Bookstore Telepathy

We told this story here a couple of years ago about an incident in a bookstore that combines synchronicity and telepathy. We’ve re-written it for The Synchronicity Highway, and because it’s one our favorites we’re putting it up again as it will appear in the book that comes out this fall.

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Our telepathic connections often occur in bookstores or through books, which isn’t surprising since we’re both writers who, after thirty years of marriage, understand each other’s tastes in reading material. Shortly after Dan Brown’s second novel, The Lost Symbol, was published, we stopped by a Barnes and Noble to browse. While Trish was looking at the novel, Rob picked up a different novel under new releases, read the first couple pages, then picked up another and did the same.

In the first novel, Shimmer, by David Morrell, the story opens in a chopper with a police pilot who is chasing a pickup truck along a desert highway. In the second novel, The Sign, by Raymond Khoury, the story opens in a pickup truck racing across the desert, pursued by a chopper. What are the chances of that: desert-desert, chopper-chopper, pickup-pickup. Point of view above; point of view below. But if it was a synchronicity, how was it meaningful?

Rob figured that because he was reading and editing our first synchronicity book for the final time before submitting it, he attracted what he was focused on. Or, more esoterically, As above so below:  the macrocosm is the same as the microcosm. He suspected that if he read The Lost Symbol, which Trish bought, he would find out more.

Not long afterward, we were on a trip and  Rob was reading The Lost Symbol. In the first hundred pages or so of the novel, one of the repeated themes was As above, so below, the very concept he’d noticed during our bookstore trip. The odd synchro had come full circle, a good example of the kind of telepathy involved in close relationships.

When we posted this story on our blog, Navine – a poet – commented that she and her husband had experienced something similar at a Borders Bookstore about the same time that we were browsing Barnes and Noble.  “I’d just finished with an appointment at my hair salon and was at Borders, really, to pick up my husband, who was waiting for me there. I didn’t find him, and I figured he’d walked to his favorite cigar shop around the corner.” So she browed the new titles, saw that The Lost Symbol was available, as was Ted Kennedy’s True Compass.

Navine remembered her husband talking about Kennedy’s book, so she picked it up for him and bought The Lost Symbol for herself. Then she walked over to the cigar shop to find her husband. As she walked in the door, she spotted him with a cigar in hand, smiling. And he said, “Check out what I got at Borders. I got The Lost Symbol for you, and True Compass for me.”

A skeptic might argue that married couples know their partner’s taste in books, so of course those two books would be logical choices. Both Dan Brown and Ted Kennedy are household names, one known for fast-paced storytelling, the other known for his progressive politics and family legacy. Maybe…but maybe not. According to statistics issued by UNESCO in 2010, the U.S. published the most books of any country in the world: more than 328,000.

Random choices? Or telepathic choices?