When synchronicities manifest themselves through global events, the universe seems to be addressing us as a collective.
“You cannot begin to understand the nature of mass events of any kind unless you consider the even greater framework in which they have their existence.”
—JANE ROBERTS, THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE NATURE OF MASS EVENTS
Whether you live in Alabama or Albania, in Prague or Peoria, in Santiago or San Francisco, the individual who occupies the U.S. White House has an enormous bearing on the quality of your life. Given the controversial nature of George Bush’s two terms in office, it was stunning to witness the way the universe spoke through synchronicity as Bush’s second term came to an end.
On January 15, 2009 at 8:00 P.M., the president gave his final speech to the nation. In a presidency defined by the repercussions of planes slamming into the World Trade Center, it was intriguing that just five hours earlier, U.S. Airways flight 1549 crashed into the Hudson River, a short distance from the tragic site of 9/11. Yet, the landing was near perfect, and all 155 passengers survived.
The first rescue boat to reach the scene was named after Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, a staunch supporter of the separation between church and state, a man consistently ranked as one of our best presidents. After eight years of flagrant abuse of power, a disastrous war of choice, torture, rendition flights, and the erosion of civil rights, it was as if the “miracle on the Hudson” was the universe assuring us that we would come through it all intact. It’s no small irony that five days later, the day after Martin Luther King Day, the first African-American U.S. president was sworn into office.
Through mass events and the synchronicities so often associated with them, the universe speaks to us as a collective—as a people, a community, a nation, as citizens of the same planet. These types of synchronicities certainly illustrate connections to a deeper layer of existence, similar to what quantum physicists speak of when they refer to everything in the universe being intimately connected. As Michael Talbot put it in The Holographic Universe, “Our brains mathematically construct objective reality by interpreting frequencies that are ultimately projections from a deeper order of existence that is beyond space and time—the brain is a hologram enfolded in a holographic universe.”
In this era of 24/7 news coverage, most of us have heard or read a national story that we recognized as a meaningful coincidence. On occasion, the cable news broadcasters comment on them. At the end of the funeral for NBC broadcaster Tim Russert, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” played, and as family and friends left the church, a double rainbow burst across the sky. Fellow broadcaster Keith Olbermann noted the synchronicity on his program the next evening, though he didn’t use the term.
As part of the memorial service for the seven astronauts who died in the 1986 Challenger disaster, wreaths were dropped from a helicopter off the Florida coast. A pod of dolphins unexpectedly surfaced near the wreaths. The film of the event was shown repeatedly on news broadcasts. NASA scientists studied it and counted the dolphins; even though only five were visible, scientists speculated there were at least two more in the pod—one for each astronaut.
The dolphins’ spontaneous appearance at the dramatic ceremony was inspiring and reassuring, symbolic of a larger picture. Greek and Mediterranean legends treat the dolphin as a creature of good fortune and intelligence, a talisman for voyages not only on the sea but also into the afterlife.
In the late 1990s, five-year-old Elian Gonzalez fled Cuba with his mother and ten other people on a small craft. When the craft sank, everyone onboard drowned except Elian, who was found on Thanksgiving Day 1999, floating off the coast of Florida. A fierce custody battle ensued between Elian’s father in Cuba and his relatives in Miami. Because the boy was supposedly saved by dolphins that kept him afloat after the other passengers drowned, a kind of religious movement grew up around him.
Take a few moments to think about mass events—disasters, invasions, large-scale demonstrations, deaths of public figures—and try to remember any synchronicities related to them. Maybe you had a dream or premonition about such an event. Maybe you had a connection with someone involved in the event, or a connection with the location. Chances are that the events, which captured your attention, carried some personal significance.
Millions of people around the world watched the World Trade Center disaster unfold on television as it was happening. For weeks afterward, it dominated worldwide media coverage. In the aftermath of the attack, thousands of personal synchronicities were recorded about the events. If you Google “9/11 synchronicities,” tens of thousands of sites come up, many of them stories of survival that illustrate how personal synchronicities are often enfolded within mass events.
