Welcome to The Mystical Underground

On August 11, 2015, Anne Strieber passed away after a long illness. She and Whitley were married for 45 years and were not only spouses, but creative partners as well. In 1998, she founded Unknown Country as Whitley’s World, then changed the name in 2001 and expanded it to include what she called, “the credible edge of science and reality.” She was the managing editor until January 2015.

In addition, Anne edited all of Whitley’s books, published The Communion Letters, a compilation of hundreds of letters Whitley received after Communion was published, and wrote three novels. She was also active on Dreamland, the popular podcast she and Whitley started in 2004. It was through the podcasts that we got to know Anne.

Rob and I had been following Whitley Strieber’s career since the late 1980s, when we both read Communion, but didn’t have the pleasure of “meeting” him or Anne until my novel, Esperanza, was published by TOR/Forge,  Whitley’s publisher for many of his books. My editor, Beth Meacham, also edited Anne’s three novels and she was kind enough to send my novel to Whitley and ask him to give Esperanza a blurb. I was thrilled that he did and I emailed him, thanking him, and from then on, the Striebers and the MacGregors enjoyed an erratic email exchange. They felt like family.

When our first two books on synchronicity were published- 7 Secrets of Synchronicity and Synchronicity and the Other Side– the Striebers invited us to be guests on Dreamland several times. If I recall correctly – this was in 2011- the shows were divided into two 30-minute segments. The first segment for the show in March 2011 was for the general listening audience and the second segment was for subscribers to Dreamland.

In one of the shows, Anne interviewed Trish about synchronicity and she was a lively, knowledgeable and insightful interviewer. Not surprisingly, she had experienced synchros herself numerous times and shared some of them during the interview. I think that Whitley interviewed Rob for the subscriber section of the show. At any rate, after the show had aired in late March 2011, Anne forwarded some emails she’d received from listeners who had experienced synchros during the show and suggested that I write them if we wanted to use the material on our blog. One of the most intriguing was from Matt.

After Aliens in the Backyard was published and then The Synchronicity Highway, we were on Dreamland multiple times, sometimes interviewed by Whitley, other times by Anne, and sometimes by both of them. I was always blown away by the depth and breadth of Anne’s knowledge not only about the visitors, but about their connection with dead. She understood  the MO of these visitations, perhaps even better than Whitley.  If you put the name Strieber into the blog’s search box, you’ll see the various posts we’ve done over the years about them and their work. The range of topics is breathtaking.

One of the best spirit communication stories we’ve heard came from Anne. It was about how a pair of green tweezers was the object that the spirit of their friend, author Margo Adler, used to communicate with them.

Wednesday afternoon, shortly after hearing about Anne’s death, we experienced something very unusual, which we attribute as a salute from Anee from the other side!

We had received an email from “Sandy,” the retired veterinarian with whom we did one of the Dreamland shows, telling us that Anne had passed on. I immediately wrote Whitley about how sorry we were to hear the news and lit a candle for Anne to illuminate her journey into the afterlife. But I told Whitey I suspected that Anne was the one lighting up the afterlife.

We exchanged several emails and while I was writing the one below, an incredibly strange thing happened. First, that email:

Thank you for letting us know that she died peacefully. If we can do anything to help out, in any way, please let us know.

I had just typed the word  know and suddenly, in our family room, which is directly off of our offices, there was a tremendous explosion and a brilliant flash of light. The explosion sounded like a transformer does when it blows, except it was inside the house, within a few feet of our respective doorways. Rob and I shot to our feet. We thought the air conditioning or the TV had blown out –even though it wasn’t on. Our dog, Noah, stretched out on the living room couch, was startled out of a sound sleep. Besides the flash and the explosive sound, there was no black out or brown out. Not even a flicker on our computer monitor. Rob turned on the TV to make sure it hadn’t blown. It was fine, and didn’t even need to reboot. We checked the entire house but didn’t find anything broken or blown out, not even a light bulb.

We think it was Anne, making her presence known.

