Synchronicity or Coincidence: What is it?

[Tyger]

For me Synchronicities and Coincidences are evidence of something significant, impossible to explain by current material science.
Would love to hear people's stories of real-life synchronicities. Here is my contribution -

Anthony Hopkins couldn’t find a book anywhere in London. Then he sat down on a subway bench.
It was 1973. Hopkins had just landed a role in a film called 'The Girl from Petrovka', adapted from a novel by American journalist George Feifer.
Like any serious actor, he wanted to read the original book. He spent an entire day searching bookshops along London’s famous Charing Cross Road.
Nothing. The book wasn’t available anywhere in the UK.

Frustrated and exhausted, Hopkins walked into the Leicester Square Underground station to catch a train home.
That’s when he noticed something on a bench.
Someone had left a book behind.
He picked it up. Turned it over.
'The Girl from Petrovka.'
The exact book he’d been searching for all day, abandoned on a subway bench in a city of eight million people.

Hopkins couldn’t believe it. He took it home, read it, and noticed something unusual. The margins were filled with handwritten notes in red ink. Annotations. Someone had carefully marked up the entire book.
He didn’t think much of it. He used the notes to better understand his character, prepared for the role, and quietly filed the coincidence away as one of life’s strange moments.

Months later, Hopkins traveled to Vienna, where the film was being shot.
One day on set, he was introduced to a visitor. George Feifer. The author of the book.
They spoke about the film, the characters, the story. Then Feifer mentioned something that made Hopkins freeze.
“I don’t have a copy of my own book anymore,” Feifer said. “I lent my personal copy to a friend years ago. It had all my notes in the margins. He lost it somewhere in London. I’ve never seen it since.”

Hopkins felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
“I found a copy,” he said slowly. “On a bench in the Underground. It has handwritten notes throughout.”
Feifer looked at him in disbelief.
Hopkins retrieved the book and handed it to the author.
Feifer went pale.
It was his copy. His handwriting. His annotations. The personal book he’d lost years earlier - somehow left on a subway bench at the exact moment Anthony Hopkins, the actor who needed it most, happened to sit beside it.

In a city of millions. Across thousands of streets. Among hundreds of tube stations.
The right book. The right bench. The right moment.
George Feifer got his lost book back. Anthony Hopkins gained a story he would tell for the rest of his life.

Carl Jung called it synchronicity - the idea that meaningful coincidences aren’t random, but part of a deeper pattern woven into reality.
Hopkins has always been fascinated by that idea. He’s spoken about learning to simply be amazed by life.
“I don’t know if there’s a master plan,” he once said. “But sometimes things happen that are just too perfect to explain.”

Maybe it was luck. Maybe it was fate. Maybe it was the universe quietly smiling.
Or maybe, just maybe, some books are meant to find their readers.
And some stories are meant to be told.

 

[Richard Hawkins]

For me Synchronicities and Coincidences are evidence of something significant, impossible to explain by current material science.
Would love to hear people's stories of real-life synchronicities. Here is my contribution -

Anthony Hopkins couldn’t find a book anywhere in London. Then he sat down on a subway bench.
It was 1973. Hopkins had just landed a role in a film called 'The Girl from Petrovka', adapted from a novel by American journalist George Feifer.
Like any serious actor, he wanted to read the original book. He spent an entire day searching bookshops along London’s famous Charing Cross Road.
Nothing. The book wasn’t available anywhere in the UK.

Frustrated and exhausted, Hopkins walked into the Leicester Square Underground station to catch a train home.
That’s when he noticed something on a bench.
Someone had left a book behind.
He picked it up. Turned it over.
'The Girl from Petrovka.'
The exact book he’d been searching for all day, abandoned on a subway bench in a city of eight million people.

Hopkins couldn’t believe it. He took it home, read it, and noticed something unusual. The margins were filled with handwritten notes in red ink. Annotations. Someone had carefully marked up the entire book.
He didn’t think much of it. He used the notes to better understand his character, prepared for the role, and quietly filed the coincidence away as one of life’s strange moments.

