Coincidence

The key question here is expressed in the subtitle - a matter of chance or synchronicity? The book follows up the earlier work of Arthur Koestler and contains a great many case histories as well as analysis and explanations of various types of coincidence. One of the earliest is Lord Brougham, who is travelling through Sweden in 1799. On arriving at an inn he saw an old student friend of his sitting on the chair on which he had put his clothes while enjoying a bath. He got the distinct impression that his friend had died, and remembered that they had made a pact as students to the effect that whichever of them died first would appear to the other. When he returned to Edinburgh, he found that his friend had indeed died on the date of his appearance. Brougham himself decided that it must have been a dream and a simple coincidence. This illustrates the role of interpretation – in my view, deathbed apparitions, extensively documented since the 1880s, cannot be written off as a chance occurrence like many more trivial instances. Statistics are now invoked to explain how coincidences can be put down to chance, and in some cases this is indeed likely. However, there is a core of cases that make much more sense in terms of an agency of some kind. Readers will have to make up their own mind, but there is plenty of material as a basis for an informed view in this book.