Chapter 12 - Coincidence Rising
Coincidence Speaks
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Happy Friday friends!
As ever, in addition to new chapters of Coincidence Speaks each week, I share creations from Substackia and the greater internet Void that I find especially moving, to an italicized degree.
This week’s iteration of that commitment is this short and powerful personal essay by
. I won’t ruin it, but suffice it to say it’s about a sixth grade boy with a hyperbolic heart. Who is way too hard on himself. Who demonstrates the true etymology of masculine courage.
We now return to the latest installment of Coincidence Speaks. Chapters are crafted to be read on a standalone basis. For the full experience head this way to start at the beginning!↩️
Chapter 12
Coincidence Rising
Paul was hosting a Monday morning meeting in the boardroom with a client and his boss when it happened.
Without warning, a bluish haze shimmered up above his boss as he spoke, and a small translucent halo now hovered atop his balding head. Paul blinked hard and shook his head, trying to clear his vision. Maybe it was the bright artificial lights above creating a sheen on his shiny dome? But why would it be reflecting blue like that?
After several blinks it only grew more distinct, the amorphous field of light growing, now flickering bright wisps of bluish smoke around his head.
The exact moment his boss finished speaking, the strange pulsing hues vanished as quickly as they had arrived, a desert mirage on the second floor of a Class A office building.
Paul sat in his office afterward, struggling to make sense of it. He watched his inner narrator churning away for an explanation, reasoning, “Hey—you’ve been doing this daily ‘expanding awareness’ practice a while now after all, so maybe you’re just noticing more stuff than you used to, and what you’re seeing is just some kind of afterimage that’s always been there.”
Sure enough, he checked online and saw how, through something called the “afterimage effect,” holding extended visual focus on an object resulted in complementary colors and shapes rising up around it.
“Aha! Must’ve just been holding my gaze in one spot during that meeting without realizing it.”
He tested the phenomenon with Clara as soon as he got home that evening.
“Hey—something weird happened at work today. Can we try an experiment? Just need to make sure I’m not totally crazy.”
“Crazy how?” Clara asked, one eyebrow ascending.
“Crazy like I was in the middle of a meeting, and it looked like some kind of light field popped up around my boss’s head for a couple seconds. Then it disappeared.”
He rummaged around in the kitchen drawer. “I want to see if we can recreate it.”
Clara looked at him quizzically as Paul grabbed a bright orange colored pen and held it up in front of the white wall behind him.
“Keep your eyes on this and let me know if anything happens. Just like thirty seconds or so.”
Clara shrugged and obliged, going silent as she focused her gaze. It didn’t take long.
“Wow, that’s pretty cool—it’s like there’s a pulsing blue energy field all around it!” she exclaimed. Paul laughed.
The afterimage effect indeed.
But that Sunday, in church, it happened again.
Midway through an especially inspired and heartfelt sermon, a triad of colors erupted up around the pastor’s shoulders with such intensity that Paul gasped. Greens and golds and pastel pinks pulsed with her oration, seemingly matching the energy of her spoken words and gestures. As if they were visible wavelengths of her emotive expression.
“Holy crap… the ‘afterimage effect’ sure as heck doesn’t explain this!” Colors corresponding with human emotion?
On the drive home from church, a shimmering golden field seemed to hover an inch or two above the treetops. Maybe it was just how the wind danced atop the leaves as the brilliant afternoon sun poured through. But Paul didn’t think so.
The afterimage effect didn’t explain that either.
The whole world seemed to be blooming in color. With it, surprising new patterns began to blossom in everything around him. Patterns and connections he’d either never seen, or never noticed before.
In quite an unexpected turn of events, recurring number sequences began to pop up everywhere he looked. Especially the number 1.
Suddenly, it seemed like every single time he looked at his watch, or picked up his phone, or noticed an email timestamp, it was always 11’s. Receipts, texts, financial calculations, they all contained consecutive 1’s, lining up one after the other, time and time again over the course of a full work week.
That Friday was the final straw. As Paul angled into a gas station to fuel up after his last offsite client call, a tiny speck of movement caught his attention.
It was the odometer, turning from 141,110 to 141,111 miles. Simultaneously, the clock on the dashboard turned from 4:10 to 4:11. His eyes moved to the car radio—the track number of the song that had just ended was 0411.
