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  Ever since The Hunger Games was released as a movie, I’ve read a number of blog posts about why dystopian novels are not the blog author’s favorite type of story. But I am, quite frankly, fascinated by dystopian novels.

 First, there’s that word, dystopian. It rolls off your tongue in a weird, uncomfortable way, doesn’t it? According to dictionary.com, a dystopia  is  “usually an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives.” Let’s look at some of the best ones:

 In Orwell’s classic, 1984 (yeah, he was off in his timing!)  the world is one in which books are banned – not just censored, but banned, forbidden, so there are small groups of rebels and outliers who spend their days memorizing books.

Blade Runner, probably one of Philip K. Dick’s best novels, became a movie of the same name in 1982 and was one of the first movies in which Harrison Ford played the protagonist. It depicts Los Angeles in 2019 (that’s six years from now!) in a world where corporations are king.

A Wikipedia summary: The film depicts a dystopian Los Angeles in November 2019 in which genetically engineered organic robots called replicants —visually indistinguishable from adult humans—are manufactured by the powerful Tyrell Corporation as well as by other “mega–manufacturers” around the world. Their use on Earth is banned and replicants are exclusively used for dangerous, menial or leisure work on off-world colonies. Replicants who defy the ban and return to Earth are hunted down and “retired” by police special operatives known as “Blade Runners”. The plot focuses on a brutal and cunning group of recently escaped replicants hiding in Los Angeles and the burnt-out expert Blade Runner, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), who reluctantly agrees to take on one more assignment to hunt them down.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I read this book in two sittings. McCarthy is a powerful writer and I was blown away by this book. It‘s a strange, post- apocalyptic  story about a father and son – who are never named, they are simply man and boy – as they travel through a ruined landscape in search of…well, hope. We have a heartbreaking sense of their relationship, of how the father will do anything to protect his young son. McCarthy won the Putlizer prize for this novel and it went on to become a movie with Viggo Martenson. The movie wasn’t nearly as moving as the book. I should add that Rob found this book so depressing he couldn’t finish it.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and yes, it also became a movie. It’s the first in a trilogy about a world that has suffered some terrible calamity and in its wake, North America has been divided into 12 districts ruled by an oppressive government. The Hunger Games are an annual event in which one boy and one girl ages 12–18 from each of the twelve districts are selected by lottery to compete in a televised battle to the death. In other words, kids killing kids.

What I found most interesting about the trilogy and the subsequent movies is that this trilogy is for young adults because the protagonist is a 16-year-old girl. That means it’s okay to show kids killing kids, but these same kids can’t swear or have sex. Really? Kids killing other kids is okay, but kids having sex or saying shit is not?

There are many other dystopian novels – Stephen King’s Running Man,  Philip K Dicks’s Minority Report, and Scott Westerfield’s series that begins with The Uglies.   A good number of them are young adult books, but for the moment let’s focus on these.

1984 made us aware of literary censorship and probably helped to spawn many of today’s anti-censorship organizations. When a book is censored, attention is brought to who and why. The American Library Association publishes annual lists of censored books and all the relevant details.

Blade Runner may actually be happening now, with the recent whistleblower revelations by 29-year old high school dropout Edward Snowden. This young man worked for the NSA through an outsourced company and you can read all about him here. Is he a version of the Ford character in Blade Runner ? Is he a hero or a traitor?

The Road is a literary journey through a world where anarchy rules, nearly everyone is dead, and the survivors are desperate.  The emotional relationships between father and son is what makes the story work.

In all dystopian novels, we are presented with a horrifying what if, a probable path,  and are invited to live it. As we read, as we watch, we are confronted with the very thing we do NOT want. We are presented with shocking contrasts. I think dystopian novels reveal the probable futures that are available to us as a species, and help us to collectively strive for something better, more positive, more humane.

These novels and movies impact us at a collective level, and often force us, individually and collectively, to evolve as human beings. They teach us things  about who  we are and hope to become.

Here’s a string of synchronicities related to a murder that involves three related men—the killer, his brother, and the killer’s son.

David Berg is a well known Texas lawyer who founded his own law firm and has won cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He’s also been a civil rights activist and a Clarence Darrow-style defender of the damned: disgraced politicians, grungy protesters and celebrities.

But the most dramatic case of his life, revealed in his memoir, Run, Brother, Run, occurred years before Berg became a lawyer. He and his brother, Alan Berg, were separated at a young age when their parents divorced. They reconnected when Alan moved to Houston after serving in the Navy. The two grew close and David admired his older brother, a salesman who seemingly could sell carpeting to anyone. Alan worked for his father’s carpeting company, but in 1968 he vanished.

