From the Narrow Desert: Dreams

Showing posts with label Dreams. Show all posts

Sunday, July 14, 2024

Neomonotonists

I dreamed that representatives of a secretive organization were going around to elementary schools and interviewing the “gifted and talented” kids, trying to identify individuals of possible interest to their group.

Part of the interview involved playing brief clips of various national anthems and noting in particular how each child reacted to “La Marseillaise.”

Children were also asked about their favorite colors and why they liked them. If a child expressed a preference for black and white, the interviewer was to say, “So you probably like zebras, right? Are you a Neomonotonist?”

The child’s reaction at this point was extremely important. Some would ask what a Neomonotonist was. Others would bluff and say yes or no as if they had understood the question. Neither was the response the interviewers were looking for.

Sunday, July 7, 2024

Lord Byron on a motorcycle

My dreams of last night ended with this brief scene: Lord Byron, dressed in the clothing of his era, with a black cape about his shoulders, was standing astride a black Yamaha crotch rocket with a long bridge ahead of him. Behind him, the late afternoon sun was shining. Before him, dark storm clouds gathered. He stood there for a few moments, gazing into the distance as if sizing up the situation. Then he started the engine, hunched forward in the seat, and sped off over the bridge and into the storm.

This afternoon, I experienced a weird sense of déjà vu when, motorcycling back home from Taichung, I came up on a long bridge and saw black clouds lowering ahead, even as the sun shone bright behind me. I had a paper bag full of books hanging from a hook in front of me and was not prepared to deal with rain, but what choice did I have? Like Byron in the dream, I went over the bridge and into the dark. The first fat drops began falling literally seconds after I arrived at my destination.

Friday, July 5, 2024

Unhenned

I dreamed about a soon-to-be-published book called Unhenned. The author, rumored to be a major literary figure writing anonymously (I imagined him looking like Philip Roth), had released photos of the cover — all red, with just the one word Unhenned on it — but refused to reveal anything else about it, not even whether it was a novel or a work of non-fiction. Rumors swirled, mostly about how misogynistic it was probably going to be.

Wednesday, July 3, 2024

Fruit grown from a ruby in a cup (with a turtle)

I had another brief vision or waking dream today, while praying the Rosary and contemplating the Descent of the Holy Ghost.

I saw a large golden goblet, and a big ruby -- about the size of a large walnut -- was put inside it. I couldn't see who was putting it there. I just saw the ruby move through the air and down into the cup, but slowly and deliberately, not as if it were falling or being thrown. My impression was that it was being placed in the cup carefully by an invisible hand.

A few seconds later, a box turtle walked up to the goblet. It stood up on its hind legs and put its forefeet on the rim of the cup, trying to peer inside. As soon as it did this, all kinds of fruit started bubbling up from the goblet until it was full almost to overflowing. There were bananas, grapes, a pineapple, and lots of other fruits whose individual identities didn't register. The whole thing reminded me of Carmen Miranda's fruit hat. It was just a lot of fruit -- no plant or tree from which it was growing -- but my impression was nevertheless that it had all grown very rapidly from the ruby, and that the turtle's attempt to look into the cup was what had triggered it.

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I have no clear interpretation of this, just a few hints at possible connections. One thing I immediately thought of was the Rider-Waite Ace of Cups card:

Here, too, we have something being put into a golden goblet. The imagery of the descending dove ties in with the context of the vision (I had been contemplating the Descent of the Holy Ghost), and of course turtle is a word that can refer either to a shelled reptile or to a dove.

I also thought of "This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L," where a gorilla seems to be about to put a bunch of grapes into the Holy Grail.

The ruby in the cup made me think of one of Debbie's dreams, where she was given a cup with a crystal in it, and the whole thing had something to do with Heaven's Gate. Since comments aren't searchable, I can't find that dream, so Debbie, I'll have to ask you to post it again. (You might consider starting your own blog so that these things are searchable.)

I also thought of William Wright's "Herbie the Hamster: A Short Story." The story is about a seed, and the ruby in my vision functions as a seed. Hamsters and box turtles play similar roles as low-maintenance pets often kept by small children, and the turtle's standing up on its hind legs to look into the cup reminded be of Herbie's efforts to get over the wall and see what is outside.

Sunday, June 30, 2024

Dreaming in black and white

On Friday night (June 28) I dreamed all night about the flag of Brittany -- mostly the modern Gwenn ha Du (Sable four bars argent, a canton ermine) but sometimes also the older Kroaz Du (Argent a cross throughout sable).

That was all there was to the dream: no plot, no characters, no role for myself, just one shot after another of these black-and-white Breton flags.

On Saturday (June 29), I started using a new textbook with a student of mine. The first page of the first unit included this illustration:

It's a black-and-white picture of the Greek flag -- literally black and white, even though the Greek flag is blue and white, and the other pictures I've included in the photo show that the illustrations use shades of gray, and that even coffee is portrayed as gray rather than black.

This version of the Greek flag obviously closely resembles the Breton flags I had been dreaming about: five black stripes, four white stripes, and a canton which is the Kroaz Du with the colors swapped.

This morning (June 30), I checked my email and found that a correspondent had sent me a photo of a moth with striking black-and-white markings:

The central black marking resembles both a cross and a heraldic ermine spot, suggesting both of the Breton flags.

