From the Narrow Desert

Last night I dreamed that I saw a blog post with that title (including the odd capitalization), though I wasn't sure whether it was on my own blog or someone else's. I didn't read the post; I only saw the title.

By posting this, I am making my dream come true.

In the dream, I thought it was an allusion to Jim Morrison's "The Celebration of the Lizard," with its famous lines "I am the Lizard King / I can do anything." Wizard sounds like lizard, and the lion is the king of beasts -- ergo, Wizard Lion = Lizard King.

Immediately upon waking, I thought, no, the wizard/lizard lion is the chameleon, a lizard with a lion in its name and with the "magical" ability to change color.

Not until this evening did I get around to looking up "The Celebration of the Lizard." Like most Gen-X Mormons, I am a half-assed Doors fan at best and only knew a few lines -- "Is everybody in? / The ceremony is about to begin," plus the Lizard King bit. As it turns out, the very first word of the poem is lions, which would seem to confirm my in-dream interpretation.

I was sync-posting about "The invincible Lizard King" back in January 2023.

Given Mr. Mojo Risin's penchant for anagrams, I thought "I am the wizard Lion" might be one. It's an anagram of "rationalized whim," which seems like a phrase people might use on occasion, so I tried googling it. Only four results -- but the first one was very recent: a March 1, 2024, article for The Lamp by Jude Russo, called "Whim All the Way Down" -- about, of all things, the watches owned by dictators. The key phrase occurs in the first paragraph:

Most Americans, I think, fancy themselves collectors of something or other. It is the natural consequence of our superabundant material culture; with the specter of famine having shuffled almost out of our living memory, people are free to devote a decent portion of their earnings to whim. Collecting is just rationalized whim.

I am no exception. I have my little whims -- books, guns, watches -- but . . .

Note that though the rest of the article is about watches, early on he pairs them with guns.

Scrolling down a bit, I noticed a "colonel" reference:

Col. Muammar Gaddhafi kept up a steady stream of inexpensive quartz watches bearing his likeness at every stage of his fashion sensibility . . .

This led me to the colonel's Wikipedia article, where I found this:

Colonel Gaddafi's golden gun caught my eye because, due to recent Corn Flakes syncs, I had been thinking about songs that mention that cereal: "I Am The Walrus," "Punky's Dilemma" by Simon & Garfunkel, and of course Tori Amos's "Cornflake Girl" -- which has the repeated line "And the man with the golden gun thinks he knows so much."

I hadn't listened to any of those songs or even searched for them -- I had just been thinking about them -- when I opened up the YouTube Music on my phone and found that the first song it had queued up in my "Supermix" was called "Gold Guns Girls":

After that, running into a real-life Colonel with a Golden Gun -- found by searching for an anagram of a line from a dream! -- was quite the coincidence.

Last night I checked Richard Arrowsmith's Black Dog Star blog -- which is updated very infrequently, and which I check with corresponding infrequency -- and found a new post (well, about a month old), the first in over a year and a half: "Waking from a dream." In the post, he links to an old 2009 post by Jake Kotze, the granddaddy of Internet synchromysticism: "Robin: '11:11, Time For Ascension!'" Richard highlights this image from Jake's post:

Richard's interest was in the theme of the raised fist, which he connects with the "woke" BLM salute and other things. My own interest is in the fact that it's a box of Corn Flakes. In my March 8 post "Hidden Treasures, the super cereal," I also posted a picture of a Corn Flakes box in the context of waking from a dream:

Following the link back to the Jake Kotze post, I found that it also includes this photo:

Jake's focus is on the "Crisis? 911" part, but 311 is much more prominently displayed. This number has come up a lot recently, for example in my March 21 post "Fake colonel 3:11." Debbie has repeatedly pointed out that colonel and kernel are homonyms. Kernel comes from the root of corn (German Kern, plural Kerne) plus the diminutive suffix -el. Moving the l can transform fake kernel to flake Kerne.

Do recall my 2003 dream/esoteric experience I shared with you titled: 11:11. 11:11 are twins, as are all master numbers.

Although now in 2024, the 11:11 experience is pervasive on the internet that wasn't the case in 2003 as the internet (at least to the public) was in its infancy. Youtube wasn't launched until 2005, and there was next to none information about 11:11 that I could find online in 2003 after I had the 11:11 dream/experience. Marshall and I only got our computer in 1998. I DID NOT KNOW about 11:11 before the dream.

The post Debbie was commenting on was about the 2000 Britney Spears song "Lucky," which begins thus:

Early morning, she wakes up
Knock, knock, knock on the door
It's time for make-up, perfect smile

These lyrics had reminded me of Rebecca Black's 2011 anti-hit "Friday," which begins this way:

Seven a.m., waking up in the morning
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal

"But thou, son of man, hear what I say unto thee; Be not thou rebellious like that rebellious house: open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee."

And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein; and he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.

Moreover he said unto me, "Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel."

So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll.

And he said unto me, "Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness."

And he said unto me, "Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with my words unto them. For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech and of an hard language, but to the house of Israel; not to many people of a strange speech and of an hard language, whose words thou canst not understand" (Ezek. 2:8-3:6).

And thou . . . hast lifted up thyself against the Lord of heaven; . . . and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified. Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written (Dan. 5:22-24).

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire: and he had in his hand a little book open . . . .

And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, "Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth."

And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, "Give me the little book."

And he said unto me, "Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey."

And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.

And he said unto me, "Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings" (Rev. 10:1-2, 8-11).

And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live (Deut. 8:3).