“It’s very hard to explain except to say that when a loved one disappears you become detached from anything even remotely that could be described as a normal life,” Alan recently said in an interview on National Public Radio. “I couldn’t take an unlabored breath. My father was so distraught he would throw up. He would bolt from the middle of sales discussions and just leave and look for my brother. So it was devastating.”

David’s father finally hired a well established private detective named Claude Harrelson to search for Alan. Within three days, Harrelson reported that Alan had been murdered. The detective then asked for $3,000 to locate the body. He said he didn’t want to take the $5,000 reward already offered, because he was afraid he would be the killer’s next victim.

A short time later, police arrested the alleged killer, and astonishingly it was Claude Harrelson’s brother, Charles Harrelson.  Supposedly, Harrelson had been hired by a former employee of the carpeting company, who was starting his own business, and was in conflict with Alan’s father. But Charles Harrelson escaped conviction when testimony from the only witness, his wife, was ruled inadmissible because she was his spouse.

But Charles Harrelson would  be convicted of two other murders and he was suspected in at least 20 killings. He also once confess to involvement in the JFK assassination. He died in prison in 2007.

That’s a somewhat lengthy explanation that leads to the next synchro. In 1993, David Berg attended a Simon & Garfunkel reunion concert at Madison Square Garden. Sitting in the adjacent seat was actor Woody Harrelson, Charles Harrelson’s son.

Woody was raised by his mother and knew very little about his father until he was seven years old when he found out his father was accused of murder. That was 1968, the year Charles was accused of killing Alan Berg. As an adult, Woody often visited his father in prison and considered him a friend, more than a father – or a mass murderer.

One year after sitting next to David Berg in Madison Square Garden, Woody Harrelson starred as a crazed serial killer in Natural Born Killers. With that role, Harrelson lost his image of an actor who nice-guy roles. Possibly, his electrifying performance was abetted by his genetic link to an actual killer.

This video is interesting. You can hear the family talking about what they’re seeing about halfway through, which gives it an air of authenticity.

 This morning at the gym, I was on the treadmill when my right shoe suddenly felt like it had a stone or a stick inside of it. I got off the treadmill to remove whatever it was and discovered the side of the right shoe had torn away from the sole. The sole looked like it had gone through one puddle too many and it seemed pretty doubtful that even a cobbler could hammer and stitch things back together again.

I am fond of my workout shoes. They are filled – deliberately – with holes that allow the feet to breathe.  I don’t have to wear socks with them. I think of them as my multidimensional shoes; in these shoes, I can do anything! So, I figured a trip to the sports store would be in order.

This is my third pair of shoes like this. When Nika was a puppy – 18 months  ago –  she chewed up the first pair and destroyed the left  shoe in the second pair. At the time I found the second pair, I realized the right shoe was untouched, so I stashed it away in a plastic bin where we put our shoes before coming into the house. I’m not sure why I did this. Maybe I’m part pack rat, maybe in the back of my mind I thought I might be able to use it if Nika got a hold of my third pair of shoes.

I stashed it and forgot about it.

This evening, I was fishing around in the shoe bin for a pair of workout shoes I could use until I had a chance to buy a new pair  – and came across the stashed shoe. Now my multidimensional shoes are complete once again!

I like the symbolism of shoes. They not only carry us through mud, across treadmills, into and out grocery stores,  they protect and support our feet.  They can dress us up or render us strictly casual. My main rule for shoes is simple: are they comfortable? And my multidimensional shoes are certainly that.

So now that my  shoes are reunited, left and right a perfect match, I’m hoping these shoes are willing to take me across the world.

Some of my most vivid dreams have come at the time of death–or shortly after– of friends and family members. In these dreams, the deceased seem surprisingly alive in the afterlife.

Our friend, Marcus Anthony, an Australian futurist, has also had dreams related to deaths recently. However, Marcus’s dreams have come a week or two before the deaths. The dreams weren’t of anyone close to him, but to a couple of men that he had admired for years. I’ll let Marcus tell the story. – Rob

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Recently on their blog synchrosecrets.com, Rob and Trish Macgregor wrote a post which featured a quote on synchronicity by David R Hawkins, the mystic and author of the influential book Power vs Force. I have written about Hawkins quite a bit over the years, as I feel that much of what he writes has a very high level of truth. That post by the Macgregors inspired me to go to YouTube and watch some of Hawkin’s videoed lectures. Unfortunately I was saddened to see one entitled “David R Hawkins’ last lecture”. I then found out that he had died in September 2012.