Later today, I spotted this on the wall of a restaurant:

In both parts of the design, there are five black stripes, just as on the Gwenn ha Du.

Update: After lunch, I went to a used bookstore and found a book about Ireland (a Celtic nation, like Brittany) shelved next to one with a zebra on the cover.

Update 2: Forgot to include this photo, taken on the street the same day. Of course it had to be five black noodles hanging from the chopstick-flagpole:

Thursday, June 20, 2024

The Gospel of Luke on lobsterback

In Animalia, as discussed in "This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L," the Gospel of Luke appears on the back of a lobster. No, not like the Judgement Tablet on the back of a cicada! It's in ordinary book form, if a bit thicker than the Gospel of Luke as we know it, but the book is supported by a lobster.

I've already written a bit about the possible significance of the Gospel of Luke, but I didn't say anything about the lobster. It's been nagging at me, though, and I finally figured out its relevance: "The Lobster-quadrille"! The G and L post prominently featured a griffin, also shown together with something representing sacred records, and the Gryphon in Alice is the one who, with the Mock-turtle, sings "The Lobster-quadrille." (That word quadrille originally meant "one of a set of four," which has obvious relevance to the Gospel of Luke.) In the song, lobsters are thrown out to sea from England, so far that they nearly reach the northern shore of France:

You can really have no notion how delightful it will be
When they take us [the whiting and the snail] up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!
. . .
There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
The further off from England the nearer is to France --

Normandy is on the northern shore of France, and of course there were later Normans in England as well, so there is possible relevance to Minbad the Mailer. Besides being written correspondence, mail is also a kind of armor, and Normandy and Brittany belong to what was once known as Armorica -- so perhaps the Norman Mailer is sending "mail" (in the form of sacred writings) back to his homeland of Armorica. What was once just called mail is nowadays known as snail mail, and "The Lobster-quadrille" makes it clear that the lobsters being thrown toward France are accompanied by snails.

Where was I reading about Armorica recently? Oh, right, Rimbaud's A Season in Hell:

Hélas, l’Evangile a passé! l’Evangile! l’Evangile. J’attends Dieu avec gourmandise. Je suis de race inférieure de toute éternité. Me voici sur la plage armoricaine.

Alas! The Gospel has gone by! The Gospel! The Gospel. Greedily I await God. I am of an inferior race for all eternity. Here I am on the Breton shore.

Louise Varèse has "the Breton shore" in her translation, but the original French is clearly referring more generally to Armorica as a whole. That geographical reference was all I had remembered as possibly relevant, but when I looked it up I saw that it is juxtaposed with "The Gospel" repeated three times. The third Gospel is, of course, that of Luke.

So we have Rinbad (Rimbaud-Tolkien) waiting on the Armorican shore for the Gospel of Light to be sent over from Britain on lobsterback by Minbad the Norman Mailer. Lobsterback is 18th-century slang for a British soldier, so perhaps it is soldiers who travel from Britain with the Gospel. Or perhaps I should say from "Britain," in scare-quotes, as labels do not always mean what they seem. When I dream, I dream about books -- and one of the books I've dreamed about, back in 2020, was titled Britain as Another Planet. In "How can these books not exist?" I describe looking at some books inside a dome-shaped indigo building (supposedly a "convenience store") called Blue Harbor:

One of these was a "round book" -- that is, its pages were circular rather than rectangular -- and I wanted to look through it but couldn't because it was shrink-wrapped. The others were ordinary books and didn't look very new. I perused the spines and noticed these three titles:

Things Soon to Come
Britain as Another Planet
I Tried to Be Parents

Rereading that now, I was struck by the "round book," since a recent dream has featured Plates (sacred records) in the form of a round disc.And "I wanted to look through it but couldn't because it was shrink-wrapped" -- what is that but another way of saying, "I cannot read a sealed book"?

This idea that a "round book" of plates has something to do with the "Gospel of Luke" received minor but interesting synchronistic confirmation today. I was, for complex psychological reasons, praying the Rosary while lying supine on a tile floor. On Thursdays, one prays the Luminous Mysteries, or Mysteries of Light (Luke means "light"), and as I was doing the third of these five meditations (Luke is the third Gospel), a single copper coin fell out of my pocket and onto the floor -- a little metal disc.

Thursday, June 13, 2024

A Sasquatch-eating party every week

In the hypnopompic state this morning, I heard a brief exchange between two male voices that spoke with an accent which, while slight, made me think they might be from Texas or thereabouts.

"He holds a Sasquatch-eating party every week."

"Every week?"

"Every week."

"That's a lot of Sasquatch, my man."

This little dialogue was striking enough that I jotted it down immediately after waking. Eating Sasquatch is such a bizarre idea; they are generally portrayed as more hominid than animal, so that it would almost verge on cannibalism. I wondered if maybe they meant squash, and sasquatch was some dialect variant or a reference to unusually large squash or something.

Plates among the dead leaves

On the night of August 26, 2023, as documented in "Phoenix syncs," I dreamed that I was with my brother (I'm not sure which brother it was) in "a long-abandoned building where everything was covered with dead leaves," and that we were searching the place, "trying to find 'plates' -- meaning further records like the Golden Plates from which the Book of Mormon was produced."

