Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, August 2026
Synchronicity: An Interactive Form of Psychic Dynamics?
by: Brent Raynes
An experiencer named Char Touchstone wrote me on December 5, 2020, “Very early this morning, maybe around 2 a.m., I awakened because there was a small object in my room that was odd shaped, with what looked like metal wiring sticking out from all sides. It was a sort of round square shape, if that makes sense. It reminded me of the Borg vessel on Star Trek, but it was not as perfectly shaped or ‘neat’ looking. It was about the size of a football and it was lighting up one side of my room in front of the window facing my backyard.”
She knew she was definitely awake. “I watched it for a while,” she noted. “I could tell there were two beings inside. Somehow, I knew they were just watching me, and nothing was going to ‘happen.’” “It first emanated a soft white light, like a glow all around it, radiating in a disc shape all around it, which did not make sense because the object was not disc-shaped at the moment. It next turned on its side, changed shape to a disc, but still football sized, and then it totally and instantly disappeared, and all the light was gone. It was dark as could be in my room again.”
Then Char included a remark that other UFO experiencers have told me. “I went back to sleep with no issues, which is extremely odd for me to be able to do under normal circumstances. Just amazed.” She acknowledged that she was someone who suffered from insomnia.
My reply was as follows: “First of all, just yesterday and the day before, I was pretty immersed in pulling together a variety of UFO reports where UFO (and even their occupants) allegedly could shrink in size!”
I had noted what seemed like a significant number of unusual instances of what Carl Jung had called synchronicity (meaningful coincidence). A number of people in the UFO field came to notice this phenomenon in connection with their research. “I was being led to people and cases to support whatever theory I was working on at the time,” journalist John Keel once wrote (1). “I tested this by inventing some rather outlandish ideas. Within days I would receive phone calls, reports, and mail describing elements of those ideas.” The highly respected UFO investigator and author Raymond E. Fowler wrote SynchroFile: Amazing Personal Encounters with Synchronicity and Other Strange Phenomena (2004). “It might come as a surprise that Carl Jung was what one would call a dedicated UFOlogist today,” he noted. “Indeed, he even came to believe that the elements of synchronicity was a common element of the UFO phenomenon.” Fowler’s book contains numerous examples from his and his own family’s lives.
Here’s how a string of synchronicities with Char began. After years of reading about the late great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his views on UFOs, synchronicity, archetypes and the collective unconscious, and my many discussions about Jung and his ideas over the years with my good friend Greg Little, who authored The Archetype Experience (1984, 2022), I decided one night (Dec. 19, 2018) to give a process Jung called “active imagination” a try. I felt a need at that time to try tapping into my subconscious mind for any answers or insights that might help further facilitate my personal quest and journey in this field. I began to pull different books from the bookshelves and as best I could outline my strategy.
Before going to sleep I tried to relax and open myself up to this process, when suddenly in my mind’s eye I perceived an angelic like blond haired female figure in a flowing robe, and even though the background was black I immediately knew [without any logical reason for knowing] that this was the location in the middle of my bedroom at my parent’s home in Maine where back in the fall of 1975, at the age of 23, I had this experience that has long intrigued me wherein shortly after climbing into bed I suddenly found myself, I thought, walking across the bedroom floor headed toward the open doorway to the main hall on the second floor, where the light was still on. Everything seemed real, and in my mind I was physically walking toward this door. But then about halfway I stopped and even though I didn’t feel a physical restraint, I just knew that someone behind me had just somehow stopped me. Naturally, feeling this to be the case, one would think that I would turn around to face whoever it was. Instead, I continued to maintain my sight upon the open doorway, and suddenly these small glowing white pulsating translucent marble sized spheres – it looked like hundreds – appeared in the hallway and began swirling around. It seemed to begin up near the ceiling and worked their way down near the floor where they began to amass into a glowing white cluster that seemed to resemble a small four-legged animal – but before it completely solidified the next thing I knew I was laying on my back in bed [which is slightly unusual, as I’m more comfortable laying on my side or stomach in bed] starring up at the ceiling.
I came to reason that this was a religious based experience as I was going through a kind of existential crisis at the time. I had lots of people giving me religious advice and I wanted answers, so I prayed that God could give me some sort of powerful sign to help me on my spiritual journey – but, I asked, please don’t let it be something that will frighten me. Well, it was two nights later that this “vision,” if you will, occurred and I observed without any fear – in fact, with no emotions at all! Which is very unusual experiencing and seeing what I perceived as normally, one would expect, there should have been some sort of reaction. I have come to feel that the prayer programmed what I experienced.
Getting back to my “active imagination” exercise, the following morning, December 20th, somewhere around 4 or 5 a.m. I awakened from a dream where I had been in my Maine bedroom again. I was by my bed, and I was uncomfortable with the fact that there were strangers in my room – who I felt were like “inspectors” of some sort. Then my mom appeared, in the middle of the room, and I rushed up to her and I saw myself embracing her and, at that point, everything was okay. All of our past differences, like how she felt my interests in ufology and the paranormal were a waste of time, evaporated. There was acceptance and understanding now. That’s how it felt.
Without knowing anything about this dream, a psychic named Char Touchstone wrote me on December 21 about a strange dream that she had just had on the night of December 18, in which a white van pulled up to work on her mother’s cable TV. Her mother, like mine, has since passed away, but was present in the dream, and so was I! She wrote that in the dream her mother knew me from some “karmic connection (or) past life type thing.”
Char felt that her and her mother could tell that I was troubled over a couple of issues, one of which was my wife’s health, which was true – something that we had not previously discussed. She stated that in this dream I was told “telepathically not to worry – needs would be met.”