Months later, Hopkins traveled to Vienna, where the film was being shot.
One day on set, he was introduced to a visitor. George Feifer. The author of the book.
They spoke about the film, the characters, the story. Then Feifer mentioned something that made Hopkins freeze.
“I don’t have a copy of my own book anymore,” Feifer said. “I lent my personal copy to a friend years ago. It had all my notes in the margins. He lost it somewhere in London. I’ve never seen it since.”

Hopkins felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
“I found a copy,” he said slowly. “On a bench in the Underground. It has handwritten notes throughout.”
Feifer looked at him in disbelief.
Hopkins retrieved the book and handed it to the author.
Feifer went pale.
It was his copy. His handwriting. His annotations. The personal book he’d lost years earlier - somehow left on a subway bench at the exact moment Anthony Hopkins, the actor who needed it most, happened to sit beside it.

In a city of millions. Across thousands of streets. Among hundreds of tube stations.
The right book. The right bench. The right moment.
George Feifer got his lost book back. Anthony Hopkins gained a story he would tell for the rest of his life.

Carl Jung called it synchronicity - the idea that meaningful coincidences aren’t random, but part of a deeper pattern woven into reality.
Hopkins has always been fascinated by that idea. He’s spoken about learning to simply be amazed by life.
“I don’t know if there’s a master plan,” he once said. “But sometimes things happen that are just too perfect to explain.”

Maybe it was luck. Maybe it was fate. Maybe it was the universe quietly smiling.
Or maybe, just maybe, some books are meant to find their readers.
And some stories are meant to be told.

Fantastic story. Makes a person stop and think or as my old mum used to say. It all works out in the end.

 

[Tyger]

Fantastic story. Makes a person stop and think or as my old mum used to say. It all works out in the end.

There's another one to do with a book - across decades - even continents. I'm trying to find it. Will post when I get it.

Another one that will blow your mind - with several witnesses to the event.

 

[Tyger]

I FOUND IT!!!! Or it found me!!!! Wound up finding it was easier than I thought it'd be. Here is the story -
[P.S. I have a hunch about this phenomenon. I'll explain later.]

************************************************************************************************************************************************************

THE STORY OF THE FOUND BOOK

She found her childhood book in a Paris bookstall. Then she opened it. Her name was written inside -
from Colorado, 30 years earlier, 5,000 miles away.

Paris, 1929. The green bookstalls along the Seine.
Anne Parrish wasn't searching for anything important that afternoon. Just killing time while her husband Charles rested at a café table nearby. She loved the ritual of it - thumbs brushing across dusty spines, the musty smell of old paper, the thrill of stumbling onto something forgotten.
Then her fingers landed on a children's book she hadn't thought about in decades.

'Jack Frost and Other Stories.'
Battered cover. Faded binding. She felt something catch in her throat.

"I had this exact book when I was little," she told Charles, hurrying back to show him. "One of my absolute favorites."
He wasn't buying it. Too many old children's books looked identical back then. Similar covers, similar titles, mass-produced.
But Anne insisted she remembered specific stories inside - a girl named Dorothy, something about hating her nose. Charles flipped through the pages, skeptical, until he found it.

Word for word. Exactly as Anne described.
Fine. Maybe she really did read this book as a kid. Maybe this was just another copy of something popular.
But then Charles turned back to the front cover.
And froze.

Scrawled on the inside page, in a child's careful handwriting, was Anne's full name.
And beneath it, her childhood address in Colorado Springs.
Not a similar book. Not another copy.
This book. Her book. The one she'd owned as a girl, probably thirty years earlier, in a town thousands of miles away.

Somehow it had left Colorado Springs. Crossed the entire United States. Crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Passed through countless hands, shops, homes, attics, estates.
Ended up in this exact bookstall, on this exact afternoon, on this exact street, in a city of millions.
Waiting for her to find it again.

Anne Parrish was no amateur. She was a celebrated American novelist by 1929 - a bestselling author who'd built her career spinning stories, crafting plots, making the unbelievable feel real.
But this wasn't fiction. This wasn't a story she wrote.
This was documented. Verified. Real.
Her husband was there. He saw it happen. The story made newspapers. It became one of the most famous documented coincidences in literary history.

And it makes you wonder.
What are the odds?
Think about the journey that book took. Someone in Colorado Springs - maybe Anne's family, maybe a secondhand shop - let it go. It traveled east. Changed hands. Crossed an ocean. Landed in France. Moved through Parisian book dealers. Made its way to the Seine.