On Holy Saturday night, March 30, 2024, as recorded in "Chips, clips, and the eclipse," I dreamed that I was again in "an indoor area full of dead leaves" on Annunciation Day and that I found there "a flat disc some 10 inches in diameter . . . made of some light-colored metal (color perception in this dream was poor) and . . . covered with engravings."

At the time of the dreams, I connected this place full of dead leaves with the abandoned restaurant I began exploring in July 2022 ("Owl time and cold noodles"), since that was the only such place I knew in waking life. In neither case did I say the place was that restaurant, though, only that it suggested or resembled it. Nevertheless, the dreams did leave me with a vague sense that I should keep going back to the restaurant and that I might find something of value there. Since January 22 of this year, the restaurant has been locked up ("The Green Door finally closes"), and I haven't been back inside. Such is the influence of the dreams, though, that I keep having a nagging feeling that I should go back in, even if it means picking the lock or climbing the wall.

I've been there many times, though, and explored it pretty thoroughly. The only "plates" there are ceramic and melamine dishware, and the only "discs" are some scratched-up CDs of run-of-the-mill pop music and for some reason a lot of blank CDs as well. (I brought them home and confirmed that they're all blank.) The chance of finding anything new there -- let alone some kind of ancient engravings -- is obviously exceedingly remote.

When I acquired some new Tarot cards this past May 30, I received a strong impression from Claire that I needed to get an "ark" -- her word -- to keep them in. (Readers may have noticed a passing reference to this in "More on Joan and Claire.") I know some Tarotists are finicky about where they store their cards -- they have to be wrapped in back silk or whatever -- but I've never really cared about that and generally just keep them in the box they came in. With this deck, though, Claire insisted on an "ark" and flashed me a helpful illustration, somewhat reminiscent of IKEA-style assembly instructions, showing how the cards should be placed on a bed of dried rosemary leaves in a small stone box with a lid. (This was before Simon and Garfunkel had entered the chat; now I wonder if I should add some parsley, sage, and thyme!) When I wondered where on earth I was going to get a stone box of the appropriate size, my first thought, however ridiculous, was to look for one in the abandoned restaurant! In the end I settled on a stainless steel "ark" instead (paper and plastic were definitely out of the question, and I couldn't find anything suitable in ceramic), on the understanding that this was only a temporary home for the cards until I could get something in stone.

Not until I started writing this post did it occur to me that I now had, symbolically, some "plates" in a "room" full of dead leaves.

The Golden Plates used by Joseph Smith were found in a stone box, which Don Bradley and others have compared to the Ark of the Covenant -- instead of Moses' stone scripture in a gold box, gold scripture in a stone box.

Today it finally clicked that maybe the "dead leaves" in my dreams have nothing to do with the restaurant but may be yet another "plates" reference. "Leaves of gold" -- both tree leaves and leaves of a book -- have been very much in the sync-stream recently. This started with my January 4 post "Leaves of gold unnumbered," in which golden tree-leaves in two different Tolkien poems were connected with the leaves of the Golden Plates. In the second of these poems, "Namárië," the golden leaves are also dead leaves, falling from the trees in autumn. I also included this imagery of "gold" autumnal leaves in my May 15 poem "Humpty Dumpty revisited"; this was just some whimsical punning on Humpty's "great fall," with no conscious reference to my earlier "leaves of gold" post. Then on June 10, as recorded the next day in "Feuilles-oh, sauvez la vie moi," I tried to translate a passage from Rimbaud for myself because I was unhappy with Louise Varèse's failure to translate feuilles d'or literally as leaves of gold. Rimbaud's "leaves" are closer to the Golden Plates, something to write on. Then that very night, I happened to read in Richard Cavendish's The Tarot about Etteilla's claim that the original Book of Thoth had been written "on leaves of gold" near Memphis. William Wright picked up on this theme in "The Brass Leafy Plates and all roads lead to France," proposing that my "leaves of gold" syncs have to do with the Brass Plates and that these are currently in France. (If anyone wants to follow up that lead, the first place I'd look is behind the altar in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse; let me know if you find anything.) He also brings up the idea of an "ark" (and connects it with Joan of Arc, which I had somehow failed to do!), though for him it is the plates themselves that constitute the ark.

The place to which all roads proverbially lead is of course not France but Rome, and that makes me think of Book VI of the Aeneid. There our hero visits the cave of the Cumaean Sybil, a prophetess whose usual practice is to write the word of bright Phoebus on literal leaves -- oak leaves -- and leave them at the mouth of her cave, where they soon blow away in the wind. Aeneas specifically asks her not to do this with the oracle he has requested: "Only do not write your verses on the leaves, lest they fly, disordered playthings of the rushing winds: chant them from your own mouth." The seeress obliges -- and goes on to speak of leaves of gold!

Hidden in a dark tree is a golden bough, golden in leaves and pliant stem, sacred to Persephone, the underworld’s Juno, all the groves shroud it, and shadows enclose the secret valleys. But only one who’s taken a gold-leaved fruit from the tree is allowed to enter earth’s hidden places.