“1’s again what the heck…”
Clunking the gas nozzle into the fuel tank, his mind wandered back to the business meeting he’d just finished, strategies and schedules now permeating his thoughtstream while he topped off the tank. «CHUNK» the gas pump hit the auto shut off and interrupted his planful reverie.
The meter read 14.111 gallons. The final sale was $41.11.
This was highly disconcerting to his analytical mind, which was already at its logical limits after a long work week. Nonetheless, it did its stubborn best to dismiss the phenomenon as a manifestation of randomness, or his own confirmation bias. But Paul worked with and analyzed numbers all day in the business world, and he most certainly wasn’t seeking out the phenomenon.
“What the hell are the actual odds of all these different numbers synching up, all at the exact same time?” Statistically anomalous to the point of ridiculousness, as far as he was concerned.
So even though it was a subjective experience, rather than dismissing it altogether, he stayed open to a potential unconventional meaning. Just like with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, he aimed to keep some objective curiosity about his own subjective experience, resolving to apply the “awareness expansion” he’d been cultivating over the past several months to tune into his inner state the exact moment when the repeating patterns would appear.
“Maybe seeing these recurring numbers isn’t just a coincidence? Maybe the patterns are some kind of real-time communication, just for me?”
He was right. It wasn’t a coincidence.
Or at least, with close observation over the next several days he recognized his own common subjective thread—the number sequences always showed up exactly when he was completely lost in his own inner narrative, his own story, his own mind. When he was disconnected from the bigger interconnected picture of life around him, totally identified with and absorbed by the endless monotony of his own thoughts.
The persistent patterns of repeating numbers seemed to have a very specific purpose indeed: they were like lightning bolts, breaking him out of his daily programmed routine and compelling him to see that there was something more happening, if he would only take the time to slow down and tune in.
It was almost as if the events of his life itself were conspiring to shake him out of his default autopilot state, surprising him with such striking numerical coincidence that he couldn’t help but be brought out of his own head…
…and right into the present moment.
Just as the physical symptoms of Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy had compounded and escalated the longer the chronic pain signal became ingrained, the more he kept up his awareness expansion practice, the more novel phenomena gathered momentum in his outer life. But all strange phenomena aside, the predominant shift in Paul was a significantly heightened sense of spaciousness, for lack of a better term.
He had a hard time putting the sense of it into words: a constant overarching feeling of unlimited potential, like the physical world wasn’t nearly as concrete as he’d always assumed. Life seemed more like a malleable dream now, and he was an observer in the midst of it.
“A lot like that sudden flash of heightened awareness in the back corner of the emergency room,” he remembered.
More and more, the external events of his walking, talking life seemed to be inextricably connected to his thoughts and feelings in a seamless, fluid realtime. Paul moved through each passing day with an ever-increasing feeling of déjà vu, and everything felt… symbolic. Archetypal. Metaphoric.
Something was reawakening.
At night, he began to wake up while he was still asleep.
Sleeping transformed into its own nightly adventure. Paul’s dreams became much more vivid and even lucid sometimes, and every now and then he found himself coming into full consciousness right in the middle of them—the exact same way he did during his daily awareness practice. Their memory would almost always vanish as soon as he started the morning routine, so he started writing dream notes in his journal.
The dreamworld experience was totally bizarre relative to the usual waking state, but through recording his nightly adventures in writing, he began to notice how the patterning and events of his dreams would often give implicit metaphors and direct symbology that showed exactly how his inner emotional and mental state was affecting his outer waking life.
Sometimes, his dreams would give direct insight into the nature of how the coming day would unfold.
Sometimes, his dreams would come true.
End Chapter 12
Chapter 13 - The Dream Collapses will post Friday, May 10th. Thanks for being here in interactive real time! Comments and feedback always welcome.
In gratitude,
E.T. Allen
Now you really left me hanging . Time to chime in with my bizarre possibilities.
His breathing practices resulted in an increased size of the frontal lobe regions of his brain . Causing strange biochemical changes which activated an ability to tap into his sixth sense?
Or alien take over of his body.
Ok, I’ll shut up and sit back and wait for it…
Reading Chapter 12 gave insight that I'm not the only one seeing these numbers! I saw myself while reading especially waking up in dreamtime. I think the hardest part for me is trying to figure out exactly what my guides are trying to tell me. Thank you for validating my own awakening through your writing! I loved reading this chapter!