This MacGregor clan is actually pretty small – Rob, me, Megan and, over the years, a number of animal companions. It’s been awhile since we had a new animal addition, but there she is at the top of this post, looking straight at my phone’s camera.

This kitten, a female, was rescued by a friend of our daughter’s who is allergic to cats. Megan agreed to take her in, but her current roommate is also allergic to cats. Her roommate, though, is going to move into an apartment soon so we agreed to take the kitten until Megan finds a new roommate who, hopefully, won’t be allergic to cats.

We named her Luna, but think she may actually be a Dusty or Dusky. We found that she isn’t afraid of dogs and is, in fact, apparently eager to bond with them. Here’s Megan’s dog, Nika, eager to make the kitten’s acquaintance.

We also discovered that she likes riding in cars.

During her first night at Megan’s, she explored the house in a couple of hours and slept draped around Megan’s neck. During her first night at our place, she was hissed at by both of our cats, aging Powder and middle aged Simba. But, undaunted by the hostility, she eventually found her way to our bedroom, where she slept curled up between Rob and me, in a nest of pillows.

I’d forgotten the wonder that kittens bring with them. The world itself is like a Beatles song, a magical mystery tour of sights and sounds, movements and strangeness. She loves playing with a spool of thread, a ball covered in catnip, or chasing some stray fly in our kitchen. When we’re watching the latest news on Trump and Clinton and Sanders, she’s happy to curl up between us and offer her two cents on the candidates. Trump gets a big yawn, Clinton gets a stretching of her claws, Sanders gets a contented purr.

Okay, so I’m reading into this. She actually doesn’t give a cat’s poop about politics. When I rail that Rachel Maddow is apparently campaigning to become Clinton’s press secretary, the kitten yawns.

When we talk about how Laurence O’Donnell is more balanced in his coverage of the campaign, how he actually discusses Clinton’s email problems and the FBI’s investigation, the kitten is momentarily interested, then curls up and goes still again. Her eyes are partially open, though, so I know she’s listening.

She is not quite as sanguine when the news turns to Trump. I imagine that she hisses, snarls, darts away to hide. But the truth is that she jumps to the floor and cuddles next to our Golden Retriever, Noah, who is at least 100 times her size. Protect me from Trump. Noah’s tail thumps the floor. He is happy to oblige her. He equates Trump with Romney, the Mormon dude who actually announced to the 80 million dog owners in the U.S. that he actually put the family dog in a crate on top of the car for a trip to Canada.

Some people believe that Romney lost the election in 2012 because of his comments about the 47 percent. But Noah knows it was the dog story that did him in.

I would like to know what this little kitten, still casting around for a name, might actually know. Maybe she’s a political oracle. Maybe she’s my muse in a new disguise. And maybe she’s just as cute as she appears to be, big ears and all.

I’m in love. Welcome to the clan, whoever you are!

There’s a certain eeriness about the Latin name for night terror. Pavor Nocturnus…Say it three times aloud and you’ll wake up screaming.Well, let’s hope not.

Night terrors make ordinary nightmares seem well, ordinary. These experiences typically involve  a sudden false awakening from sleep and persistent fear or terror. Your heart hammers in your chest. You probably scream, sweat profusely, and feel disoriented. It sounds like a bad acid trip, but these experiences are typically drug-free terror and can happen to anyone from infants to the elderly. But the most common age group is 3-7.

Usually the person has no recollection of the incident, only a vague sense of frightening images. Researchers say that many people experiencing night terrors see spiders, snakes, animals, or strange people in the room.

It’s tempting to link night terror with alien abductions, but I think they’re two distinct experiences. One of the reasons is that people who experience night terror often wake up the entire household and are observed during the experience. Alien abduction experiences, on the other hand, are quite the opposite. Typically, no one wakes up except the abductee.  The experience is closer to sleep paralysis, another experience confused with alien abductions. In the Middle Ages, a succubus – a small creature – was said to sit on the chest of the sleeper causing the paralysis.

The two sleep experiences are explanations of choice for skeptics who don’t accept the reality of alien abductions. The problem with that explanation, though, is that alien abductions are also reported by people who are awake, sometimes driving cars, as in the famouse case of Barney and Betty Hill.