Aeneas finds this fabled golden bough hidden among the leaves of an otherwise ordinary oak tree:

Just as mistletoe, that does not form a tree of its own, grows in the woods in the cold of winter, with a foreign leaf, and surrounds a smooth trunk with yellow berries: such was the vision of this leafy gold in the dark oak-tree, so the foil tinkled in the light breeze.

(I'm away from my study at the moment and don't have access to any of my preferred translations of Virgil. The above are A. S. Kline's, taken from this site.)

With this context -- and the Aeneid, which I have read more times and in more translations than any other book outside the Bible, is very much a part of the furniture of my subconscious, likely to influence my dreams -- the dream image of golden plates hidden in an enclosed space full of dead leaves takes on another possible meaning. It's as if some devotee of far-darting Phoebus, anxious that nothing be lost, had assiduously gathered as many of the wind-scattered leaves as could be recovered and shut them up in a room lest they blow away again. Alas, leaves are but leaves, and it is not the wind that keeps them from lasting forever. They may be bright when they fall from the oak, but nothing gold can stay. Hidden among those brittle husks of desiccated prophecy, though, may be found, like mistletoe in the shadows, a few leaves from the genuine Golden Bough, enabling passage to other worlds. These at least are not ephemeral: "these plates of brass should never perish; neither should they be dimmed any more by time."

So maybe the Sybil's way of doing things was right all along: Let blow away whatever can blow away; true gold will remain.

Working out what that means is going to take some time, but at least it's nice to have found a different interpretive angle and to get away from the stupid literalness of focusing on that restaurant!

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One little postscript: In "What shall we do with the drunken Railer?" I mention the very unsatisfactory nature of the French translation of the Sinbad bit in Ulysses, where Joyce's tailor and jailer and whaler become the meaningless tarin and jarin and wharin. Couldn't they have found some actual French words that rhyme with marin as the English words rhyme with sailor? Well, I've been on a DIY translation kick recently, so if no one else is going to do it . . . .

I found a French rhyming dictionary online and looked up words that rhyme with marin. Pretty slim pickings, it turns out:

Pinbad le Parrain, the godfather? Not too many other possibilities here. But the very first result, after marin itself, is romarin. I looked it up, and it's the French word for rosemary, the herb. Weird coincidence.

Tuesday, June 4, 2024

Tim, Claire, Diego

In his May 30 post "'Naming' Joan (and 'Beware this one!')," William Wright brought up Tim and Claire Delune, two beings I encountered in dreams some months back -- Tim on the night of November 6-7, and Claire on the afternoon of January 5. Then in yesterday's "Eowyn-Eve dwelling in Everlasting Burnings," he revisited another of my old dreams, from March 5, with a character named Diego. In the post, he connected Diego with Israel and with Tol Eressëa:

When I read the dream, I understood Diego to be synonymous with Israel. Diego is the Spanish equivalent to Jacob, who was renamed Israel. . . . Who fought against Israel? In my story, Pharazon and the Numenorean's attack on Eressea was an attack on Israel given that many of Finwe's House resided on that island.

Today I had a meeting with the owner of another school. One of his teachers is taking a long vacation, and he had hoped I would be able to help him arrange a substitute. The owner is someone I had only met once before, some seven years ago, so I asked why he had thought to contact me.

"Tim suggested I give you a call," he said. I know Tim. He's a sales rep for a bookstore chain, and I often order textbooks through him. Then he added, "Actually, I don't see Tim all that often these days. He's really busy, so I mostly contact him through his assistant, Claire."

I did not know Claire.

"I don't think I've met Claire," I said. "I always work with Tim and Miss Chen."

"Yes, yes, Miss Chen. Didn't you know? Her English name is Claire."

This is a Taiwanese person I was talking to. His English is extremely limited, and our whole conversation was in Chinese except for the names Tim and Claire. I've been doing business with Tim's assistant for five or six years now and never knew her by any other name than Miss Chen. The guy who doesn't speak English, though, knows her as Claire. Weird.

Later in the conversation, I asked for some information about his school's curriculum, and he said, "I'll arrange for you to meet with Diego, and he can explain it. Diego's one of our teachers. He's from Guatemala."

Curiouser and curiouser. I suppose it goes without saying that Taiwan is not blessed with an overabundance of people named Diego. And from Guatemala, too! Remember that William has connected the Diego in my dream with "Israelites" living on Eressëa. As it happens, Guatemala has come up exactly once on William's blog. In the May 20 post "Conferences in the Sawtooth Mountains," he discusses a movie about the Book of Mormon which "portrayed the events happening in the jungles of Guatemala or something... not, as we now know, on Eressea."

Looking up my Diego dream now, I find that it also features the surname Chen. Running into that name isn't that much of a coincidence -- one in every nine Taiwanese people is a Chen -- but it still counts for something.

Monday, May 27, 2024

Hey birds, here are cookies!

Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad stories came up in my attempt to describe my recurring dream of break-dancing frogs. Our parents read us those stories countless times when we were kids, and one line from them became a family catchphrase. In Frog and Toad Together, Frog and Toad bake some cookies that are so delicious that they lack the will power to stop eating them. They try various ways of forcing themselves to stop, such as putting the cookies high up out of their reach, but nothing works. In the end, Frog takes the cookies outside and shouts, "Hey birds, here are cookies!" Birds come and eat up all the cookies, and Frog comments that now that the temptation is gone, he and Toad "have lots and lots of will power."

