Coincidance: A Head Test

Overview
Coincidance: A Head Test is an eclectic collection of essays, dialogues, poems and parodies by Robert Anton Wilson that mixes humor, skepticism, conspiracy theory and metaphysical curiosity. The pieces range from brisk provocations to longer, playful investigations that blur the boundary between satire and serious thought, inviting readers to test their assumptions and enjoy the dizzying play of ideas.
The collection stitches together Wilson's familiar interests, synchronicity, model-building, Jungian and quantum metaphors, and the sociology of belief, into a mosaic designed to unsettle dogma and stimulate imaginative doubt. Wit and intellectual audacity give the writing a carnival energy that both entertains and provokes.

Themes and approach
A central theme is model agnosticism: the advice to treat every map of reality as provisional and useful rather than absolute. Wilson urges readers to hold multiple, even contradictory, models simultaneously, using each where it proves practical and discarding it when it fails. This pragmatic pluralism shows up in playful riffs on logic, probability and the psychology of belief.
Synchronicity and coincidence appear not as mystical endpoints but as cues for pattern-seeking minds, prompts to question narrative impulses and to explore alternative explanations. Conspiracy is handled similarly, both as a genuine social phenomenon and as a mirror for the human appetite for pattern and purpose, with Wilson often lampooning the excesses of both paranoid and credulous thinking.

Form and notable pieces
The book's form is deliberately mixed. Short aphorisms and essays sit beside imagined dialogues and faux-scholarly notes, creating a patchwork that resists linear reading. Humor and satire are tools as much as content: bizarre hypotheticals, invented authorities and playful logical traps function as experiments that test the reader's reflexes.
Rather than presenting a single argument, the collection accumulates experiences, rational puzzles, surreal anecdotes and rhetorical jokes, that aim to expand cognitive flexibility. Footnotes and marginalia sometimes become running gags, further dissolving the distance between author and reader and reinforcing the sense of intellectual play.

Tone and rhetorical strategies
The tone alternates between genial provocation and gleeful subversion. Wilson's voice is accessible and mischievous, often coaxing readers into complicity as conspirators in a game of perspective-shifting. The rhetorical strategy is to undermine certainty through humor, irony and layered exposition rather than through doctrinal refutation.
This approach converts abstract philosophical issues into lived epistemic exercises. Rather than lecturing about error and bias, the text stages traps that reveal how easily one's certainties can be manufactured, showing that skepticism can be emancipatory and joyous rather than merely negative.

Audience and legacy
Coincidance speaks to readers drawn to countercultural critique, speculative thought and the crosscurrents between science, mysticism and popular myth. It rewards both long-time fans of Wilson's "reality tunnel" thinking and newcomers attracted to its irreverent intelligence. The book influenced later subcultures interested in libertarian skepticism, psychedelic inquiry and avant-garde approaches to information and belief.
By promoting playful skepticism and a habit of testing one's own assumptions, the collection continues to be a useful stimulant for minds that prefer multiplicity over monism, irony over dogma, and creative doubt over passive acceptance. It remains a pocket laboratory for anyone who wants their head properly tested and their certainties checked with a smile.