I write about night terrors in my book Dream Power for Teens, which is just coming out as an e-book to accompany the print edition.

While nightmares take place during REM sleep, night terrors occur at a deeper level of sleep, when the brain produces slow delta waves and no REM sleep. The night terror experience might last from five to twenty minutes. During that time the person is asleep and unable to wake up, even if his or her eyes are open.

While it isn’t considered dangerous, what you do during the night terror episode can lead to dangerous situations. Some people who experience night terror walk into walls or fall down stairs, which is certainly hazardous.

Here’s a description of night terrors from my book that was provided by a nineteen-year-old named Heather.

One of my most frightening experiences was when I was six years old. I was having the worst night terror of my life. I was sitting in my room, everyone still sleeping, and the walls were falling in around me. The books were all falling off the shelves, walls crashing. I was so scared, but I couldn’t do anything. I was in a trance, a haze. My head throbbed and buzzed, and I was sure I would die.

From what I’m told, I walked into the living room and turned up the stereo as loud as it could go, and woke up the entire family. I told them about the book shelves falling in my room, and I ranted and raved for about twenty minutes. Some things I said made no sense at all. I was in my own world, more like my own hell. Finally, my mother put me in a cold bath and I “sobered up “ That was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life and one that I will never be able to forget. Even now when I think about it, I get shivers down my spine.

Heather reported her experience on the online Night Terror Resource Center, at www.nightterrors.org. She said that her night terrors stopped when she turned twelve, and she considers herself very lucky.

Rob has been in Minnesota, cleaning out the house where his mother has lived for 60 years. She recently moved to an assisted living facility, a good thing for her. She’s 91, doesn’t drive, and has been living essentially isolated for years.

In the process of preparing her home for sale, he has been rummaging through his own past. He and his sister grew up in this house and he discovered that his mother saved nearly everything, that she was something of a pack rat who couldn’t bear to part with certain things. He discovered old photos we had sent his mom of Megan when she was really young, the violin he played when he was a kid, and that Knights Templar sword depicted in the photo at the beginning of the post.

This sword has connections to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Rob wrote the novelization for the movie, which may be a synchronicity unto itself. We joked about him carrying this sword into the airport to ship as baggage, but suspected he would promptly be arrested by the TSA as a terrorist. He decided to mail it to the house.  Here’s another view of the sword:

I was telling this to my neighbor, Annette, who suggested that he take photos of it first because, after all, who knew what might be substituted for this beauty? So when Rob texted photos, I decided she might be right. The sword had belonged to Rob’s grandfather, Guy, and had been forged in St, Paul, Minnesota, which meant it had been created for a Masonic temple in that city. Guy’s name is on the blade, hard to see in this photo. But the engravings of symbols on the blade and the ivory handle are beautifully rendered and I can’t wait to see this sword hanging somewhere on the walls in our home.

In dreams when you are digging around in a cellar, you are foraging for lost parts of yourself, your consciousness, your identity, your psyche. The physical act of cleaning out a cellar, of finding the sword, may be a glaring symbol of power rediscovered – and claimed.

Here’s a review by Adele Tyler of a book by Jean-Francois (Jeff) Vezina, a clinical psychologist in Quebec, that explores Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity. Vezina will talk about his book at length on May 20-21 when he will be the featured speaker at the Nashville Jung Circle.

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Most of us can look back on our lives and remember chance encounters, usually with people but also with works or art or even places, that had a special meaning and impact, perhaps even changing the direction of our lives. It is these “synchronistic encounters” common to human experience that Jungian analyst and author Jeff Vezina explores in his book Necessary Chances: Synchronicity in the Encounters that Transform Us. Inspired by the Jungian theory of synchronicity as well as chaos theory from the field of mathematics, Vezina writes from the perspective of a new field of study he calls “relational synchronicity.”

Vezina takes abstract theories that might seem daunting and presents them in a personal and highly readable style by using numerous stories and examples from his own life and those of his clients. In this short book of one hundred and sixty pages, he is able to introduce original ideas of how we experience synchronicities, or “meaningful coincidences,” and explain these in the context of other basic Jungian concepts like the collective unconscious, archetypes, complexes, the Self, and individuation. In doing so, he offers an introduction to Jungian psychology as well as a fresh take on such concepts for more experienced readers. In addition, Vezina offers a layperson’s discussion of chaos theory and quantum physics, showing how these fields of scientific study are beginning to overlap with psychology and religion.

