Coincidences

I am often struck by what appear to be coincidences between what I’m writing and what is actual and real. For example in Razor’s Edge I was writing about a place where a certain object was manufactured without knowing a) if such an object even existed and b) where in the US it might be manufactured. As I was writing fiction, I described the object and randomly selected a city where that object was manufactured. Several days later I was ‘Googling’ and decided to see if this object indeed existed and lo and behold it does exist and it is indeed manufactured in the exact city I had selected!  In writing Seeing Double, I had a similar instance where in I randomly described a doomsday scenario, its location and specific locations in different countries that were involved. About a week later I ran across a CNN piece paralleling what I had described in my novel, including international responses that paralleled the novel. Scary?
While it can be thrilling when these coincidences occur it is also a bit weird. It feels a bit ‘para-psychological,’ a bit ‘whooo-whoo,’ but those feelings don’t make the fact of these experiences any less real. Sure there could be other explanations like ‘I read something about it somewhere’ but that’s not the reality. The best I can come up with is coincidence, luck or fluke but none of these words quite capture the experience.  It’s more like ‘a gypsy fortune teller’ saying ‘you will meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger,’ and you run into Ian Somerhalder at Starbucks and you’re the fortune teller!  Perhaps it’s telepathy though I don’t consider myself to be telepathic  and yet those who are might say that we all have the inherent capacity to be telepathic but are socialized to spurn those ideas/abilities. We are trained as children to be more reality and fact-oriented, to develop practical skills. Children are naturally more fantasy-oriented, their unformed minds are imaginative and creative. Perhaps the coincidences that I’m describing occur when my mind is in that free flowing state. When I’m typing without regard for hard core facts;  I’m just ‘in the moment’ with my fingers on the keyboard. It occurs at those times when the words just flow and ideas accumulate forming and reforming like so many clouds moving with the wind.