Char’s mom, incidentally, had a powerful life-changing UFO-alien encounter in Texas one night back in August 1957. [Again, UFOs and psychic phenomena, please take note] Under the pseudonym of Elaine Burke, her experience is described in Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact wih Non Human Intelligence, Vol. [2018], in a chapter entitled Communication with UAP Related Non-Human Intelligence: The Early Years, by Kathleen Marden. Kathleen is the niece of one of the most famous UFO abductees, the late Betty Hill, and today is an acclaimed UFO author, investigator, and a hypnotherapist.
“My mother was the most amazing psychic I have ever known and I have known a lot of them,” Char told me.
Char shared with me a copy of a remarkable 20-page handwritten account that her mother wrote of her experience years later. To me it really captured some of the terror and confusion she underwent at that time. Her husband away at work, she suddenly found herself becoming strangely tired. “I am actually fighting sleep as I’d never imagined it,” she wrote. This began under a cold shower. She crawls into bed, grabs a book to read, a nightly ritual for her, but this night she knows she isn’t going to be able to follow through with it. Then she is aware of a blinding light in the room and “a funny humming sound.” She writes, “Oh God, why can’t I open my eyes?” Gradually she manages to open her eyes, but at first the light is still so bright she has difficulty seeing details. “My heart is pounding out of my body,” she continued. “I am bathed in perspiration. My mouth feels closed.”
“There is nothing in the year of 1957 to help me understand, no books, no movies, no experience, no conversations to explain. Just mind shattering, life altering terror. Though my head is filled with silent screams, I hear a voice ‘Do not be afraid.’ I stare at this thing I am seeing. A very small round metallic object, hovering maybe 2 or 3 feet off of the ground. What looks to me like a glass bubble on top. Inside this transparent dome sit two creatures – creatures of a kind I’ve never heard of or read of. Not even in fairy tales as a child. They are very small, with large heads, huge strangely shaped very black eyes, a small slit where a mouth should be. No nose, as we know it. More indentations with what seemed to be nostrils, but I couldn’t see any ears. I don’t know why I struck on that, but I kept thinking ‘why don’t they have ears? Can they hear?’ For some reason that bothered me in a strange way, considering I was engulfed in terror and shaking from head to foot and totally unable to speak. Then I heard, ‘Yes, we can hear’ and my next thought was, ‘Why are they gray?’ Then it rushed into my mind, ‘My God, they’re hearing me and I can’t speak and I’m hearing them and their mouths aren’t moving.’”
“This is the way we communicate, through thought process,” Elaine was told.
“Being from a very religious background I asked them if they were of God, as my greatest fear was of anything evil. They did not say yes or no. He [there was only one who seemed to be doing all of the communicating] replied that they were of the One Universal Force. Somehow they did not feel to me to be of an evil power.”
Returning to synchronicity, on January 16, 2019, I was contacted on Facebook messenger by a lady up in Missouri who I’ve known for a number of years now, who has shared a variety of psychic, ghost, and UFO abduction experiences. Jamie informed me that she’d gotten a sunburn from a dream the night before! Curious naturally, I suggested we talk on the phone. It sounded like this was going to be a weird story! In the dream she was in a building with glass windows all around her. There were other people, but she was the only one standing. The others were huddled on the floor. It looked outside like the sun was about to go super nova and she felt the end was near. Then her mother, who had died 15 years earlier, looking younger than the age she was when she passed, appeared in the room and rushed up to her and they embraced. Her mom told her, “You don’t have to be alone.” Then a tremendous burst of bright light flooded the room, and she woke up, she claimed, with a sunburn!
Char posted on Facebook on February 22, 2021: “Omg. Got home from work a bit ago and not one, not two, not three, but FOUR eagles flying in circle, three times, over my house, and then flew off. Amazing! My Indian friends would tell you that’s a very good sign. I’ve never seen an eagle over here! Four of them!”
I would soon fire off a message to Char to let her know how that very same day Joan and I were leaving town when a short distance off the highway we saw an eagle scratching on the ground nearby. It had been many years since we had seen an eagle ourselves! I wrote: “You have my book Visitors from Hidden Realms. Go to the Grizzlybear Lake’s UFO story and how on page 49 this story began with “a series of unusual dreams about silver-colored eagles…four eagles…formed a circular flying pattern.” Eventually the “eagles appeared as four silver-colored discs” and eventually one day he had a full-blown contact encounter where he was seemingly beamed aboard a saucer piloted by Native elders!”
“I do have the book, and I remember the story,” Char replied. “I had not thought about that. I have NEVER seen an eagle in my neighborhood area before, and I’ve lived there for 12 years! It’s all very, very interesting. We were destined to meet!”
Trying to figure out what message might lurk behind such a synchronicity, I became concerned and felt I should go online and see if I could reach him. After all, it had been quite sometime since we had last chatted, and many months earlier he had sent me a copy of a book he had written called Spirits of the Earth: A Guide to Native American Nature Symbols, Stories, and Ceremonies. Even autographed it. He wanted us to do a follow up interview where we discussed what was in this book. But, alas, I had dragged my feet and online I discovered that he had passed on.
I opened the book and checked the index for pages dealing with eagles. On page 109 I came across this: “If I see an Eagle sitting in a tree, on a telephone pole, or alongside the road while I am traveling, I know it is telling me that I will encounter a spirit person up ahead, such as a medicine man or a ceremonial leader.”
Or how about a woman who is very spiritually focused in her life and who has had many Native American friends and attended sacred ceremonies. Message received.
Research Note:
1. The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel (1970).