To define what he means by a “synchronistic encounter,” Vezina begins by discussing Jung’s theory of synchronicity, which is most easily understood as a “meaningful coincidence.” He emphasizes the acausal nature of synchronicity, distinguishing it from a causal event, which is one that is reproducible. The author tells the story of the two synchronistic encounters that led to Jung developing his theory of synchronicity over a period of thirty years.

Around 1920, Jung hosted Albert Einstein at several dinners, where the two men discussed Einstein’s theory of relativity. Jung said “Einstein started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space” in the realm of psyche, postulating that what is true in the world of matter holds true in the world of psyche. A second synchronistic encounter was with Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who encouraged Jung to expand and refine his theory of synchronicity.

Pauli came to Jung as a client during a turbulent time in his life, which led to a twenty-five year friendship and collaboration between these two famous men. Pauli was drawn to Jung’s work and began to develop what he called a “neutral language” that worked equally for physics and depth psychology, matter and mind. At Pauli’s urging, their work together culminated in a joint publication of essays by both men, entitled “The Interpretation and Nature of the Psyche,” in 1952.

The theory of synchronicity was explained by Jung in his story of a very rational client of his, who was resisting the therapeutic process until a synchronistic encounter occurred. As the woman was telling Jung about her dream of a scarab beetle, this rare insect flew into the window of the room. Jung opened the window, picked up the insect, and handed it to the woman, who was stunned and transformed by this “meaningful coincidence” and only then began to open up to the therapy.

The title of the book, Necessary Chances, refers to chance occurrences that might be called “necessary” because they influence and guide our lives in certain directions. The subtitle, Synchronicity in the Encounters that Transform Us, emphasizes that these encounters can alter the course of our lives in some way. Vezina outlines four aspects of a synchronistic encounter:

1)Acausal: no causal connection between two events but rather a connection    through meaning

2)It creates an emotional reaction in the person

3)It has a symbolic and transformational effect

4)It occurs more often in times of distress and transition

These features distinguish it from a mere coincidence, which is defined as random events that coincide but have no symbolic meaning, emotional impact, or transformational effect. Mere coincidences can occur that are not synchronicities.

A majority of the examples in the book are of synchronistic encounters between people, particularly in romantic relationships but also in brief encounters, perhaps on a trip or at a party, where a coincidence sparks a connection and even alters the course of a life. In addition, there are meaningful encounters with a work of art, like a book, movie, or even a place.

Jung’s synchronistic encounter with a book, the I Ching, and its translator, Richard Wilheim, played an important role in bringing ideas of eastern religion to the west for the first time, in the 1900’s. In the chapter “Places that Haunt Us,” Vezina discusses how, like migrating birds, we are mysteriously drawn to certain landscapes and locales. Jung, for example, was attracted by water from an early age, and places near water played important roles in his life.

Jeff Vezina specializes in the area of depth psychology and film, and he uses a personal example of a movie, “Magnolia,” which has had important symbolic meaning in his life. He points out that films, often a reflection of the collective unconscious, developed at the same time as psychoanalysis, in the early 20^th century. Cinema might be seen as a system of new myths or collective dreams which express the “major anxieties and questions of society.” In a method similar to dream analysis, he uses films in therapy, to help clients analyze movies that have had significant impact on them, to bring symbolic meanings to consciousness.

Synchronicity, like depth psychology in general, is based in symbolism. How symbolic patterns unfold in our everyday lives was a major contribution of Jung, but many critics rejected his ideas as unscientific, accusing Jung of mysticism. The author states that as quantum physics has begun in recent times to expand the parameters of science, synchronicity, which is a part of eastern traditions like the Tao, may come to be better understood and accepted.

According to Jung, Vezina says, our modern age is limited by rational thinking that is too “bright,” making it hard for us to recognize symbols, much like a bright sky makes it hard to see stars. Just as we see more stars in total darkness, we are better able to perceive symbols in times of darkness in our lives, which is also when we are more likely to have synchronistic encounters – as if the psyche is trying harder to communicate with and guide us in our darkest times.

