Ask And You Receive

     In his wonderful book, The Three Only Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination, Robert Moss offers a synchronicity game that he dreamed up, literally.  He calls it the Coincidence Card Game.  It's simple; every person in the circle gets an index card on which they are asked to write, legibly and on one side only, a saying, a line from a song, part of a dream, or absolutely anything that comes to mind.  The cards are collected and shuffled thoroughly, maintaining the blank side out at all times.  Each person gets to pick a card from this newly minted deck that they must put down without looking at the written message. Then, they must think of a question they would like to put to the universe, a question they don't mind sharing with the group.  One by one, each person states their question, turns their card over and reads the message they received out loud. I've played this Active Dreaming game in groups Robert Moss has led, as well as in my own dream groups; it never fails to bring laughter, but it also creates some undeniable synchronicities.   

The example I will share here happened in a group I led this past Saturday.  The CC Game is a great way to raise energy after some intense dream work, so before we wrapped up, I handed out the index cards, one to a person and kept one for myself to write on. I then put the rest of the cards away, so as not to confuse the deck.  Everyone wrote something and I collected those cards; I shuffled thoroughly and each person chose their response card from the deck I now held out to them, then put it down without looking at it.  We went around the circle with our questions and oracle answers and just about everyone felt that little pique of intrigue as they considered how the serendipitous message might answer their question. There was one wonderful synchronicity that I could not have anticipated.

At the beginning of our group, I gave a short introduction to Active Dreaming and the techniques of Lightning Dream Work and Dream Re-entry.  At one point, someone asked about dreams with departed loved ones and we talked about them briefly.  I made a comment like; "Well, we all have a physical body with an expiration date." as  a humorously intended aside.

In our Coincidence Card Game, the last participant, when it came her turn, said her card was blank, but that's okay, she was happy with that answer.  I was flummoxed; how did an extra card get into my deck?  I carefully handed a single card to each, took one myself and got rid of the rest.  I apologized and, realizing I was holding two written-on cards when I should have only one left for myself, I said; "Here, pick one of these", holding out the two cards.

She smiled broadly and said; "This really is the perfect card for my question which was, "What is my expiration date?"

There is always magic when we play with our dreams together in a group.  C.G. Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist and dream explorer descrlibed this phenomenom succinctly as an acausal connecting principle, or meaningful coincidence.  In my experience, it often comes with goose bumps, as it did this time for the whole group.  I don't know how the blank card got in the final deck; it was probably stuck to another one, but without my knowing.  What more powerful answer could this dreamer have gotten to her intrepid question?  We don't know our expiration date, so we live our fullest life now, trusting that when the time comes, we'll be ready.  

Connecting to our dreams connects us to the deeper realities that are in harmony with our waking ones; they come through with a personalized assurance that we're not alone.  We just ask for what we want, and as the song says, we'll get what we need.