"Coincidence? I think not" has become a parodied dialog line in paranormal tales. It is inspired by "synchronicity," which is a fancy way of describing the experience of seeing two or more events as meaningfully related, even though they are unlikely to be causally related and may not be simultaneous in time. For example, suppose you are reminiscing about a beautiful rose garden when a total stranger hands you a bouquet of roses and walks away. Suppose you dream that a friend is in the hospital, and the next day you learn the friend has just been in a car accident. The concept of synchronicity was first described by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in the 1920s. Skeptics say the human mind is programmed to find patterns, to the point of connecting random events. Others see evidence of worlds beneath or beyond the everyday. I'm not a writer of paranormal fiction, so I generally use the plot spice of synchronicity sparingly. But since most of us have experienced inexplicably interconnected events at some point, a fictional world without any "synchronicity" also seems both unreal and uninteresting. Have you experienced "synchronicities" that impacted you significantly? For more explanation, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
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