Editing Synchronicity (section)

== Examples ==

=== Jung ===
[[File:Cetonia_aurata_MF.jpg|thumb|A gold-coloured {{lang|la|[[Cetonia aurata]]}}]]
Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event in his 1960 book ''[[Synchronicity (book)|Synchronicity]]'':

{{Blockquote|text=By way of example, I shall mention an incident from my own observation. A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (''[[Cetonia aurata]]''), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.<br /><br />
It was an extraordinarily difficult case to treat, and up to the time of the dream little or no progress had been made. I should explain that the main reason for this was my patient's animus, which was steeped in Cartesian philosophy and clung so rigidly to its own idea of reality that the efforts of three doctors—I was the third—had not been able to weaken it. Evidently something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my powers to produce. The dream alone was enough to disturb ever so slightly the rationalistic attitude of my patient. But when the "scarab" came flying in through the window in actual fact, her natural being could burst through the armor of her animus possession and the process of transformation could at last begin to move.{{sfnp|Jung|1973|p=[https://archive.org/details/synchronicityaca00cgju/page/27 27]}} }}

After describing some examples, Jung wrote: "When coincidences pile up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them—for the greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its character, the more improbable it becomes."<ref name=":0" />{{Rp|91}}

=== Deschamps ===
French writer [[Émile Deschamps]] claims in his memoirs that, in 1805, he was treated to some [[plum pudding]] by a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him that the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fontgibu. Many years later, in 1832, Deschamps was at a dinner and once again ordered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fontgibu was missing to make the setting complete—and in the same instant, the now-[[senile]] de Fontgibu entered the room, having got the wrong address.<ref>{{cite web|title=Œuvres complètes de Émile Deschamps : III : Prose : Première partie|last=Deschamps|first=Émile|publisher=[[Alphonse Lemerre]]|location=Paris|date=1873|pages=262–265|url=https://archive.org/details/oeuvrescompltes03descgoog/page/n268/mode/2up|via=Internet Archive|access-date=16 March 2024|language=fr|trans-title=The Complete Works of Émile Deschamps : III : Prose : First part }}</ref>

=== Pauli ===
In his book ''Thirty Years That Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory'' (1966), [[George Gamow]] writes about [[Wolfgang Pauli]], who was apparently considered a person particularly associated with synchronicity events. Gamow whimsically refers to the "[[Pauli effect]]", a mysterious [[phenomenon]] which is not understood on a purely [[Materialism|materialistic]] basis, and probably never will be. The following [[anecdote]] is told:

{{Quotation|It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold. A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected with Pauli's presence once occurred in Professor J. Franck's laboratory in Göttingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena collapsed. Franck wrote humorously about this to Pauli at his Zürich address and, after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp. Pauli wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr and at the time of the mishap in Franck's laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at the Göttingen railroad station. You may believe this anecdote or not, but there are many other observations concerning the reality of the Pauli Effect!<ref>Thirty Years That Shook Physics – The Story of Quantum Theory, George Gamow, p. 64, Doubleday & Co. Inc. New York, 1966</ref>}}