That's really the only Frog and Toad story I have any clear memory of. To me, Frog and Toad are synonymous with "Hey birds, here are cookies!"

In a comment, William Wright connects my break-dancing frogs with Gregor the Stymph (skeletal bird-monster) and Odessa "Sally" Grigorievna the vulture. Both are humans who have been transformed into animals. Gregor is a prince who doesn't want to be called a prince, and Odessa Grigorievna resists being called Sally, which means "princess." The usual animal for princes to be transformed into is of course the frog. (My 2021 post "The Emperor's orb" begins with birds of prey and ends with the Frog Prince.) I think the stereotypically "Russian" garb of my break-dancing frogs (black and white Adidas tracksuits) also suggests a connection with this vulture who is actually a Russian woman.

The Odessa Grigorievna dream begins with my seeing "in the distance some kind of large carcass with carrion birds flocking around it." That, combined with the Frog and Toad story, made me think of this passage from the Book of Revelation:

And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great (Rev. 19:17-18).

Notice how close Arnold Lobel comes to the biblical language of "cried with a loud voice":

He shouted in a loud voice, "HEY BIRDS, HERE ARE COOKIES!"

Birds came from everywhere.

The main difference of course is that Frog and Toad's birds eat baked goods, while John's eat human flesh. However, there is biblical precedent for equating the two:

When the chief baker saw that the interpretation was good, he said unto Joseph, I also was in my dream, and, behold, I had three white baskets on my head: And in the uppermost basket there was of all manner of bakemeats for Pharaoh; and the birds did eat them out of the basket upon my head.

And Joseph answered and said, This is the interpretation thereof: The three baskets are three days: Yet within three days shall Pharaoh lift up thy head from off thee, and shall hang thee on a tree; and the birds shall eat thy flesh from off thee (Gen. 40:17-19).

I know that's kind of a dark direction to go with something as charming as Frog and Toad, but it does seem to be what the sync fairies have in mind.

It has not escaped my notice that both cookie and cake (Toad plans to bake a cake after the cookies are gone) suggest the Egyptian frog-god Kek, who is also called Kekui. Kek has been explicitly connected with cake in memes -- e.g. forty keks and topkek. Topkek is particularly interesting, since Pharaoh's baker specifies that his cakes were "in the uppermost basket."

Break-dancing frogs

Twice in a row now, my dreams have featured a segment where a voice delivers a message while I watch a pair of cartoon frogs break-dancing. These aren't Pepe-type frogs. They look more like the characters from Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad stories, except that they are wearing sunglasses and black Adidas tracksuits of the type one associates with Russian gopniks.

I have zero recollection of the spoken message, only of the break-dancing frogs themselves. I log it here just because I've dreamed it twice now, and it's so bizarre.

Note added: I generally avoid using AI image generators these days, but I'll make an exception for this. Stable Diffusion gets tolerably close to what I saw:

Thursday, May 9, 2024

The Menelmacar mudra; the hot bee of Fatima; and spiritual experiences on Monday, July 22

Last night, while in the hypnagogic state (i.e. in the process of falling asleep), I heard a woman's voice repeating "Pika thlein, pika thlein" -- which I recognized as the Elvish words so similar in sound and meaning to Prika-Vlein, the name of the Little Skinny Planet. (See "Prika-vlein . . . is Elvish?")

I was close enough to the dreaming state to experience auditory hallucinations like that but still sufficiently awake for a conscious and somewhat coherent train of thought. I thought about how a commenter on the Prika-vlein post had suggested that a word like pika just naturally sounds like it should mean something small, citing the metric prefix pico- (one-trillionth). Yes, I thought, but nano- doesn't sound phonaesthetically small. I remembered that as a child, before I knew the scientific meaning of nano-, I had invented an imaginary creature called a nanosnake. This was a dinosaur-scale beast with the general body shape of a very long-necked plesiosaur, but with no flippers or other limbs. It had a beak like a parrot and a pair of small wings on the back of its head, which it used to keep its head held high for long periods without its neck tiring.

At this point I lapsed into a full dreaming state, and my reminiscences about the nanosnake gave way to the sudden panicked thought that perhaps I had accidentally swallowed a nanosnake -- meaning, this time, a microscopically small snake. This felt like an extremely urgent problem, and I was panicking, unable to think clearly. An immaterial woman was nearby, trying to help me by shouting advice. "Mudra! Mudra! Mudra!" she kept saying, the way you might say, "Stop, drop, and roll" to someone who was on fire.

She was telling me to do a mudra -- one of a number of named hand gestures that carry symbolic meaning in Buddhism and Hinduism -- but that just made me panic even more. There are lots of different mudras, and my knowledge of them is pretty much limited to what little I can still remember from that Central Asian Art class I took back in college to meet a diversity requirement. I had no idea which one I was supposed to do. I tentatively raised my right hand in a half-assed "fear not" abhaya mudra. Nataraja (dancing Shiva) makes that mudra with the arm that has a snake wrapped around it, which I guess is what made me think it might be relevant to my "nanosnake" problem. I still had no idea if it was what I was supposed to be doing, though.