I finished my email to Whitley and sent it off: As I am writing this, there was suddenly a huge bang inside the house, in the family room next to our offices.  No apparent cause. A transformer explosion type of noise. Anne is already stirring things up!

Whitley replied quickly:

She sure as hell is. She is here, you better believe it!

I will be asking you to do a brief remembrance on Dreamland. We will get the memorial program running soon. She had a list of people she wanted on that program, and you guys are on it.

We’ve had a few poltergeist experiences in the past, but never anything like this, never something this immediate and mind-blowing and synchronous. It seems that Anne Strieber, whose presence in physical reality was so powerful and transformative, is now a force to be reckoned with on the other side as well!

We’re eager and honored to be a part of her remembrance of Dreamland.

Today, August 11, the largest planet in our solar system enters the sign of Virgo, where it will be until September 9, 2016. In astrology, Jupiter is known as the great benefic – i.e. it symbolizes good luck, abundance, expansion (and excess), optimism. It rules publishing, foreign travel and cultures, religion and philosophy, higher education, abstract thought, sports, animals, our ideology and worldview.

If you’re a poker player, Jupiter is your royal straight flush. If you’re a nomad, Jupiter is your free ticket to exotic ports of call. If you’re applying to college/grad schools, Jupiter is your ticket into the program of your choice. If you’re a writer, Jupiter’s energy gets you published. You get the idea here.

In Roman mythology, Jupiter was the sky god, Mr. Supremo, and his equivalent among the ancient Greeks was Zeus. In other words, he was the big dude.

All of us have Virgo somewhere in our charts. If you know your time of birth – from mom or dad, a relative, sibling, or from your birth certificate, go here to get a free chart. If you don’t know your time of birth, use noon. So what can you expect during this transit?

Well, if you’re earth sign Virgo or have a Virgo moon or Virgo rising, then certain facets of your life are likely to explode wide open. Wherever you have placed your attention and focus will suddenly expand in ways you probably haven’t even anticipated. You fall in love, get married, have a child. Your novel or screenplay is purchased, you become a travel writer and a professional globetrotter, you land the part in a movie that’s a career game changer, you’re promoted, get a substantial raise, you move…You experience pivotal life events.

If you’re a Capricorn or a Taurus, then your life is also impacted in a positive way because Jupiter is forming a harmonious angle to your sun sign. If you’re a Cancer or a Scorpio, Jupiter has some gifts for you because it’s forming a beneficial angle to your sun sign. Even water sign Pisces, the polar opposite of Virgo, benefits but with some challenges. The air signs – Gemini, Libra, Aquarius – are beneficiaries of this transit, too, in spite of Jupiter forming challenging angles to your sun sign.

That’s the oxymoron with Jupiter’s transit through any sign, even Virgo. Everyone benefits, but in different ways. Pisces and the air signs may experience the excess part of this transit – weight gain, more work responsibility, more family obligations, more financial obligations. But one way or another, you can make this transit work for you by going with the flow – whatever that flow is for you.

If you have  other planets in Virgo, then as Jupiter approaches a conjunction with these planets, you benefit. In my own family, our daughter is a triple Virgo – sun, moon, and Mars, and Rob is a triple earth sign – sun and rising in Taurus, moon in Virgo. I have a moon in earth sign Capricorn and a rising in water sign Scorpio. This means that each of us will experience the expansiveness of Jupiter in different ways.

In the following section, I have laid out the meanings of each planet. When Jupiter forms an angle to any of these planets, the expansion will occur according to the nature of the planet that is impacted. If the planet governs your sun sign, Jupiter’s benefits are even more powerful.

Sun – the ego, will power, your creative thrust in life. Rules Leo.

Moon – your inner world, emotions, intuition, how you nurture and are nurtured, the nurturing parent. Rules Cancer.

Mercury – communication, travel, contracts, your conscious mind, writing, teaching, your intellect. Rules Gemini and Virgo.

