ABSTRACT
Four individuals share a premonitory experience. Each appears to be responding to a common source of unconscious knowledge, as if they’re reading a cosmic newspaper.
Carlita, Melissa and Emily sign-up for Dan’s drawing course. Each begins the first session manifesting thoughts about suicide. Dan ruminates over his father’s suicide. Melissa, whose brother died of an overdose, draws her hand in the shape of a cocked pistol. Emily, who was blamed for the suicide of a classmate, jokingly threatens to blow us up. Carlita claims Dan could cause a suicide. Then her cousin shoots himself.
Dan supervises Raul, a psychoanalytic social worker. Raul works in a hospital ER. Arriving at work one morning Raul learns a young man had shot himself in the parking lot. Entering the ER, he passes the family who’d just identified the deceased. Coincidentally, a month later the dead man’s sister schedules a therapy session with him. More improbably, nine more survivors of family suicide enter his practice.
Raul claims Dan is a “strange attractor,” drawing suicide survivors toward him through Raul. In response, Dan proposes the concept of “psychic weather.” Dan suggests psychological currents swirling through the transpersonal unconscious motivate human behavior.