To understand symbols, we need to distinguish a symbol from a sign. A sign points to something that is known, like a traffic light telling us to cross the street. A symbol, though, points to something unknown or ineffable. Symbols help us relate to the unknown and therefore are abundant in religion and art. Jung said symbols are spontaneously created and come to us from the wisdom of the collective unconscious, which he defined as a “field of fundamental possibilities, a deep layer below our personal unconscious that is shared by all humans and passed down through history.

This deep layer of the unconscious, he theorized, exists outside of time and space and exerts it influence on our perceptions and emotions in a way similar to gravity. A synchronistic encounter is not a sign, telling us what to do, but rather a set of symbols that hint at something that we must flesh out and interpret for ourselves, much the way we might reflect on the meaning of a dream.

In discussing patterns, Vezina relates how symbols are used to express patterns and tell stories, much as the women in Fez, Morocco, tell the stories of their ancestors by weaving patterns into their carpets, saying “Indeed, we are all treading on an immense carpet with patterns for all to see, woven by the soul of the world.” He emphasizes how synchronistic encounters can help us uncover the patterns, which he calls life themes, that repeat in our lives. Repetition, he says, is “at the basis of life.” We can learn to identify these themes in our lives and the history of our parents and grandparents, perhaps even making a chart of family events as a tool in uncovering our family stories. By making these themes more conscious, we can begin to direct and change our own life story.

Vezina first became interested in synchronicity through studying chaos theory, a mathematical concept that examines how, in nature, order seems to come out of chaos, in the form of repeating patterns. This field of study, made possible by computer modeling in recent years, looks for fractals, or repeating geometrical patterns, represented by mathematical formulas plotted on a graph. In this way, we can see patterns emerge and see order emerge from chaos. In the same way, the author says, we can detect subtle patterns emerging from the random events, or chaos, of our lives, and synchronistic encounters are one such way these patterns are expressed:

“We may sometimes have the intuition, during a synchronicity, that it is connecting us to a much larger chain of events … this underlying order may be in some mysterious way attempting to reorganize our life.”

Vezina says that we cannot cause or create synchronistic encounters, for synchronicity eludes the control of the ego. Instead, we can make ourselves available for the unconscious to relay messages and guidance to us through synchronistic encounters by paying attention and allowing ourselves to open to the mystery of life.

In closing, the author says synchronicity was the theory that brought Jung perhaps the most criticism and admits that it is a difficult subject to study. He hopes his book advances a few hypotheses on the subject of synchronicity and helps readers begin to explore the areas of acausality and the irrational, saying that expanding our mindsets beyond rational thinking can be helpful as a counterbalance to a “cold, rational, and mechanical world.”

As a reader, I found myself giving into the mindset I allow when watching a movie or reading a novel, a “suspension of disbelief” that helps me to enter the world of the imagination and the unknown. Our daily lives are influenced by a series of unknowns and chance occurrences, and Vezina hopes to help readers to better understand, accept, and be guided by such “necessary chances.”

In the end, we have free will and can choose to acknowledge or ignore these symbolic themes in our lives:

“We can remain deaf to these symbolic motifs that subtly play themselves out in our relationships. We can remain blind to these amazing coincidences that bring us soothing works of art at times when we most need them. We can ignore the clues that guide us towards settings that will be determining for our encounters. We can believe that these meaningful coincidences are just the fruit of imaginary projections, a weakness in reasoning. We can be convinced that these chance occurrences are not necessary and only happen in books and movies. But by turning our backs on this aspect of reality, we are turning our backs on one of the essential aspects of life: beauty.”

In 2004, Rob was approached by pilot Bruce Gernon to co-author a book based on Bruce’s extraordinary and harrowing experience in the Bermuda Triangle in 1973. The Fog was published in 2005 and over the years, Bruce has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows to talk about the experience and his theories about what actually happened – the electronic fog. We also wrote about Bruce’s experience in our book Aliens in the Backyard.