I then recalled that I had had a vivid dream of Hawkins’ dying some time ago. I still recall the dream. In it I saw Hawkin’s face, and it was clear that he had passed away. The other thing was that his overall consciousness field appeared to be “empty”. This is hard to explain, but it was as if he was hollow. My sense is that this was because he was in a kind of non-dual state which he had often described himself as feeling like nothingness (BTW, this is not the highest state of consciousness, according to Hawkins).

I have a lot of precognitive dreams, but I only write down my dreams every now and again these days – when I feel they are profound or perhaps precognitive. When I heard that Hawkins had died, I recalled the dream and that I’d written it down somewhere. So I went looking for it. I was particularly interested to find the exact date.

Annoyingly, I couldn’t find it anywhere in my journals or on my computer. Then I recalled that I occasionally write down dreams on the notepad on my mobile phone. I try not to have my phone anywhere near my bed when I am sleeping these days, but I have sometimes kept it there deliberately for this very purpose.

Alas, it was to no avail. The Hawkins’ dream was nowhere to be found on my mobile either (I know I put it somewhere!!!). But what I did find on my mobile notepad was a whole heap of dreams that I had recorded and mostly forgotten about. Some of them were quite fascinating.

But one really caught my attention. Indeed it was even more prophetic than the Hawkins’ dream.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this dream is that it occurred only six weeks ago. It is dated April 22, 2013. And I had absolutely forgotten about it!

This is not that unusual (though it’s true I do remember a lot of dreams, even when I don’t record them).

When I awake and write a dream down, I am often barely conscious, and in a very, very drowsy state. I fall back to sleep immediately, as soon as I record the dream. I am a very heavy sleeper.

So what was so special about this dream? Well, take a look at it. This is the dream as I recorded it in its entirety. I emailed this to myself directly from my mobile note pad, and I have cut and pasted it here.

I am looking in from a railway station at a pub across the road. It says “Stuart Wilde pub” on the sign. Then I look closer and see that it says: “Stu dead”. I feel great sadness.        

Then I hear someone say: “Is it true?”            

A little boy’s voice returns: “Yes. He had a heart attack.”      

I keep hearing the song “She’s out of my life.” (Michael Jackson) It’s very sad.     

Then I hear another voice. It is Stuart Wilde saying: “I’d like to thank her.”           

Next I am hearing words from the Cold Chisel song “Flame Trees”:           

 ”There’s no change. There’s no pace. Everything within its place. Just makes it harder to believe that she won’t be around”.   

There is a sense of sadness and emptiness, like just after someone dies or leaves.

As many of you will know, Stuart Wilde died of a heart attack on May 1st, just over a week after I had that dream, while traveling through Ireland. I found out about Stuart’s death two weeks after that. I was very sad to hear about it. He had been very influential in my own spiritual journey.  I was moved to write this blog post about his life and its significance.

Incredibly, when I came to write that post I had forgotten all about the dream which I’d recorded just a week or so before he died. I did have a vague recollection of dreaming about it, but it was very hazy, and I didn’t want to mention it on the article.

Everything in the dream is very easy to understand, with perhaps the one vague part being Stuart’s cryptic words: “I’d like to thank her.” It felt as if he was literally grateful to a female who was close to him. My sense is that he was thanking his mother.

 Imagine seeing a pair of adult eagles battling in midair, talons locked together as they plunge earthward and strike a runway at the Duluth International Airport in Minnesota.  An employee at Monaco Air, a servicing center at the airport, saw the birds fall. They were still entangled when he ran over to them, so he  called the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

Randy Hanzal, a conservation officer with the DNR who took the photo above,  collected the adult birds and tried to transport them to Wildwoods, a wildlife rehab organization in Duluth. He didn’t have a cage large enough to accommodate the birds, so he put them in the back of his pickup and covered them with blankets and jackets. He secured them with webbing straps and slowly drove toward the rehab enter, which was just a couple of miles away.  

Halfway there, Hanzal heard an uproar in the back of the truck. He glanced around, saw feathers flying, then one of the eagles jumped out, onto the tailgate of his truck, and flew off. Hanzal got the remaining eagle secured again and finally made it to the rehab center. A spokeswoman for the center said that a few days later, after the eagle was treated for its injuries, it was transferred to the Raptor Center at the University on Minnesota.

According to Frank Nicoletti, director of banding at Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory in Duluth, midair battles between eagles aren’t uncommon. But it’s rare for them to hit the ground.

So is there a synchronicity in this eagle skirmish?

In 1782, the American bald eagle was adopted as the official bird emblem of the U.S. It was chosen not only because it’s native to North America, but for its beauty, strength, and long life. In the wild, an eagle will live 30-35 years  and in captivity, will live up to 50 years. A full-grown bald eagle has a wingspan up to 7 feet. They fly up to 30 miles an hour and can dive at 100 miles an hour.