Venus – romance, artistic ability, material resources, earning capacity, spending habits, sociability. Rules Taurus and Libra.

Mars – your physical energy, sexuality, dynamic expression, athletics, competitive spirit, action, the individuation process. Rules Aries, co-rules Scorpio.

Jupiter- luck, expansion, the higher mind, higher education, publishing, foreign travel and cultures, achievement, prosperity, worldview, spirituality. Rules Sagittarius, co-rules Pisces.

Saturn- responsibility, discipline, limitations, restrictions, structure and foundation, physical reality. Rules Capricorn.

Uranus – your individuality, breaks with tradition and old pattern, sudden disruptions, genius, revolution. Rules Aquarius.

Neptune – your visionary self, illusions, what’s hidden, the paranormal, imagination, dreams, artistic inspiration, flashes of insight, mystical tendencies, all forms of escapism. Rules Pisces.

Pluto – transformation and regeneration, redemption, power, transcendence, the afterlife, good and evil. Rules Scorpio.

Jupiter takes 12 years to circle the zodiac. So for some hint of what this transit may mean for you, look back to the 13 months between August 2003 to late September of 2004. What was going on in your life then?

Lake Worth bridge across the Intracoastal Canal

Today as I was headed out to run errands, our neighbor, Annette, was in her driveway. She and her family had just gotten home from the beach and were unloading their car. She waved her arms and called, “I’ve got a synchro, Trish!”

So, of course, I stopped. We’ve posted a number of her and her family’s synchros over the years and they’re invariably good ones. I lowered my window, eager to hear this one.

“A beach synchro?” I asked.

“Only that we were coming back from the beach. A front was moving in. The sky was getting really dark and ominous, thunder rumbled in the distance, and it was starting to rain. We were coming across Lake Worth bridge, where there’s some construction going on, and we spot a pair of tall cranes on the bridge. Maddie (her daughter) points at the cranes. ‘Do you think lightning ever strikes those things?’

“Seconds later…and I mean seconds, that was all…there was a tremendous boom that woke Fergie (her dog) out a sound sleep in the back seat and she crawled between the seats and into my lap. The flash of light was so bright it briefly blinded us. We realized lightning had struck the crane. We were stunned, just stunned.”

“Maddie experienced a precognition!” I exclaimed. “A synchro about a future event.”

Mulling this over later, I thought of the adage, “Lightning strikes.” It’s often used when people experience sudden good luck that usually involves money, and wondered if there was another layer to this precognition.

Annette and her husband are seeking a settlement that relates to the housing meltdown of 2007, when banks were involved in mortgage derivatives that resulted in numerous foreclosures in South Florida and left many homeowners bewildered about who owned the mortgage on their home. I think this lightning precog bodes well for their settlement!

Our friend and writer Nancy Pickard recently sent this story. I think it demonstrates that our loved ones who have passed on will use anything they can to communicate with us.

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I have been thinking a lot about my favorite relatives, Aunt DeeDee and Uncle Rex. They died long years ago, but they were around until I was in high school, and they were the grandparents I didn’t have. I cannot think of a single bad memory of them, only fun and love. They were “characters,” and they both had a great, slightly outrageous sense of humor.

So today I not only thought of them, but I wrote them a note. Seriously. I typed out an email to them to say I was thinking of them, and how much I had appreciated them, and loved them. It was short. A paragraph.

Then I got up from the chair, taking my little glass of water with me. I had poured it from a filtered container and had been sipping on it for a while. It had been perfectly fresh. But now I took a drink from it, and EWWW! It smelled awful! Like sewer, that yucky sulfur smell, you know?

What the hell? I wondered. And then I burst out laughing. My aunt and uncle had lived in a little town, Nevada, south of Kansas City. You want to know what its strangest feature was? Its air smelled and its water tasted like sulfur!!! Really strong. I can’t remember why, and it no longer does. But, boy, it did then.

I really truly think that was a “Howdy, honey!” from beyond in response to my letter to them.  Aww. Thanks, you sweeties.

