The night before last, I had a weird and rambling dream, which is a pretty common occurrence for me. It involved getting in a rickety plane, and having something of a near-death experience while the pilot squeezed the plane in sideways down narrow streets, like during the dogfights in Independence Day. When I finally arrived at my destination, it turned out I was meeting a friend to go see a Toni Braxton concert in New Orleans. When we went to check in to the hotel, I realized I’d forgotten my wallet AND the Toni Braxton tickets at home. But it all worked out okay in the end, with me telling myself, “There is always a way to solve a problem.” Suddenly, in my dream, I rediscovered digitally-printable concert tickets.
I’m sure it would take a team of psychologists weeks to figure out just what’s going on in this brain of mine, but the fun part of the story is that the friend in the dream – a real person, with whom I worked over a decade ago – called me the very next morning. She’s a good friend, good enough so that we sometimes share vacation rentals, most recently this past summer, but she lives in Florida and I haven’t spoken to her since our vacation share six months ago. Then, after dreaming of her, she called me the very next day.
I told her the dream, and she laughed and told me she didn’t even know who Toni Braxton is (frankly, I haven’t exactly listened to any of her music for at least a decade, so I have no idea why my subconscious pulled her out of the files either). But it left me marveling at the world of coincidence, and how safe and beautiful the world would be if we could chalk that up to some magical connection through the ether rather than simple coincidence.
I vacillate on the issue, actually. Sometimes coincidences feel too magical to be ignored, sometimes I want reason to prevail. But I think it’s one of the reasons I’ve been enjoying writing fantasy. What if, even if we don’t live in a world full of magic, we can create one? And maybe that’s enough for me.
