My car was stolen.

And now it was lying at the bottom of the ocean in Yachats, Oregon.

When I’d arrived at the Oregon coast for work-related workshops, I was enamored with the wild and ferocious ocean. But then I started to have nightmares. One of them was about my car. The constant sound of the crushing waves made me anxious and paranoid. In a matter of seconds, it could swallow us all.

Toward the end of my trip, I was sitting on a bench in a small town in Oregon, waiting for a colleague.

Then a man with purple hair appeared out of nowhere.

“Hello, beautiful lady,” the man said. He was dressed in neon-bright clothes. Maybe he was there for the town fair. “Would you like me to tell your fortune? It will only cost you fifteen dollars.”

I’m not really into fortune telling. I’d rather find out what I need to know in my own way. Plus at this point, I had very little cash left.

But when the man heard where I was from, he wanted to tell me something anyway. “For gratis.” After he talked about my interest in metaphysics, he asked, “Are you writing?” Then he told me that I should be writing “many books.”

Maybe that’s what he told everyone he met. But I’d already written a draft for a novel. It was based on the five volumes of my documented dreams, one volume for each year I’d lived in the States. In the last two years, I had asked my subconscious mind a question each night before going to sleep. The response dreams were fascinating — sometimes I had five dreams a night. I woke up after each dream and wrote it down.

Maybe I had become such a prolific dreamer thanks to my friend Pauline. She had gone to San Diego and had met a psychic in a city fair. I came up in their conversation, and the psychic gave her a dream-stone for me. “This will help her to connect with her vision and get out of the difficult relationship she is in,” he said.

I washed the stone, as he’d suggested. When I put it under my pillow and closed my eyes, what I saw in my mind’s eye was incredible. My dreams then became clearer and more vivid than ever.

But my novel based on my dreams was a romance — and I suck at writing romance, even the mystical kind.

“Take this coin,” the man with the purple hair said. And he gave me a huge silver coin. “It’s for good luck.”

My colleague arrived a second after he’d left.

“Did you see the man I was talking to?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “Are you OK, Lilac?”

“Yes. I was just talking to a man with purple hair and neon clothes.”

“It’s hot today. Drink some water.”

Not long after that, I found my voice as a writer. What I write involves dreams, but in a completely different way than before.

Sometimes I think that the coin the man gave me is indeed magical, like the coin in American Gods. Maybe he wasn’t a man at all but a deity. And maybe it was also he who’d given me the dream-stone.

***

While I was writing about a magical coin, Donna Everhart wrote a post about magical coins as well, or in her case, pennies. Synchronicities intrigue me, and I love Donna. Check out her post. It’s wonderful.