Watch the moon in this video. Put it on full screen. Is the UFO pretending to be the moon? Or is this a fake?

Carl Jung considered synchronicity to be an umbrella that covered all aspects of the paranormal because so many examples of meaningful coincidence could easily be seen as precognition,telepathy, clairvoyance or other related phenomena.

The story that follows is truly interesting, not only because it is a remarkable synchronicity and example of precognition, but because of the unusual attempt by authorities to  evade the predicted event. Here’s the story, which appeared a book called, Coincidence: A Matter of Chance or Synchronicity? by Brian Inglis.

“In 1981 British Rail had a call from a woman who claimed to have had a vision of a fatal crash in which a freight train had been involved. So clear had it been, she said, that she not merely saw the blue diesel engine, but could read the number: 47 216.

“Two years later, an accident of the kind she predicted occurred, all the details matching – except one: the engine’s number was 47 299.

“That would have been that, but a train spotter, Howard Johnston, happened to have noticed that 47 299 was not the engine’s original number. It had been renumbered, a couple of years before, from 47 216. Diesels, he knew, were ordinarily renumbered only after major modifications, which this one had not undergone. When curiosity prompted him to ask why, he was told about the prediction.

“Apparently British Rail officials had been sufficiently impressed (they had checked with the local police, and found that the woman who had provided it had given them some useful information from her visions) to try to ward off Fate by changing the number. The ruse had failed, and they had officially logged it all as an ‘amazing coincidence.'”

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I find this story somewhat disturbing, because I like to think that the future is not fated, that we can change it through appropriate action. ‘Appropriate’ might be the key word. Possibly, the rail officials didn’t do enough. Perhaps, if they had de-commissioned the engine, the event would not have happened. So maybe you can alter Fate, but you can’t trick it. At least, not by merely changing numbers around.

Brian Inglis, the author of the book, died in 1993 at the age of 77.  He was an Irish journalist, historian and television presenter.  He was best known to people in Britain as the presenter of All Our Yesterdays, a television review of events exactly 25 years previously, as seen in newsreels, newspaper articles, etc. He also had interests in the paranormal, and alternatives to institutionalized medicine.

Inglis’ final synchronicity came on the day of his death. His good friend and colleague Bill Grundy died on February 9, 1993, and Inglis had just finished writing Grundy’s obituary when he, too, died.

“Life is full of coincidences, some are minor, but often, like the one above, they are extraordinary. Whether they are random events or meaningful cosmic moments which have a purpose, we don’t know—it remains a mystery. But what is certain is, a lot of people have them, and they never cease to amaze us.” – Brian Inglis

This synchro, which happened to Tim Wallender, is one of the most remarkable I’ve ever run across. We included it in 7 Secrets of Synchronicity. Tim now lives in Memphis, and says this story took place in Wisconsin, around 1995. It’s an incredible instance of an object lost – and then found in a very mysterious way.

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Both me and my brother worked for the same railroad. He was an engineer and I was a conductor at the time. One day we were both working but on different trains. It was the first day that the railroad issued cell phones to the engineers. The engineer I was working with asked me who I thought would be the first one to lose their phone. I said without a doubt my brother would.

A few miles further down the track we had to stop and set out some cars. Mind you, this is approximately 120 miles from where we both started our trip and only my train was to stop there. I set out the cars and engine, and as I looked down in the snow there was a cell phone. My engineer was there also to help with the hoses and we both looked at each other and said, “No way”. Sure enough I open up the case and there was a sticker with my brother’s name on it.

I called him at the hotel he was staying at in Chicago and asked him where his phone was. He said he didn’t know. Turns out his second engine was giving him trouble and it must have fallen out of his pocket when he walked back to check it out.

I don’t know what the odds are of finding your brother’s cell phone 120 miles from where he got it, the same day he got it, and only minutes after telling someone that he would lose it. Or what are the odds of stopping on top of it and looking down in about a three-foot section of rail and finding it?