And on one random afternoon in 1929, Anne Parrish - who could have been anywhere in the world, doing anything - walked past that exact stall.
And saw it.
Not similar. Not reminiscent. Not "one like it."
The exact book her child hands had held.

The mathematician in you wants to calculate the probability. How many books leave childhood homes? How many cross oceans? How many end up in Paris bookstalls? How many original owners happen to be browsing that exact spot on that exact day?
The number is so small it might as well be impossible.
And yet.

It makes you think about all the pieces of ourselves we leave behind.
The toys we lost. The letters we never sent. The objects that slipped through our fingers when we moved, when we grew up, when life pulled us forward and we couldn't carry everything with us.
Where are they now?
Whose lives have they touched? What attics do they sleep in? What secondhand shops hold them? What boxes in what basements still contain the things we thought were gone forever?

And could they possibly - against every mathematical probability, against every rational explanation - find their way back?

Anne Parrish's book did.
It traveled 5,000 miles and three decades to return to her hands.

There's no explanation that makes sense. No logical reason. No way to trace every hand that held it, every transaction that moved it closer.
It just... happened.

Some people hear this story and think about fate. About meant-to-be. About the universe conspiring to return things to their rightful owners.
Others hear it and think about probability. About the sheer number of people browsing bookstalls, the volume of old books in circulation, the odds that eventually, randomly, impossibly, someone finds their own.
But maybe the real story isn't about odds or fate.
Maybe it's about paying attention.

Anne could have walked past that stall. She could have been too tired, too distracted, too busy. She could have skipped the bookstalls that day entirely.
But she stopped. She browsed. She let her fingers trail across spines.
And when she found something that whispered of memory, she paid attention.

How many of us rush past the moments that might be waiting for us? How many times do we almost-see something, almost-recognize something, but we're moving too fast to notice?

Anne Parrish found her childhood book in a Paris bookstall in 1929.

Somewhere, right now, something you lost years ago is sitting on a shelf. In a shop, in a box, in someone else's attic.
Will you walk past it? Or will you be paying enough attention to recognize it when it finds its way back?

The book waited thirty years.
Maybe yours is waiting too.

 

[Richard Hawkins]

I FOUND IT!!!! Or it found me!!!! Wound up finding it was easier than I thought it'd be. Here is the story -
[P.S. I have a hunch about this phenomenon. I'll explain later.]

************************************************************************************************************************************************************

THE STORY OF THE FOUND BOOK

She found her childhood book in a Paris bookstall. Then she opened it. Her name was written inside -
from Colorado, 30 years earlier, 5,000 miles away.

Paris, 1929. The green bookstalls along the Seine.
Anne Parrish wasn't searching for anything important that afternoon. Just killing time while her husband Charles rested at a café table nearby. She loved the ritual of it - thumbs brushing across dusty spines, the musty smell of old paper, the thrill of stumbling onto something forgotten.
Then her fingers landed on a children's book she hadn't thought about in decades.

'Jack Frost and Other Stories.'
Battered cover. Faded binding. She felt something catch in her throat.

"I had this exact book when I was little," she told Charles, hurrying back to show him. "One of my absolute favorites."
He wasn't buying it. Too many old children's books looked identical back then. Similar covers, similar titles, mass-produced.
But Anne insisted she remembered specific stories inside - a girl named Dorothy, something about hating her nose. Charles flipped through the pages, skeptical, until he found it.

Word for word. Exactly as Anne described.
Fine. Maybe she really did read this book as a kid. Maybe this was just another copy of something popular.
But then Charles turned back to the front cover.
And froze.

Scrawled on the inside page, in a child's careful handwriting, was Anne's full name.
And beneath it, her childhood address in Colorado Springs.
Not a similar book. Not another copy.
This book. Her book. The one she'd owned as a girl, probably thirty years earlier, in a town thousands of miles away.

Somehow it had left Colorado Springs. Crossed the entire United States. Crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Passed through countless hands, shops, homes, attics, estates.
Ended up in this exact bookstall, on this exact afternoon, on this exact street, in a city of millions.
Waiting for her to find it again.