Apparently not, as the ghostly woman kept right on shouting, "Mudra! Mudra! Mudra!" Finally, as if in exasperation at my thick-headedness, she spelled it out: "Menelmacar mudra!"

As soon as she had said that, I woke up.

Menelmacar, I know thanks to recent posts by William Wright, is one of the Elvish names for the constellation Orion. (The only Elvish name for Orion I had known previously was Telumehtar.) A few days ago he posted "Orion and his most excellent pose," about the position of Orion's arms -- a mudra in a broad sense -- and how the same gesture appears in a Lionel Richie music video and in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

So this is the Menelmacar mudra, I guess. Remember it in case you ever accidentally swallow a nanosnake.

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One of the reasons my half-awake mind had jumped from pico- to nano- was that shortly before going to bed, I had listened to the They Might Be Giants song "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat," which is from the album Nanobots.

The song is full of off-the-wall metaphors for inversions of the usual order of things: "The words assassinated the book / The kitchen cooked and ate the cook," etc. This reminded me of William Wright's first post to feature the Menelmacar mudra, "Dancing on the ceiling," in which he quotes a Book of Mormon variant of Isaiah:

And wo unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord! And their works are in the dark; and they say: Who seeth us, and who knoweth us? And they also say: Surely, your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay. But behold, I will show unto them, saith the Lord of Hosts, that I know all their works. For shall the work say of him that made it, he made me not? Or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, he had no understanding? (2 Ne. 27:27)

Here's the biblical version, modified from the King James Version to correct what is universally considered today to have been a translation error:

Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? Surely you turn things upside down! Shall the potter be esteemed as the clay? or shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding? (Isa. 29:15-16)

The difference is quite significant: In the biblical version of Isaiah, it is the workers in darkness who are accused of turning things upside down. In Nephi's version, they accuse the Lord of doing so. The accusation of turning things upside down is itself turned upside down!

Two lines from "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat" in particular caught my imagination:

The bark now commands the trees
The queen is overruled by the bees

I had just been reading in John Keel's Operation Trojan Horse about the Fatima apparitions of 1917:

One of the witnesses, a woman named Maria Carreira, testified that she saw nothing when the children suddenly knelt and began talking to an unseen entity, but she did hear a peculiar sound -- like the buzzing of a bee.

The children understood their mysterious visitor, who finally identified herself somewhat cagily as "the Lady of the Rosary," to be the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven. In Maria Carreira's perception, though, the Queen was overruled by the bees. This association of bees with the Queen of Heaven made me think of the Sugarcubes song "The Bee":

The key lines are these:

Oh, hot bee
Queen of heaven
With glossy trunk
Buzz to me

I don't know what "glossy trunk" was intended to mean -- I guess a bee's thorax is its "trunk," or torso? -- but it sounds more like a description of a tree than of a bee. Specifically, it would be a reference to the texture or appearance of a tree's bark, so that's another tie-in with "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat."

The odd phrase "Oh, hot bee" is another link to the bee-buzzing Lady of Fatima. In the grand culminating apparition on October 13, 1917, Keel reports that "A wave of heat swept over the crowd, drying their rain-soaked clothes instantly."

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I had started reading this Fatima stuff last night, after reading William's post "Twos-day: San Ramon, another Walt, and flying into the Sun." In that post, he mentions seeing the date 02/22 and realizing that the number 22 (which had been appearing in syncs) could be a date, and that his own birthday was such as date: July 22. I left a comment saying that in the past I had thought of Monday the 22nd as a day of good omen, the reverse of Friday the 13th, and that my first spiritual experience had taken place on Monday, July 22, 1996.

It was just after reading that post and leaving the comment that I picked up Operation Trojan Horse and read this, in the lead-up to the account of the Fatima events:

One of the girls was named Lucia Abobora. She was born on March 22, 1907, and she was to become one of the central figures in the earthshaking drama to follow.

There is no apparent reason for giving this girl's exact date of birth. In a book that mentions hundreds of different individuals, a word search for the word born confirms that no other person's exact date of birth is given. For some reason, Keel made a point of mentioning that Lucia Abobora, later of Fatima fame, was born on the 22nd.

This morning, reading on in Keel, I found a much more specific sync. Recall that in my comment on William's blog I had mentioned one particular date: Monday, July 22, 1996, and gave it as the date of a spiritual experience. The year 1996 was a leap year beginning on a Monday; these occur every 28 years. The last one before 1996 was 1968. The next one after 1996 is the present year, 2024. Today I read this in Keel:

Six young Canadian girls, ranging from seven to thirteen years old, allegedly saw the Virgin Mary on the evening of Monday, July 22, 1968.

That's Monday, July 22, in year with a calendar identical to that of 1996 (and 2024). And seeing the Blessed Virgin obviously qualifies as a spiritual experience.

Friday, May 3, 2024

Hometo Omleto

That's the Esperanto name for Humpty Dumpty. Some of you may have read in Martin Gardner that it's Homito Omleto and means "Little-Man Egg" -- which spoils the rhyme, incorrectly uses the passive past participle affix as a diminutive, and somehow misses the very obvious fact that omleto means "omelette," not "egg." (I guess an especially big omelette would be an omlo.) So the next time you hear someone casually mention Humpty's non-existent brother Homito, I hope you set them straight. We must each do our part to stop the spread of violent misinformation about what Humpty Dumpty is called in Esperanto.