Last week, I received one of the most gratifying e-mails I’ve ever gotten. It was from writer Nancy Pickard.  There were two words: It’s real! And she provided a link.

When I got the e-mail, I was at one of the Paint Nite events that my daughter, Megan, teaches, an always uplifting experience where 20 to 50 people attend a two-hour painting class at a local bar. I was staring at my attempt at painting a beach scene with an umbrella in the foreground and wondering why my beach umbrella didn’t look like Megan’s. Did it need more red? A wider brim? What?

Then my phone dinged and there was Nancy’s e-mail: It’s real!

In 2010, I wrote a post called Writers  about Nancy’s beautiful novel, The Scent of Rain & Lightning and how it had just hit #19 on the New York Times Bestseller list. As Nancy wrote at the time: “It’s only taken 30 years!”

As I wrote in that post:

Thirty years.  Think about that for a moment. Three decades of typing, of churning out stories. Thirty years and so much inner work, tweaking of beliefs, paying attention to your dreams, interpreting them, taking your cues from those dreams. And, ultimately, it took believing it could happen, that her work was powerful enough to compete. The Scent of Rain and Lightning is proof of a writer at the apex of her talents. The book is magnificent.

This 2010 post was also about how we met in 1985, at a bookstore where I was signing copies of my first novel, and the friendship that grew from that and has spanned thirty years. So when Nancy’s e-mail came through last week, I knew what it meant before I clicked the link.

Scent is going to become a movie,  an indie production. As it says in the link:

The film, an adaptation of the novel by Nancy Pickard, is the story of a young woman forced to confront old wounds and the destructive power of hate when she learns that the man who killed her parents has been released from prison. Produced by Casey Twenter, Jeff Robison and Jeff Johnson of No Coast Entertainment, Kevin Waller and Michael Davis, and Maggie Grace, The Scent of Rain and Lightning is directed by Blake Robbins. WeatherVane Productions and PKs Remain Entertainment will be Executive Producing. Filming begins this fall in Oklahoma.

I shot up from my chair and ran toward the back of the restaurant, where Megan was cleaning up paintbrushes. “Megan, you’ve got to see this! Nancy’s book is going to be a movie!” I thrust my cell into her hands so she could see the article.

“My God,” Megan breathed. “This is awesome. What a great cast. Maggie Grace was in Lost.”

Then we bumped fists.

This is the kind of stuff you dream about when you’re a kid, the kind of stuff you talked about at sleepovers with your buddies….When my book becomes a movie…. It’s magic. And when it happens to someone you know and love, the joy you feel surpasses everything else. My friend did it, she really did it… You go to sleep and wake up and leap through your day with a big grin on your face.

Way to go, Nancita! The MacGregors will be in line on opening day.

This synchro was first posted when our blog was just a few months old. It illustrates, I think, how synchronicity often comes along at exactly the right second and saves the day!

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This story needs a little background. During the mid-1980s, Rob and I led trips to the Peruvian Amazon for travel writers. One of the writers who joined us for the 350 mile trip from Leticia, Colombia to Iquitos, Peru, was Gary Provost. He was a frequent contributor to Writers’ Digest, a book reviewer, and an author who had an amazing gift for taking what is essentially a right-brain process – fiction writing – and breaking it down in a left-brain way so that he could teach the craft to others. He and his wife Gail, founded the Writers’ Retreat Workshop to pass on that wisdom to aspiring writers.
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Gary and Gail started the Writers’ Retreat Workshop in 1987. It’s a ten-day intensive workshop for fiction writers. The idea is immersion -classes geared specifically to the craft of fiction writing taught by the staff, with visiting authors, editors, and agents who teach and lecture as well. Gary passed away suddenly in 1994, but the retreat continued.

Fast forward to 1998. Gail had remarried and she and her husband, Lance, were struggling to continue the retreats. “Enrollment had dropped, we no longer had a location for the retreat, we didn’t have a budget for advertising,” Gail says. “It was a real low point. The future of the retreat looked pretty bleak.” But they kept reaching out, hoping, following leads, trying different fund-raising venues.