Three weeks before the World Trade Center disaster, we were visiting friends in Cassadaga, Florida, a spiritualist community. Medium Art Burley was giving Rob a reading focused on his career when Burley suddenly caught his breath and looked up. “I see two huge explosions coming, from above, like huge bombs. It’s coming very soon. It’s going to be enormous and will change everything.” Apparently still thinking that he was talking about Rob’s career, he added, “It could be a movie. It’s big.” Of course, it wasn’t a movie, it was real, and the bombs weren’t a metaphor for a career change. They were two commercial jets turned into bombs as they struck their targets.
British biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake sensed that psychic experiences related to 9/11 would abound. He placed a newspaper ad in the Village Voice and posters in Union Square in New York City, seeking dreams and premonitions related to the tragedy. He received fifty-seven responses; thirty-eight involved precognitive dreams, fifteen were related to premonitions. About a third of the dreams occurred the night before the disaster and another third during the preceding five to six days.
Sheldrake felt the people who responded represented a fraction of those who probably experienced related premonitions. Several respondents dreamed of buildings collapsing, explosions in New York, airplanes crashing into buildings, or people fleeing in panic. The responses that most impressed Sheldrake came from people who told others about their dreams before the terrorist attack and premonitions from people who rarely experience such a sense of foreboding.
Mike Chirni, a forensic scientist who lives in New York City, dreamed of flying low over buildings he recognized in Manhattan. He and others on the plane were upset. He felt an overwhelming sense of dread, then a tremendous impact, and woke up.
Amanda Bernsohn, who worked three blocks from the World Trade Center, didn’t know why she couldn’t stop crying the night of September 10. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed not of the World Trade Center, but of Nazis taking over New York. She overslept for the first time since she’d started her job eight months earlier and was awakened by a call from a friend shortly after the first plane struck the North Tower.
Not surprisingly, an event like 9/11 reverberated through time. Back in the early 1990s, Vicki DeLaurentis lived in the suburbs of Philadelphia and attended a day-long spiritual retreat with past-life regressionist Carol Bowman. During a guided meditation into the future, Vicki saw the Twin Towers on fire and crumbling to the ground. She had no idea when this would happen, but her spirit guide assured her she wouldn’t be there when it did. For years, she tried to figure out the timing and asked every psychic she knew, but none of them had any inkling of anything like this.
In 1997, she and her husband moved to Long Island, and she really began to worry about what she’d seen in Carol’s workshop. Her husband was employed in the oil business and his traders worked in the World Trade Center. Still, her guide reassured her she would be fine.
Fast forward to 2001. Vicki’s husband had a meeting in the WTC, scheduled for September 11. He and Vicki decided to have dinner that evening at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the World Trade Center. Vicki, who has a fear of heights, felt uneasy about it. However, a week before 9/11, her husband’s meeting was postponed until the 12th. “If the original meeting hadn’t been changed, my husband would have been there.”
When a major event occurs, especially a disaster, it’s natural to feel frightened and confused. Our immediate reaction is a concern for our lives and the lives of our loved ones. Whether it’s a natural event, such as a hurricane, or a manmade one, we eventually start to wonder why it happened and what it will mean to us in the future. Here’s an exercise that can lead you toward inner awareness.
Sit comfortably, take several deep breaths, then gradually slow your breath. Feel your body relaxing, feel your mind relaxing. Forget your to-do list. Tell yourself that you’re going to reach a place of inner healing; you’re going to attract the energy you need to heal yourself and to spread that healing to others.
Visualize an energetic essence surrounding your body. See it as a glowing golden light. See it radiating around you, then focus the golden light around your heart. See it filling your body, healing, cleansing, rejuvenating, pulling positive energy into your life. Try to stay focused on this energy for at least five minutes. When your mind starts to wander, bring it back to the golden light.
Before you come out of your meditation, imagine again that you’ll be taking the healing energy with you. See a layer of violet light surrounding the golden light, allowing you to move the healing energy out into the world. Whenever you interact positively with others, see the healing energy spreading. Imagine it moving from person to person, spreading around the world, healing old wounds, physical, mental, and spiritual ones.
A website called Conspiracy Archive features an intriguing collection tion of 9/11 references that appeared in films long before September 11. For instance in the 1996 film Independence Day, one scene depicts the president and his family being evacuated in Air Force One. Actor Jeff Goldblum opens his laptop to watch the countdown and the camera cuts to a close-up of the clock: 9:11:01.
