Three Dreams and an Unexpected Email

After I was attuned to Reiki, I began noticing coincidences everywhere. One of the most extraordinary—and the one that left me in no doubt that I was being guided—happened just a couple of weeks later.

I dreamt about an ex-boyfriend three nights in a row. I hadn’t seen him for 12 years and was very unlikely ever to bump into him: he’s Argentinian, lives just outside Buenos Aires, and I didn’t even have his phone number.

The morning after the third dream, I happened to be ready for work unusually early. My daughter was at school, and I had a spare 20 minutes, so I decided to tackle some jobs that had been sitting on my to-do list for ages. Top of the list was getting into an old email account I hadn’t accessed for around five years. I needed to retrieve an email from it to renew my web domain, so after some effort, I finally found the password and logged in.

The top email in my inbox was from my ex-boyfriend. He had sent it the day before.

The account was so clogged with junk that I would never have seen his message had I not needed, at that exact moment, to access an inbox I hadn’t opened in years. He was writing to tell me he was coming to Madrid—where we had once lived together—and would love to see me.

My immediate reaction was: absolutely not. I was happily married, living in London, and the whole idea seemed crazy. But I replied simply because I had to tell him about the bizarre sequence of events that had led me to see his email at all—and on the morning after a bizarre sequence of three dreams, no less.

Then the coincidences kept coming.

I went for a pedicure, and as I walked in, a song strongly associated with the beginning of our relationship came on the radio. I took The Times with me and opened my favourite section, Travel, to find the entire section themed around Buenos Aires. That same week, I went to a work lunch and happened to sit next to a man who had lived in Buenos Aires and was a huge Boca Juniors fan—my ex’s football team, whom I had watched play a couple of times when we were together.

I couldn’t shake the funny feeling that I was being guided—and not particularly subtly—and that I shouldn’t dismiss it.

I was already planning a trip to Madrid to visit friends, so I spoke to my husband and decided to time my visit to coincide with my ex’s so that I could see him for one day. My husband was incredibly supportive.

That meeting turned out to be deeply cathartic. I processed and released so much from that period of my life that I hadn’t even realised I was still carrying.

There was another layer to the timing that made the experience even more profound for me. My husband and I had been trying to have a baby for five years, during which time I had experienced three miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy. After Madrid, I felt profoundly lighter. By the end of that summer, I was expecting our youngest daughter.

I can’t separate those two experiences in my own understanding of what happened. The synchronicities seemed to lead me towards a piece of healing I didn’t even know I needed—and that experience fundamentally changed the way I understood coincidence and intuition, and set me on the path to changing my career, too.