Anne Parrish was no amateur. She was a celebrated American novelist by 1929 - a bestselling author who'd built her career spinning stories, crafting plots, making the unbelievable feel real.
But this wasn't fiction. This wasn't a story she wrote.
This was documented. Verified. Real.
Her husband was there. He saw it happen. The story made newspapers. It became one of the most famous documented coincidences in literary history.

And it makes you wonder.
What are the odds?
Think about the journey that book took. Someone in Colorado Springs - maybe Anne's family, maybe a secondhand shop - let it go. It traveled east. Changed hands. Crossed an ocean. Landed in France. Moved through Parisian book dealers. Made its way to the Seine.

And on one random afternoon in 1929, Anne Parrish - who could have been anywhere in the world, doing anything - walked past that exact stall.
And saw it.
Not similar. Not reminiscent. Not "one like it."
The exact book her child hands had held.

The mathematician in you wants to calculate the probability. How many books leave childhood homes? How many cross oceans? How many end up in Paris bookstalls? How many original owners happen to be browsing that exact spot on that exact day?
The number is so small it might as well be impossible.
And yet.

It makes you think about all the pieces of ourselves we leave behind.
The toys we lost. The letters we never sent. The objects that slipped through our fingers when we moved, when we grew up, when life pulled us forward and we couldn't carry everything with us.
Where are they now?
Whose lives have they touched? What attics do they sleep in? What secondhand shops hold them? What boxes in what basements still contain the things we thought were gone forever?

And could they possibly - against every mathematical probability, against every rational explanation - find their way back?

Anne Parrish's book did.
It traveled 5,000 miles and three decades to return to her hands.

There's no explanation that makes sense. No logical reason. No way to trace every hand that held it, every transaction that moved it closer.
It just... happened.

Some people hear this story and think about fate. About meant-to-be. About the universe conspiring to return things to their rightful owners.
Others hear it and think about probability. About the sheer number of people browsing bookstalls, the volume of old books in circulation, the odds that eventually, randomly, impossibly, someone finds their own.
But maybe the real story isn't about odds or fate.
Maybe it's about paying attention.

Anne could have walked past that stall. She could have been too tired, too distracted, too busy. She could have skipped the bookstalls that day entirely.
But she stopped. She browsed. She let her fingers trail across spines.
And when she found something that whispered of memory, she paid attention.

How many of us rush past the moments that might be waiting for us? How many times do we almost-see something, almost-recognize something, but we're moving too fast to notice?

Anne Parrish found her childhood book in a Paris bookstall in 1929.

Somewhere, right now, something you lost years ago is sitting on a shelf. In a shop, in a box, in someone else's attic.
Will you walk past it? Or will you be paying enough attention to recognize it when it finds its way back?

The book waited thirty years.
Maybe yours is waiting too.

Excellent story.

 

[Red]

I have my own synchronicity story. I have one classmate from high school who kept popping up in my head over the years and I'd always wondered about how they were doing. My former classmate remembered we went to see David Lynch's film, Dune, in the theater and somehow found me at the end of the pandemic. They couldn't stop thinking about me when the new Dune film came out and reached out to me. And now we regularly hang out and we've been able to reestablish our friendship. We've gone to the Van Meter Visitor Festival for the last 3 years. It's been pretty awesome.

 

[Richard Hawkins]

I have my own synchronicity story. I have one classmate from high school who kept popping up in my head over the years and I'd always wondered about how they were doing. My former classmate remembered we went to see David Lynch's film, Dune, in the theater and somehow found me at the end of the pandemic. They couldn't stop thinking about me when the new Dune film came out and reached out to me. And now we regularly hang out and we've been able to reestablish our friendship. We've gone to the Van Meter Visitor Festival for the last 3 years. It's been pretty awesome.

That's amazing. And as a man called Mulder once said. The truth is out there.
I often think we are no more than Ants looking at a world and a universe we can't begin to comprehend.

 

[Nina Garfinkel]

Over 30 years ago I was living and working in NYC and had recently had my work hours cut by 20% and was nervous about how I was going to get by. Out with friends on the evening I'd gotten the bad news, I was extremely frugal in ordering a late night snack as I now felt I had to watch every dime I spent. I ordered an English muffin and a cup of coffee that came to the grand total of approx. $3. Things were cheap back then, even in NYC. On the way home on this cold, snowy night, I was down the block from where I lived when I noticed something underfoot in the icy slush beneath my feet. I bent down to find exactly $3 folded up in half. In that moment I felt everything was gong to be OK and it was. i went on to find additional freelance work and ended up having to turn down jobs. "Something unknown is doing we don't know what. " Eddington was right.