The Peacemaker, a 1997 film starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, includes a scene at JFK Airport, where the stars are pursuing a Yugoslavian terrorist. As Clooney steps off an escalator, two desks are visible behind him, numbered 9 and 11.
In Enemy of the State, a 1998 film, a computer search by Gene Hackman and Will Smith turns up personal data on a corrupt politician played by Jon Voight in the film. His birth date is 9/11/40. In the opening scenes of the 2000 film Traffic, a drug van is seized and pulled over. When the cargo is revealed, every carton is stamped 911.
Although the website is obviously skewed toward the conspiracy angle, we see these movie references as synchronicities, specifically precognition. The collective shock of 9/11 reverberated through space and time, as the research of the Global Consciousness Project has shown.
The dramatic impact of the WTC disaster became a natural target for a scientific study aimed at monitoring what author Dean Radin called the “global mind.” The Global Consciousness Project, based at Princeton University and cosponsored by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, is an Internet-based experiment started by Princeton’s Dr. Roger Nelson. Since 1998, it has monitored the movements of this global mind. Radin, writing in the May 2003 issue of IONSNoetic Sciences Review, described the project as “an ocean of individual minds … that explores the mind-matter relationship” by using a random number generator (RNG).
The network consists of sixty-five sites worldwide that generate random numbers. Once per minute, these numbers are downloaded and analyzed to find out how consistent they are. As explained at the Global Consciousness Project Dot website (www.gcpdot.com), “Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that may reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We predict structure in what should be random data, associated with major global events.” In everyday terms, repeatedly flipping a coin should result in an equal number of heads and tails. But during events of high global interest, according to the theory of global consciousness, the focused attention and emotional outpouring results in a notable difference in the percentage of heads versus tails.
Radin noted that the events of 9/11 provided a tragic but edifying test for the project, due to the nature of the events, the heightened emotions, and the massive media coverage. On 9/11, thirty-seven of the random-number generators were active. The fluctuations in the bell curve analysis indicated that anomalies began two hours before the first plane hit the WTC, odds of 20 to 1, Radin noted. The results that day were the fifteenth largest out of nearly 1,400 days. “That means that on that fateful day, the GCP’s ‘bells’ collectively rang out around the world with an unusually pure tone.”
What, exactly, is this global mind? Nelson, the project’s innovator, describes the global mind as the combined consciousness of every person on the planet. “Consciousness has a creative, productive, generative role in the world such that what we wish for is more likely to be than if we hadn’t wished for it,” he wrote on GCP’s website. “What we envision together will manifest in the world in a subtle way.”
In 2003, Dean Radin noted that after he and his colleagues published their findings about 9/11 in the physics journal Foundations of Physics Letters, some scientists were skeptical. In the course of explaining how he explored the analysis of the RNG, he said, “If the Global Consciousness Project is detecting genuine, large-scale mind-matter interactions, then it raised the possibility that some coincidences may be more than just dumb luck.” Then he related two astonishing synchronicities related to the 2002 memorial events for 9/11.
On the evening of September 11, 2002, the New York Lottery drew the sequence 9-1-1. Radin said the chance probability of selecting any given three-number sequence is 1 in 1,000. A bit of investigation revealed that in the previous 5,000 drawings of this lottery, the 9-1-1 sequence had come up five times. “However, is it a coincidence that this number appeared on this date, in this city, and not in any of the other state lotteries? Given the massive attention placed on the sequence 9-1-1 on that day and in that city, it does make one wonder.”
The next synchronicity occurred at ground zero in Manhattan, also on September 11, 2002. The weather that day was calm, the sky was blue and clear, no storms were predicted. Yet, as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, shortly before the commemoration ceremony was to begin the winds whipped up and the air filled with dust, just as it had a year earlier as the towers fell.
A month later, Windsurfer magazine published an article written by a windsurfer who was there. “After witnessing the strong wind that ‘came out of nowhere,’ the windsurfer checked the wind records for September 11 and for the previous few days,” Radin wrote in IONS Noetic Science Review. “The results were striking: For a week before September 11, 2002, the winds near New York City were calm, averaging about five miles an hour. On September 11, around 9 A.M., the winds in the bay near Long Island suddenly shot up over 45 miles an hour.”
