Making a Wish: Jung’s Book Inspires an Experiment with Astonishing Results

Going back 14 years, this incident sparked my fascination with synchronicity and a desire to understand the mechanism behind it.

I’d stumbled across Jung’s book on synchronicity in the bookshop. I read it from start to finish on the same day, getting to the final chapter while I was in bed. Towards the end, Jung makes a comment about the concept of “wishing” being potentially related. I’d also read somewhere that the time most likely to link the conscious to the “collective unconscious” was just as you drift off to sleep.

I decided to run an experiment on the power of wishing as I dozed off — by choosing a wish that was so unlikely to come true, that if it did, I’d know there really was something weird going on in the universe. I decided to wish someone (Hafez) back into my life. We’d met 13 years before, dated briefly in Sydney, before we went our separate ways. I moved 4,000 kilometers away to Perth. We completely lost touch after about a year.

The wish was simple: I wished that he would come back into my life. That was around 11:00pm at night.

Next morning, I made my coffee and sat down to check my email as usual. There was an email — sent at around 1:00am — from a lady I didn’t know telling me that her husband’s friend, Hafez, had asked her to track me down.

The weirdness didn’t end there. Hafez had arrived in Perth the week before, and the lady who emailed me lived just one street away from me.

Fast forward: Hafez and I are now married. It’s not all a “dream come true” but we’re doing okay. I’ve tried to replicate the process, with mixed results — and nothing as mind-blowing as that one! (Yet)