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Thinking about my recent griffin syncs led me to Lewis Carroll. I remembered that a Gryphon (the same spelling used in The Tinleys) featured in Alice but couldn't remember the context. Looking it up, I found that he appears together with the Mock Turtle, with whom he demonstrates the Lobster Quadrille song and dance.

The verse at the bottom of the page caught my eye because I posted it back in 2022, in "Snail on shingles." I've referenced that old posts a couple of times recently in connection with the translation of the Book of Mormon. (See for example last month's "The snail on the roof, the Lincoln Memorial, and the translation of the Book of Mormon.")

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Shortly after looking up the Gryphon in Alice, I checked William Wright's blog and found that his latest post was about Lewis Carroll: "Humpty Dumpty and the Fall of Pharazon," which has since been followed up with an other Humpty post, "Urkel, Alice, Humpty, and Physiognomy." (And yes, I'm the unnamed emailer who introduced him to the word physiognomy. Singing "Physiognomy -- I Am Doing It," adapted from a Mormon children's song about genealogy, used to be a running joke in my circle of friends.)

"Humpty Dumpty" was originally a riddle, the answer being "an egg," but it's a pretty bad riddle. I mean, why did he sit on a wall? Do eggs sit on walls? How would an egg come to be in such a precarious position in the first place? It has a certain amount in common with another well-known pseudo-riddle: "If a rooster lays an egg on the top of a barn roof, which way does the egg roll?"

William's post dealt rather extensively with the subject of Humpty Dumpty's belt (or cravat, as the case may be). This made me think of a dad-joke (I literally heard it from my dad), which I left in a comment:

What did zero say to eight?

Nice belt.

William left a reply to the effect that in Through the Looking Glass it is actually "eight" (Alice, in her eighth year) who compliments "zero" (the zero-shaped Humpty) on his belt.

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Another thing I've been thinking about these days is the three gods who are trapped inside Donchatryan Peak by the griffin in The Tinleys: Zlalop the wind god, Dinderblob the sea god, and Luppadornus Glamgornigus Simbosh the god of herpetology. Herpetology is about reptiles and amphibians, which made me think Luppadornus might have something to do with Kek, the ancient Egyptian frog god whose cult enjoyed an unexpected revival in 2016.

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Just after reading William's first Humpty post and thinking about an egg sitting precariously on the edge of a wall, ready to fall, I picked up a book I have been reading, John Keel's 1970 UFO classic Operation Trojan Horse. The very first paragraphs I read were these two:

Like the prophet Daniel, and Joseph Smith of the Mormons, Senhor Aguiar passed out. The next thing he knew, he was slumped over his motorcycle, and the UFO was gone. But clutched in his hand was a piece of paper bearing a message in his own handwriting: "Put an absolute stop to all atomic tests for warlike purposes," the message warned. "The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene."

"The balance of the universe . . ." It's a very odd coincidence how this same phrase turns up over and over again in the stories of these "kooks and crackpots."

It was actually that word crackpot that made me think of Humpty Dumpty falling and cracking. With that image in mind, "The balance of the universe is threatened" took on a different meaning. I imagined the universe as an egg, precariously balanced atop a wall, ready to fall if that balance is threatened.

The universe as an egg -- isn't that an Orphic symbol? The Cosmic Egg? I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it is a very widespread symbol, not distinctively Orphic. This summary of the Egyptian version got my attention:

The cosmic egg myth can be found from Hermopolitus [sic]. Although the site, located in Middle Egypt, currently sports a name deriving from the name of the god Hermes, the ancient Egyptians called it Khemnu, or "Eight-Town." The number eight, in turn, refers to the Ogdoad, a group of eight gods who are the main characters in the Hermopolitan creation myth. Four of these gods are male, and have the heads of frogs, and the other four are female with the heads of serpents. These eight existed in the primordial, chaotic water that pre-existed the rest of creation. At some point these eight gods, in one way or another, bring about the formation of a cosmic egg, although variants of the myth describe the origins of the egg in different ways. In any case, the egg in turn gives rise to the deity who forms the rest of the world as well as the first land to arise out of the primordial waters, called the primeval mound.

So the Cosmic Egg is associated with the number eight, as in the dad-joke. The eight gods have the heads of frogs and serpents -- herpetology -- and one of the four frog-headed ones is, you guessed it, Kek. Furthermore, the Egg leads to the creation of "the primeval mound," which rises "out of the primordial waters." This sounds like the griffin's mountain in The Tinleys, which is an island.

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After writing the above, I returned to Operation Trojan Horse -- still in the chapter titled "You Are Endangering the Balance of the Universe!" -- and read this:

Later that very night another farmer, John Trasco of Everittstown, New Jersey, reportedly went outside to feed his dog, King, when he saw a brightly glowing egg-shaped object hovering above the ground near his barn. A weird "little man" stepped timidly toward him, he said. He was about 3.5 feet tall, had a putty-colored face with large bulging froglike eyes, and was dressed in green coveralls.

"We are a peaceful people," Trasco quoted the little man as saying in a high "scary" voice. "We don't want no trouble. We just want your dog."