Radin was impressed enough by this story to check with the National Weather Service station in Central Park and also at Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C. And yes, both locations experienced changes in barometric pressure and wind speed, starting around 9:00 A.M. Radin wrote, “This ongoing experiment suggests that as mass mind moves, so does matter.”
The theory upon which the Global Consciousness Project is founded has roots that reach back to ancient times. In the fourth century B.C., Greek philosopher Heraclitus saw all things as interrelated or following “cosmic reason.” He believed events were not isolated happenings, but had repercussions across the entire fabric of existence, that all things were linked by a web of organization created by Logos.
Hippocrates, born twenty years after Heraclitus died, expressed similar thoughts. “There is one common flow, a common breathing. Everything is in sympathy. The whole organism and each one of its parts are working together for the same purpose. The great principle extends to the most extreme part, and from the extremest part returns again to the great principle.”
The Roman scholar Agrippa referred to a Fifth Essence—something beyond earth, air, fire, and water—that held existence together. He also called it the World Soul, which penetrates all things and is a thing in itself. Agrippa’s contemporary, Plotinus wrote, “Chance has no place in life, but only harmony and order reign therein.”
In the Middle Ages, this idea was known as the unus mundus, one world, and referred to a collective knowledge that exists independently of us, yet is available to us. In this cosmology, the source of meaningful coincidence is separate from our conscious awareness and egos, but it’s where the psyche and the external world touch.
It sounds a lot like F. David Peat’s theory that synchronicity is a bridge between mind and external reality: In Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind, he wrote, “Synchronicities … open the floodgates of the deeper levels of consciousness and matter which, for a creative instant, sweep over the mind and heal the division between the internal and the external.”
Sometimes, synchronicities associated with mass events blow open our awareness that the universe isn’t what it appears to be. Author Daniel Pinchbeck, in 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, wrote how in September 2001 he finally got around to editing a friend’s “poetic manifesto,” a kind of diatribe against corporatism and globalization. His partner was in the bedroom, feeding their infant daughter, and he had the pages of the poet’s manuscript spread out on a table in the living room when they suddenly heard something outside, which he described as “the roar of a low-flying airplane and then a loud metallic crunch.” He and his partner opened the blinds and “saw a flaming crater in one of the World Trade towers.” The title of his friend’s manuscript was World on Fire.
Pinchbeck grew up with a materialist belief system that would’ve dismissed such a coincidence as the product of probability or random chance. According to the materialist way, the brain naturally seeks to find patterns. “As a by-product of our habitual pattern-seeking, we are neurologically programmed to seek deeper meanings in a world that is, at the most fundamental level, devoid of such things,” Pinchbeck wrote. “Our belief that there are ‘signs’ hidden within the chaos of events is an age-old survival mechanism, an attempt to endow our lives with importance and avoid the existential fact of our insignificance.”
He went on to update his perspective. “Although I didn’t realize it at the time, deep currents of twentieth-century thought, in the disciplines of physics and psychoanalysis, suggest this materialist perspective is a flawed one.”
Forums for registering premonitions about disasters have existed in one form or another since the aftermath of the Aberfan mining disaster in 1966 when the Central Premonition Registry was created. In that incident, a coal mine collapsed in the Welsh village of Aberfan, causing an avalanche that killed 144 people, including 116 children. The disaster attracted worldwide attention.
A British psychologist named Dr. John Barker suspected that some residents in the nearby villages might have had premonitions of the dramatic event. He made inquiries and received seventy-six reports. Of those, he corroborated twenty-four.
One of the most accurate premonitions came from a forty-seven-year-old woman who dreamed of an old school building in a valley, a Welsh coal miner, and an avalanche of coal tumbling down a mountain slope. Near the bottom of the mountain was a frightened boy. She saw a rescue effort and knew the boy had been saved. The day before the disaster, she told the dream to six people at her church.
A year after the disaster, Dr. Barker established the British Premonitions Bureau. The following year Robert and Nancy Nelson founded a similar organization in New York, called the Central Premonitions Registry. The current registry is called Prophecies: Prediction and Premonition Registry and can be found online at www.prophecies.us. These organizations gathered reports of dreams that might foretell future events that could impact large numbers of people in order to warn them of upcoming disasters. However, most premonitions of disaster tend to occur a day or two before the event, making it difficult to act upon such reports.
Although preventing tragedy through premonitions seems challenging, F. David Peat recounts a story in which a healer stopped a disaster. The story originated with Richard Wilhelm, a friend of Jung’s who is best known for his 1950 translation of the I Ching into English.
The village had gone for weeks without rain, and the villagers called in a rainmaker. Instead of performing complicated rituals to bring on the rains, the man went straight to the hut that had been provided for him. He realized the village was suffering from discord, that it was out of step with nature. Once the rainmaker had composed himself, equilibrium was restored to the village and the rains fell. In a sense, the village was experiencing a collective spiritual crisis. The rainmaker served as the catalyst to its resolution.
In the same way, in the fourth century A.D., St. Augustine faced a spiritual crisis in his life. As he paced around the garden of Milan, he heard a child’s voice from a nearby house mysteriously repeating the words, “Tolle, lege, tolle, lege.” Pick up and read, pick up and read.
Baffled, he finally opened a copy of St. Paul’s epistles and read a response to his lifelong conflict—the passage even addressed its resolution. “The light of certainty flooded my heart and all dark shadows of doubt fled away,” he later wrote in Book VIII of The Confessions of St. Augustine, said to be the first autobiography in Western literature. The child’s voice, like the rainmaker in the Chinese village, helped when help was needed most. Both cases were clear examples of synchronicity.
A thousand years later, St. Augustine’s writings led to the birth of the Renaissance through the visions of Petrarch. The Italian scholar and poet, born in 1304, is known as the father of humanism and was one of the first to label the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages. For years, he thought about climbing Mont Ventoux to get a panoramic view of the region. Mountain climbing was a rarity back then, especially for the purpose of obtaining a better view. In April 1336, however, Petrarch and his brother began the ascent that scholars would later regard as the event that symbolized the onset of the Renaissance.
When he reached the summit, with clouds drifting below his feet, the wind in his face, Petrarch was astonished by the view of French Provence, the Alps, the Mediterranean. In his exhilarated state, he opened his copy of The Confessions of St. Augustine. Turning at random to book X, he read: “And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tide of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuit of the stars, and pass themselves by … .”
Petrarch marveled at what he read, recognizing the coincidence as part of a larger pattern, a transformative moment. He later wrote in a letter that it couldn’t have been an accident that he had happened upon these very words. “What I had there read I believed to be addressed to me and to no other, remembering that St. Augustine had once suspected the same thing in his own case.”
The experiences of St. Augustine and Petrarch became not only pivotal turning points in their own journeys of awakening, but had a global impact as well. Likewise, Daniel Pinchbeck’s experience blew open his awareness and shifted his intellectual orientation from a materialist perspective to a synchronistic one. It led him to think and write in the footsteps of Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, and Aldous Huxley. The personal enfolded within the global.
In the aftermath of the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, a list of astonishing similarities between Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln came to light. Although others have been added over the years, the strongest synchronicities were those noted shortly after JFK died.
The parallels between these two men are dramatic. To dismiss them as mere oddities is not only shortsighted, but reveals an unwillingness to glimpse a deeper reality hidden from the everyday world. When we allow ourselves to look, to really look, our rational minds reel. Just as the world was riveted to television in the aftermath of 9/11, so were millions riveted in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination. Mass events affect mass consciousness and create an environment fertile for synchronicity.
When Barack Obama became the forty-fourth president of the United States, many noted the synchronicities between him and Lincoln. Both men were lawyers who began their political careers in the Illinois state legislature, serving in the same district. Both served a single term in Congress before becoming president. Both brought young children to the White House. They were both propelled into the national spotlight by powerful speeches. Neither man served in the military. Lincoln freed the slaves and Obama is the first African-American president of the United States.
The life stories of Lincoln and Obama reveal fascinating parallels, just as the death stories of Lincoln and Kennedy were synchronistically connected.
After the June 2009 presidential election in Iran, massive demonstrations onstrations erupted as Iranians protested the results. It looked as though the election was rigged and the populous was rebelling against the status quo. Any uprising that involves masses of people, intense emotions, and worldwide media coverage is likely to involve synchronicity. While watching the news the next day, we found a dramatic instance of it.
A beautiful young woman’s death on the street during a demonstration was highlighted and quickly became a symbol of the movement. The graphic video was shown on cable news over and over and spread across the Internet.
The synchronicity was her name: Neda in Farsi means The Divine Calling. Her death was seen as a sacrifice to a greater cause.
On October 3, 1995, an estimated half-billion people watched or listened to the live broadcast of the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder case. It was the most publicized murder case ever. Reuters reported that the viewing audience for this event surpassed three of the five Super Bowl telecasts between 1991 and 1995.
Dean Radin, Roger Nelson, and a colleague at the University of Amsterdam were ready for the event with five random number generators (RNGs). They were looking for unusual correlations in what should be random data that would indicate heightened activity in the global consciousness.
“We expected that the unusual degree of mass attention focused on this evening would cause the combined output of five independent RNGs simultaneously to show unexpected order when the verdict was announced,” Radin wrote in IONS Noetic Sciences Review in the summer of 1998.
And that’s exactly what happened. The global mind—the unus mundus—was so focused on the O. J. verdict that it impacted the random number generators in a measurable way. Around 9:00 A.M. Pacific time on October 3, 1995, when the TV coverage about the impending verdict began, “an unexpected degree of order appeared in all the RNGs,” Radin reported.
A graph that accompanied the article showed a spike during the hour when coverage began. It resembled the sort of lines you might see on a seismograph as a quake reaches its greatest intensity. A second, greater spike culminated as the verdict was announced.
Radin said this experiment, and others like it, illustrate that the common link between mind and matter is order. It echoes Bohm’s implicate order, and smacks of synchronicity.
Move ahead thirteen years. On October 3, 2008, thirteen years to the day after O. J. Simpson was acquitted of double homicide, he was convicted of kidnapping, armed robbery, and ten other charges. He and five men had stormed a room in a hotel casino, where they seized plaques, photos, and game balls. The O. J. story had come full circle.
We share the planet with nearly seven billion people, so it behooves us to pay attention to what’s going on in the larger world and to look for synchronicities related to global events that may hold vital clues about future trends. Keep a list of them and be as detailed as possible. What do the deeper messages tell you about the future? About the landscape of global politics, war, and peace? About global warming? About the role of the individual within society? How does all of this relate to you?
Consider arranging your file of global synchronicities by categories. Here are some suggestions:
In which category do you notice the most synchronicities? What kinds of synchronicities do you find? Metaphorical? Precognitive? Literal?
Connie Cannon, a numerologist, experiences frequent synchronicities in precognitive dreams that are related to famous people. Connie is also physically sensitive to pending earthquakes. Several days before a cluster of quakes, or quakes rated 5.0 or above, she experiences a variety of symptoms including extreme vertigo, nausea, and soaring blood pressure. It took her years to make the correlation between earthquakes and her symptoms, but now she can sometimes pinpoint the areas where quakes will occur based on the types of symptoms she experiences.
Another friend of ours will occasionally see newspaper headlines on the current edition that no one else sees—only to find those exact or similar headlines a day or two later. It happens spontaneously to her. With practice, and if you’re inclined, you might develop this talent.
Sit down every morning and gaze at the front page of the newspaper. You might focus on a particular category of global events that interests you, or remain open to any remarkable developments.
Slow your breathing; shut your eyes. Press your thumb against your right nostril; breathe in through your left. Hold the air for a few seconds, then remove your thumb and exhale through the right nostril. Repeat, this time blocking your left nostril and inhaling through the right one. This type of breathing balances the hemispheres of your brain. Go back and forth a few times. With eyes closed, lay your hand on the newspaper.
Once you feel centered, take away your hand and stare “through” the newspaper. Allow your vision to “unfocus.” If you prefer, you can keep your eyes closed. As you take a few more deep breaths, you might start to see headlines from the future. When images of headlines appear, jot them down.