The 'treasure map' takes the form of the gold ball that Jim comes into possession of. . . . Dr. Doppler refer[s] to the ball as an "odd little sphere".  When I heard that, it reminded me of Nephi's description of the Liahona-Anor Stone as a "round ball of curious workmanship".  If you look up "curious" on Etymonline, you will see "solicitous, anxious, inquisitive; odd, strange".  

I read a bit in Karen Russell's novel Swamplandia! today. The narrator, Ava Bigtree (a White girl whose family has adopted an Indian surname and dresses as Indians as part of their alligator-wrestling act) is traveling in the Everglades with an eccentric known only as the Bird Man. When they unexpectedly encounter a park ranger, the Bird Man seems to transform:

[T]he Bird Man put on a big grin that made his face unrecognizable to me. It rejiggered his features so that they were at their most ordinary; even his eyes seemed pale and normal. Who had I been traveling with this great while? How could you change so completely when another person showed up, like a chameleon shifting trees? I was impressed (pp. 252-53).

Any reference to chameleons catches my eye these days, and this was a somewhat odd one -- not "changing colors" but "shifting trees." I guess the idea is that moving to different surroundings -- shifting trees -- might prompt a chameleon to change to a different color to maintain its camouflage. But this would only make sense if the two trees were different colors. This theme of two trees with contrasting colors has come up recently. In "Fighting in ash-mud and putting out the blazing white tree," I include a picture of John Opsopaus's Star card and quote him on the significance of the two cypress trees on the card:

[T]he dark cypress (with its serpent) is the Tree of Knowledge and the white cypress (with its bird) is the Tree of Life.

The white cypress with its bird is the Tree of Life. The name Ava has various origins, but as a modern name it is generally held to be a variant of Eva, meaning "life." So Ava Bigtree is White, her name suggests the Tree of Life, and she is accompanied by the Bird Man and (though it is not mentioned in the excerpt quoted above) by her pet, a young alligator which was born bright red. On Opsopaus's card, the serpent in the dark cypress is red, and the bird has the head of a lion. In recent syncs, the chameleon has been red and has been associated with the lion-headed serpent and with lion-headed creatures with wings. (See "An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge" and "Red chameleons, manticores, and vampires.") In another recent post, "Chameleons everywhere," we see a bird and a chameleon together in a tree, on the cover of a book called Lemurs, Chameleons, and Golden Plates.

In "Leaves of gold unnumbered," the golden plates were associated with leaves of gold in two poems by Tolkien. One of these two poems was quoted again in "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose," in connection with another pair of differently-colored trees: the Two Trees (gold and silver/white) of Valinor and their scions in Gondolin. I put particular emphasis on the line in the poem which says the golden leaves "are falling in the stream, the river flows away."

In Swamplandia!, a few pages after the "chameleon shifting trees" reference, Ava Bigtree uses very similar imagery in describing how her memories of her deceased mother seem to be slipping away:

Even the few facts I did have about her last weeks tended to float away from me like shining leaves on water the more I tried to get a picture together (p. 256).

Opsopaus has a white tree and a dark one; Tolkien has a white tree and a golden one. Can this discrepancy be bridged? In my "Fighting in ash-mud" dream, I found a small fire smoldering the hollow of a tree. I stoked this fire, with the result that another tree became engulfed in white flames but was not consumed. The first burning tree could be considered both "dark" (because the fire was a small one, mostly just smoldering, with few flames) and "golden" (because such flames as it did have were the ordinary yellow-orange color of a wood fire). When the fire "shifted trees," it -- like a chameleon -- also changed color, becoming white.

So now the chameleon has been symbolically identified with fire -- an idea already latent in the existing "red chameleon" theme -- and specifically with a white fire. From this idea of a fiery lizard, it is no great jump to the idea of a salamander, and specifically a white salamander, though one also associated with "leaves of gold." I just posted, for reasons unrelated to any of these themes, "Hofmann's haiku: The Broo Jerroo." This is a haiku that seems at first to be about chameleonic gelatin ("The blue Jell-O / It is yellow"), and its author is the master forger Mark Hofmann, whose most notorious forgery is a letter in which Joseph Smith's leaves of gold are guarded not by the familiar Angel Moroni but by a folk-magicky trickster spirit in the form of a white salamander:

the next morning the spirit transfigured himself from a white salamander in the bottom of the hole & struck me 3 times & held the treasure [i.e., the golden plates] & would not let me have it . . . the spirit says I tricked you again

In "Swords of Mars, two-mouthed chameleon-cat-men, and kings' stories engraved on stones," I write parenthetically "Half man, half chameleon, and half cat -- I'm cereal," linking to the classic South Park episode in which Al Gore, in a parody of his global warming shtick, tries to raise awareness of the deadly threat that is ManBearPig -- "half man, half bear, and half pig" -- and keeps repeating "I'm cereal" instead of "I'm serious."

In my "Fighting in ash-mud" dream, literal cereal came up. I needed a blanket to put out the tree's white fire, and I thought I could get one by finding a suitable word on the side of a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Then, hours after the dream, a conspiracy channel I subscribe to on YouTube, which had never ventured into the field of breakfast cereals before, posted a video about what's written on the side of a box of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes. Flat yellow Corn Flakes are synchronistically adjacent to leaves or plates of gold. Frosted Flakes differ from Corn Flakes in that they are frosted with white sugar, so we have the gold/white duality again. The mascots of these two cereals -- a bird and a large feline -- suggest some of the animals that have come up in connection with the chameleon. The other cereal that has come up on this blog recently (see "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name") is Hidden Treasures. This is also a golden plates-adjacent name, and in my quote from Hofmann's salamander letter, the plates are referred to as "the treasure."

Lilybet Green can't imagine anyone capturing a leprechaun for anything other than their Lucky Charms, but Balthazar the Leprechaun is indignant that humans want to capture his people for their gold.