Recently, Bruce was contacted by a Ryana, a middle school student in Delaware who wanted to interview him for a documentary she was shooting on the Bermuda Triangle and his experience. When Bruce told us about it, we asked for the You Tube link and were impressed by her work. She went on to win the first place award from The National Maritime Historical Society for a project related to water. Here’s her video:

For the best husband, creative partner, and dad in the universe!

I was at Mike Perry’s blog and came across this photo from a post he did in 2011. See the kid in the foreground? Looks like he’s on a cell phone, right?

This photo is from a 1939 brochure called Bournemouth- Britain’s All Season Resort. It was taken at a 1939 soccer match and at Dean Court in Bournemouth.

There are all kinds of photos like this on the Internet, some of them undoubtedly bogus, that suggest time travelers. But this one looks genuine. And who the kid looking at?

Here’s an article from the 538 web site that follows the typical mass media and mainstream science thinking when it comes to aliens and UFOs. It’s time to get all snarky, and that’s especially true when it comes to a political candidate for president making such comments.

If the author had gotten past her tongue-in-cheek – ‘look at this silly idea’ – mode of reporting to do some research, she would’ve found out that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta is serious about getting the federal government to de-classify UFO files. And why not? If the aliens and UFOs don’t exist – as implied in the article below, why wouldn’t all related files be declassified? Typically, when it comes to UFOs, mainstream journalists tend to get all giddy and lose their sense of accountability.

Since writing the above, I’ve seen more coverage of Hillary and the aliens that includes Podesta. In addition to the giddiness response, there are also some writers taking the subject seriously who sound baffled by the whole thing.

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We haven’t written anything about UFO/alien contact here for some time. Recently though a Brit from Sussex wrote us about his experiences after he read an article we wrote for NEXUS Magazine about ancient aliens on Mars one million years ago. If you’re wondering how we know anything about that, well, you’ll have to read the article, which we’re told, is on the NEXUS website free of charge.

But back to the story at hand. We’ll let Mark tell it.

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“After reading your article, I recalled two encounters that I’ve had with ETs.  One is a remote viewing-like experience and the other an actual visitation.

“In the first one, I’m sitting in my bedroom, on the carpet with my back to the radiator whilst listening to the Sunday lunchtime radio.  I’m tired, my eyes are closed but I`m awake.  Suddenly in my minds eye I see a room.  A chalky, sand-coloured room with stone walls and an archway.  Standing in front of the archway is a tall man dressed in a similar coloured robe.  He has no hair on his head, his face looks like that of a child.  A small, baby-like nose with equally pronounced lips. When I saw the eyes, the spell was broken and I came to my senses and wondered WTF I was being shown.  Its eyes were shaped liked ours but were totally black.  I opened my eyes and stand up feeling shocked.

“In the second experience, I am dreaming that I’m floating around in my bedroom.  I feel fine with this oddness and gradually make my way back into my body.  That’s when I sense a person in the room.  I turn onto my side with little worry.  I then know that it’s near me.  I feel a matchbox-sized rectangle touch my temple.  I then begin to panic – like I know what this means.  The inside of my head begins to produce humming sounds and I begin to cry.  I then wake up hours later with tear stains on my face.  I deduced later that the device that touched me stimulates the brain into reactive response.  The device can then translate this energy response into useful needs such as memory, bio status and reaction to implanted monitors.”

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Since we published Aliens in the Backyard in 2013, we’ve received e-mails like this from time to time. We’ve been gathering these stories, puzzling over them, wondering what the hell’s going on. Why do some people, who otherwise live normal lives, have these experiences not once or twice, but all their lives? After exchanging a few more e-mails with Mark, it turns out that he has had encounters since he was a child. Eventually, we’ll do another book on the subject once we find the thread that holds these stories together.

Mainstream science and the media dismiss the phenomenon as non-existent, simple fantasies and dreams based on stories we’ve seen or heard. But when you take a closer look, it becomes apparent that something very unusual is going on, something that stretches our sense of reality, and the very definition of what is real. In our minds, the UFO/alien encounter phenomenon is the mystery of our time, and maybe the greatest mystery of all time.

On reflection, there is the question of life after death. That is probably the greatest mystery of all. Some folks, like Whitley Streiber, even merge the two mysteries. Now that’s a scary thought!