Upon returning from a depressing fund-raising trip, Gail felt like she had reached a low point. “I remember walking in the door of our house that Saturday morning, feeling frustrated and defeated,” Gail says. “I was ready to just give up the whole thing. Then I went into my office and found more than a hundred messages on the answering machine, all from people who wanted to know where they could sign up for the retreat. It turned out that the day before, USA Today had run a travel story on ten educational vacations and the Writers Retreat Workshop was mentioned.”

She and Lance began returning phone calls, signing up students, found a location for the right price, and started hiring staff. To this day, Gail isn’t sure how USA Today found out about the retreat. But the break arrived just when they needed it.

Today, the WRW draws students from all over the world and many of the aspiring writers who have gone through the course have been published.

In 2009, I had just returned from the 37th WRW, my third time there as a guest speaker, and I was delighted to find that the spirit with which Gary and Gail started the retreat is flourishing. The 22 students, an overflow from a retreat in May, ranged in age from a 20-year-old college student to retirees. They arrived with their laptops and manuscripts, their dreams and dedication to honing their craft. They came from all over the U.S., and from the Virgin Islands, Luxembourg, Malaysia, and India.

Several years ago, Gail turned the retreat over to other writers, but she still attends as a guest staff member. After a talk I gave on synchronicity my second day there, she said, “Trish, did I ever tell you how synchronicity is why the WRW still exists?” And then she told me this story.

After five parts of Larry’s story, here’s a light synchro, sort of!

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Rob and I visited the Norton Museum today, a really wonderful place where you can wander around for a few hours and enjoy a visual feast. As we got out of the car, Rob said, “There’s only one Monet piece on exhibit.”

“I think it’s Matisse we came to see.”

“I think it’s Monet.”

As it turned out, Rob was right that we’d come to see Claude Monet’s Nympheas – Water Lilies – on loan from a museum in Switzerland until July 12. But neither of us knew that the Norton also had some of Matisse’s paintings exhibited. A kind of synchro?

Monet was a founder of the French impressionist movement and one of its most prolific painters. He did a number of these water lily paintings and in 2014, one of them – the painting at the top of the post – sold through Sotheby’s for $54 million. Yet, Monet, like Van Gogh, like so many of the famous artists, suffered from depression and poverty for most of his life.

At the museum, his Water Lily painting was in a room by itself and took up most of the wall. When I first saw it, I wished the museum had lit the room differently. The painting seemed ominously dark and the nuances in blues really weren’t evident to me until I took a photo.

Matisse’s paintings were in another room, with interesting company – Joan Miro, Picasso, and Georgia O’Keefe. Matisse, trained as a lawyer, may have been an exception to the depression and poverty element so many artists experienced. He supposedly came to art late – at the ripe old age of 21! I kind of get lost in his paintings, like this one, of a woman whom he painted a number of times. Her face supposedly intrigued him:

She hung next to a painting of Matisse’s wife. I didn’t snap a picture of her. I found the wife’s face disturbing; her eyes were lopsided, veiled, strange. Was the woman in the above painting Matisse’s lover? Mistress?

Then there was Georgia O’Keefe, whose art is always a delight – straightforward, an expression of whatever she loved in the moment she was painting. Her work is the perfect expression for anyone in the creative arts- love what you’re doing as you’re doing it:

The real surprise today was a photography exhibit of the Florida Everglades that the Norton has commissioned. This exhibit struck me as the most mysterious, the one that expressed only a fraction of the secrets that I suspect the Everglades holds. I set one of my novels – Kin Dread – in the Everglades – and this photo not only captures the essence, but bears an eerie resemblance to the cover:

Eliot Porter (1901-1990); Cypress Slough and Mist, Cypress Lodge, Punta Gorda, Florida, January 31, 1974; 1974; Dye imbibition print; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist; P1990.51.2171.1