Eagles mate for life, and will use the same nest for many years. Over a period of time, some nests become enormous. They can  reach a diameter of nine feet and weigh as much as two tons! The female lays two or three eggs and both parents share incubation and guard them against predators.

When I initially saw the photo of the entangled eagles, my first thought was, Oh, that’s the U.S. Congress.

 The 113^th Congress is like the pair of eagles. A fundamental disagreement in tenets has led to a paralyzed group of individuals who can’t get anything done. They posture,  make speeches, attack and revile each other, and in the end, they hit the ground, still fighting. In fact, two days after the eagle skirmish, on May 16, the Congress voted for the 36^th time to repeal Obamacare. Never mind that the Supreme Court declared it constitutional last year. Here’s what went on in Congress in just one week.  It’s stunning – and rather depressing.

This is one definite area where consensus reality and my beliefs conflict. 

Angelina Jolie carries the breast cancer gene. Her mother died of the disease in her late fifties. So Angelina elected to have a double mastectomy at the age of 37 so she could reduce the chance that she would contract the disease.

Some years back, my agent, Al Zuckerman, asked if I would be interested in writing a book about four women in the Boca Raton, Florida  area who had elected to double mastectomies because they carried this gene. I had profound reservations.  But I called one of the women and we had an interesting conversation. In the end, I told Al I couldn’t be a part of this project because I didn’t believe in bottom line: you carry the gene, therefore you will get this disease.

While it’s likely that, in consensus reality, you are more prone to breast cancer if you have this particular gene, it isn’t a foregone conclusion that you will contract breast cancer. Al counteracted with statistics – big statistics, overwhelming statistics – but I knew this project wasn’t for me.

A few years later,  Rob and I were having dinner with friends when the woman suddenly announced she was going to have a double mastectomy. “I’ve had so much of my breasts removed in the past few years that I’ve decided to just get it over with.”

I was frankly so shocked that I didn’t know what to say. I finally muttered a weak, “But why? “

“Because I feel like I’m waiting for breast cancer to hit me.”

If that was her belief, I said, then she should have the surgery. And she did. Her breasts were lopped off, like Jolie’s.

So here’s my question. My parents died from complications of neurological diseases – my mother from Alzheimer’s and my dad from Parkinson’s. When should I schedule my brain surgery so I won’t contract either of these diseases?

Richard Martini  has written a winner in Flipside: A Tourist’s Guide to the Afterlife. I initially read a review of this book on Daz’s blog.  It sounded intriguing and the price was certainly right – .99 cents for Amazon ‘s Kindle.

If you click on to Martini’s link from IMDB, you discover he’s a movie director and screenwriter. But in reading this book, I’ve discovered that Martini is actually something of a mystic with a lot of questions.

His book came about because of the death of Luana Anders, an actress and writer who, for ten years, was his partner. Then she broke it off and they remained close friends. During the final few years of Luana’s life, as she died of breast cancer, Martini took care of her. His descriptions of her – in both life and the afterlife – show us a woman with a quick wit and a restless mentality who seemed to embrace everything with a sense of fun and adventure.

Her death launched Martini’s quest and it led him into an investigation of life after death. And he moved through the field of reincarnation as both a journalist and a participant. He was regressed to a previous life, to a life between lives, and provides the details, blow by blow, and explains how these details relate to his life now. And yes, he and Luana met up during one of his regressions. On the other side, she’s  a teacher who instructs newly departed souls how to utilize energy to create physical objects. 

Martini interviews Michael Newton  – author of Journey of Souls – and his wife about the hypnotherapist’s techniques and life journey. He discusses children’s past lives  and quotes our friend Carol Bowman. He relates stories about the connections between children and their adoptive parents, about the soul families with whom we reunite on the other side, about  his personal experiences in seeing spirits. Martini  has so many questions that his psychic life is  threaded  throughout the material. The book is actually a metaphysical  memoir about his journey, his quest. And the fact that it illuminates mysterious areas for the rest of us is a bonus.

I was intrigued by the descriptions of the afterlife that are included in many of the regressions he observed/filmed. They closely follow descriptions that   Michael Newton talks about in his books – a council of elders, a library where future life options are available for perusal, a gathering of soul families, a life review…But at the heart of all this is tremendous love and compassion.

No one is ever “judged” in the sense that traditional religion teaches. According to Martini’s findings, before we’re born, we agree to play certain roles. This aspect is well illustrated in the regressions where a person returns to a life during the holocaust. Individuals who died in the camps talked about what they learned from those lives, how the situation was actually worse for the perpetrators.