 

[Richard Hawkins]

Over 30 years ago I was living and working in NYC and had recently had my work hours cut by 20% and was nervous about how I was going to get by. Out with friends on the evening I'd gotten the bad news, I was extremely frugal in ordering a late night snack as I now felt I had to watch every dime I spent. I ordered an English muffin and a cup of coffee that came to the grand total of approx. $3. Things were cheap back then, even in NYC. On the way home on this cold, snowy night, I was down the block from where I lived when I noticed something underfoot in the icy slush beneath my feet. I bent down to find exactly $3 folded up in half. In that moment I felt everything was gong to be OK and it was. i went on to find additional freelance work and ended up having to turn down jobs. "Something unknown is doing we don't know what. " Eddington was right.

Wow.

 

[Randall]

A Type 2 Synchronicity ( Synced With Nature )

One cold and dreary day, a buddy of mine ( Vlad ) and I were walking along a pedestrian path overlooking the City's frozen water reservoir. We were talking about everything wrong in the world — feeling gloomy inside and out. I said to him that it's true that we ought not ignore the problems in the world, but it's also important not to forget that there's still beauty too.

At that moment, there was a change in the air, and I knew a sign was coming, so I drew Vlad's attention to a patch of unfrozen water in the middle of the reservoir ( about 450 yards off-shore ) where a dozen or so Canada geese were on approach to land with their flock. There were around 200 of them on the ice and in the water ). "Get ready — It's going to happen", I said.

Just then — a perfectly clear break in the solid clouds appeared over the water where the geese we landing, exposing a patch of intense blue sky, flooding the scene ( and us ) with sparkling sunlight and radiant heat. For a few seconds it was like we were in another realm — everything ultra-real. The geese landed perfectly to the honking cheers of their fellow fliers — Then it was over.

The clouds sealed back up, and we went on our dreary way.

 

[Burnt State]

Synchronicities are just plain weird. They make a good argument for someone at the controls of the simulated universe that we are all living in, having a good laugh at our own expense, whenever we are startled by moments of unbelievable coincidence.

Mine is a pretty simple one, brief and well contained. During the summer of my major ouija experiment we were in contact with a young girl by the name of Heather. She claimed her dad had burnt the house to the ground killing everyone in it including her. I spent many, many hours pouring over microfiche in the local library to try and find the news article that would confirm such a tragedy, but all the dates she gave our team never added up to a discovery. We had many very strange and inexplicable things that happened on the board with her that summer.

One day, as was my usual habit, I was walking to the corner store to pick up my girlfriend where she worked to go and resume our daily ouija activities after her shift. As I was walking something gold glinted in the sand and dirt by the curb of the sidewalk I was walking on. I bent down to pick it up and it was a small flat gold little foot like you would see on a charm bracelet. I turned it over and there engraved on the back was the name, "Heather".

 

[Randall]

Synchronicities are just plain weird. They make a good argument for someone at the controls of the simulated universe that we are all living in, having a good laugh at our own expense . . .

Hmmm — Someone at the controls. But who?
Once again, The Simpsons provides the answer . . .

 

[Randall]

Over 30 years ago I was living and working in NYC and had recently had my work hours cut by 20% and was nervous about how I was going to get by. Out with friends on the evening I'd gotten the bad news, I was extremely frugal in ordering a late night snack as I now felt I had to watch every dime I spent. I ordered an English muffin and a cup of coffee that came to the grand total of approx. $3. Things were cheap back then, even in NYC. On the way home on this cold, snowy night, I was down the block from where I lived when I noticed something underfoot in the icy slush beneath my feet. I bent down to find exactly $3 folded up in half. In that moment I felt everything was gong to be OK and it was. i went on to find additional freelance work and ended up having to turn down jobs. "Something unknown is doing we don't know what. " Eddington was right.

Hey thanks for sharing your experience. Welcome back to the forum.