superimposed and Pudding and Fortgibu. But not all! Others, like this dream, look to me like something else. Two spooks drinking at the bar? I think so.

--Chris Wayan