One of the most powerful sections in the book is about Martini’s two kids, how when they were really young, they identified themselves as a Tibetan monk (his son) and someone who lived among the monks. Son and daughter knew each other in that life. They also tell Martini and his wife how and why they chose them as parents.

There’s so much material in this book that when I put it aside for awhile, I find myself thinking about it, mulling everything over. Martini also presents some interesting material on synchronicity. He has an instinctive grasp of what works in a book like this. I hope he writes a sequel!

 After yesterday’s heavy-duty synchro spiel, here’s the lighter side,  sent by Nancy McMoneagle:

A chicken farmer went to the local bar and sat next to a woman and ordered champagne.

“How strange,” the woman said. “I also just ordered a glass of champagne.”

“What a coincidence,” said the farmer.  “It’s a special day for me. I’m celebrating.”

“It’s a special day for me, too,” the woman exclaimed. “I’m also celebrating.”

While they toasted, the man asked, “What’re you celebrating?”

“My husband and I have been trying for years to have a child and today, my gynecologist told me that I’m pregnant!”

“What a coincidence,” said the man. “I’m a chicken farmer and for years, all my hens were infertile. But now they are all set to lay fertilized eggs.”

“That’s awesome,” the woman said. “What did you do for your chickens to become fertile?”

“I used a different rooster,” he replied.

The woman smiled. “Well, what a coincidence.”

David Hawkins is an internationally renowned psychiatrist, physician, researcher, and pioneer in the fields of consciousness research and spirituality. He writes and teaches from the unique perspective of an experienced clinician, scientist, and mystic and is devoted to the spiritual evolution of mankind.

With that introduction, let’s see what David has to say about synchros…. 

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“The database behaves like an electrostatic condenser with a field of potentiality, rather than a battery with a with a stored charge.  A question can’t be asked unless there’s already the potentiality of the answer.  The reason for this is that the question and answer are both created out of the same paradigm and , therefore, are exactly symeterical –there can be no “up” without an already existent “down”.  Causality occurs as simultaneity rather than as a sequence; synchronicity is the term used by Jung to explain this phenomenon in human experience.  As we understand from our examination of physics, an event “here” in the universe doesn’t “cause” an event to occur “there” –instead, both appear at the same time.



“What’s the connection between these events, then, if it isn’t a Newtonian linear sequence of cause and effect?  Obviously, the two are related or connected to each other in some invisible manner, but not by gravity or magnetism, or even by a cosmic field of such magnitude that it includes both events.  The “connection” between any two events occurs only in the observer’s consciousness –he “sees” a connection and describes a “pair” of events, hypothesizing a relationship. 

“This relationship is a concept in the mind of the observer; it isn’t necessary that any corollary external event exists in the universe.  Unless there’s an underlying attractor pattern, nothing can be experienced. Thus, the entire manifest universe is its own simultaneous expression and experience of itself.

Omniscience is omnipotent and omnipresent.  There’s no distance between the unknown and the known –the known is manifest from the unknown merely by the asking.  For example, the Empire State Building was born in the mind of its architects –human consciousness is the agent that can transform an unseen concept into its manifested experience, which is therefore frozen in time … 

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“Time, then, is much like a hologram that already stands complete; it’s a subjective, sensory effect of a progressively moving point of view.  There’s no beginning or end to a hologram, it’s already everywhere, complete –in fact, the appearance of being “unfinished” is part of its completeness.  Even the phenomenon of “unfoldment” itself reflects a limited point of view;  There is no enfolded and unfolded universe, only a becoming awareness.  Our perception of events happening in time is analogous to a traveler watching the landscape unfold before him.  But to say that the landscape unfolds before a traveller is merely a figure of speech –nothing is actually unfolding: nothing is actually becoming manifest.  There’s only the progression of awareness.



“These paradoxes dissolve in the greater paradigm that includes both opposites, wherein oppositions as such are only related to the locations of the observer.  This transcendence of opposition occurs spontaneously at consciousness levels of 600 and above.  The notion that there’s a “knower” and a “known” is in itself dualistic, in that it implies a separation between subject and object (which, again, can only be inferred by the artificial adoption of a point of observation).  The Maker of all things in Heaven and on Earth, of all things visible and invisible, stands beyond both, includes both, and is one with both.  Existence, is, therefore, merely a statement that awareness is aware of its awareness and of its expression as consciousness…”

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I had to read the above a couple of times in order to grok it, but it was worth the time. I like this line in particular: “The Maker of all things in Heaven and on Earth, of all things visible and invisible, stands beyond both, includes both, and is one with both.: