Dark Side of the Rainbow: Encyclopedia II - Dark Side of the Rainbow - Synchronicity

Dark Side of the Rainbow - Synchronicity

Some have explained this synergy effect as an example of synchronicity, described by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung as a phenomenon in which coincidental events "seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality." [1]

Dark Side of the Rainbow - Real or imagined?

Detractors [2] argue that the phenomenon is the result of the mind's tendency to look for and recognize patterns, real or not, amid disorder. In the same way, people sometimes believe that they recognize shapes in random clouds, that they see the image of a religious figure in a random blotch, or that they detect an ordered conspiracy amid a set of unrelated events.

Under this theory, a viewer will focus on matching moments while ignoring the greater number of instances where the two works do not correspond. For example, no one is searching the ground in the movie during the lyric "look around/choose your own ground," but the viewer overlooks the discord.

Dark Side of the Rainbow - Accident or planned?

While some fans argue that there are nevertheless far too many syncs between these two works to have arisen by accident, the band members have insisted that the phenomenon is pure coincidence. In an interview for the 25th anniversary of the album, guitarist/vocalist David Gilmour flatly denied that the album was intentionally written to be synchronized with Oz, saying "Some guy with too much time on his hands had this idea with combining Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon." [3] And on an MTV special about Pink Floyd in 2002, the band dismissed any relationship between the album and the movie as an accident, arguing that there were no means of reproducing the film in the studio at the time they recorded the album.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Synchronicity", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki