Recently, I was participating in an online forum on synchronicity and a man named Ryan shared a synchronicity that he titled, “Stranger than fiction.” It was so incredibly coincidental and so pregnant with meaning that I asked him if I could share it with you. He said he would be honored and so here it is: 

The audible knocking sound gave me a very weird feeling. It was because of the timing: At that exact moment, I was editing a scene in a story [I had written] where a visitor comes to a door, and I was having trouble deciding whether story-visitor “rang” or “knocked.” I dropped my pen, and got up to see who was providing sound effects. Through the window, I beheld, in flesh and blood, a black male stranger, and I realized I was in a realm of extraordinary synchronicity — Story-visitor was a black, male stranger too. And when I opened the door, the parallels continued. Like story-stranger, flesh-and-blood-stranger had alcohol on his breath. I smelled it right away when he started to talk. Flesh-and-blood-drunken-stranger was holding an empty pill bottle, and he was asking for money to fill his prescription, and so the first thing he told me concerned his diagnosis — he had a chronic disabling disease. Story-drunken-stranger was physically disabled too.

The thing about story-stranger that made him story-worthy was that he had survived a near-death experience. And so it made me wonder about flesh-and-blood-stranger. I asked. His eyes widened. He had flat-lined in a hospital. “Do you know what it is like to see trees with golden apples? Have you seen a manticore?” he asked.

What did it mean?

If you are familiar with my CMPE model, you can probably see quite readily that this has all the markings. We have two events just happening to come together—Ryan’s fictional story and the real-life knock on the door—yet sharing a number of parallels. He even calls them parallels.

His final question, “What did it mean?” really grabbed me. This had happened to him fifteen years ago, in 1995, and he was still left wondering what it meant. Knowing how CMPEs work, I felt that this experience very likely contained invaluable guidance for him. It seemed like a kind of cosmic shame, therefore, that he hadn’t received the message. Imagine God sending you a letter in the mail, only it was in Hebrew, and you couldn’t find anyone to translate Hebrew. Wouldn’t that frustrate you no end?

So I responded on the forum and offered to apply what I’ve learned from working with CMPEs to help Ryan figure out the message. He replied, saying, “Yes, I am interested in exploring the meaning of my extreme synchronicity using your CMPE model.” And so in the next post I will relate the process that Ryan and I went through and give you the interpretation I came up with, along with Ryan’s reactions.