A "little man" in an "egg-shaped" craft syncs with Martin Gardner's "Little-Man Egg." The object hovers near a barn, which syncs with the rooster riddle I mentioned. The man has "froglike eyes," like Kek. (Note, shadilay means "spaceship.") He speaks in double-negatives ("We don't want no trouble"), like the Gryphon in Alice ("they never executes nobody," "he hasn't got no sorrow"). Finally, there's a dog named King. Little-Man Egg doesn't want "King's man," the farmer, nor is he interested in horses or other livestock; he only wants King himself.

Most Mormons will have heard at one point or another Vaughn J. Featherstone's theological reading of "Humpty Dumpty," from a 1995 sermon:

There is a verse that all of you have heard:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

But the King could, and the King can, and the King will if we will but come unto him.

The "King" here is obviously God -- and dog is a well-established cipher for God, as in "God and dog at the Panama Canal."

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Did you notice the passing reference to Joseph Smith in the first John Keel quote above? The dream that started this whole griffin thing was paired with a dream about Joseph Smith. (See "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask.") In this latter dream, Smith had hidden a treasure in the basement of his house, but no one else knew about it. Since griffins are also traditionally guardians of treasure, specifically of gold, it seems likely that the two dreams are to be interpreted together.

"Humpty Dumpty" began as a riddle to which the answer is "an egg." Another such riddle has appeared on this blog recently, in "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet" and "What's a soft-boiled egg? I'm cereal." The riddle, from The Hobbit, is:

A box without hinges, key, or lid,
Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

In the story related by Keel, a Brazilian man (whom Keel compares to Joseph Smith) receives the message, "The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene." In my 2021 post "Notice: A ~~new~~ FAKE Mormon prophet in Brazil," I discuss a Brazilian man who claims to be the new Joseph Smith, and one of the evidences I give against his claims is his use of the word vigilantes to refer (in a supposedly revealed English translation) to the Watcher angels from the Book of Enoch. These Watchers have come up in connection with my dreams, in "Tin soldiers and griffins," because they are called Grigori in the Slavonic Book of Enoch, and the griffon vulture in my dream is hiding the fact that she is the "daughter of Grigori."

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In "Armored vultures and Cherubim," I note the possible etymological link between griffin and cherubim and point out that "Just as a griffin's role is typically to protect treasure, the biblical Cherubim protect the Tree of Life." The egg may symbolize hidden treasure, and this treasure may be the Tree of Life.

Jumping back to the discussion of Hometo Omleto with which I opened this post, I mentioned parenthetically that perhaps a very large omelette would be called omlo in Esperanto. Just as hometo is from homo, "man," with the diminutive affix -et-, so omleto could be (incorrectly) analyzed as the diminutive of the non-existent word *omlo.

Having acquired the habit from William Wright, I decided to check in omlo meant anything in Elvish. The best fit is the Gnomish word omlos, meaning "chestnut tree." Chestnut tree! Keep in mind that egg = treasure = Tree of Life. In Joseph Smith Senior's 1811 dream of the Tree of Life (which closely parallels the visions of Lehi and Nephi), he describes the tree thus:

It was exceedingly handsome, insomuch that I looked upon it with wonder and admiration. Its beautiful branches spread themselves somewhat like an umbrella, and it bore a kind of fruit, in shape much like a chestnut bur, and as white as snow, or, if possible whiter. I gazed upon the same with considerable interest, and as I was doing so the burs or shells commenced opening and shedding their particles, or the fruit which they contained, which was of dazzling whiteness. I drew near and began to eat of it, and I found it delicious beyond description.

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What a tangled web of syncs! Even writing about it in a linear fashion has been a challenge. Making any coherent sense out of it is going to take some time.

Monday, April 29, 2024

Tin soliders and griffins

Yesterday's post, "The Tinleys and the small key of David," featured the name T(h)inley in two different contexts. First, there's Thinley Norbu, author of The Small Golden Key to the Treasure of the Various Essential Necessities of General and Extraordinary Buddhist Dharma -- the key word for the purposes of this post being treasure. In the opening pages, Norbu mentions that the Buddha first taught Prajnaparamita "at Vulture's Peak" in northern India. The most common vulture in that part of the world would be the Himalayan griffon vulture.

Second, there are the two main characters of The Tinleys, an unfinished story I wrote as a child about two knights who are both named Tinley and who are ordered by the king to kill the griffin that lives "at the top of Donchatryan Peak, . . . the biggest, steepest, most dangerous mountain around." There is no mention of treasure in the story -- the griffin is targeted because it has been preying on cattle -- but guarding treasure is the classical role of griffins in mythology.

Today I put on some music to listen to while doing paperwork, letting the YouTube Music algorithm choose the songs. One of the songs it served up was "One Tin Soldier" (1969) by Coven, which I'd never heard before. Two tin soldiers would have been a better sync with The Tinleys, but it's still a bit of a sync. The lyrics begin thus:

Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago
About a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley folk below
On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath a stone
And the valley people swore
They'd have it for their very own

The valley people kill the mountain people to get the buried treasure, which turns out to be an inscription reading "Peace on earth." The song ends with "On the bloody morning after / One tin soldier rides away." Since all the mountain people were killed, the tin soldier must be one of the valley people who assaulted the mountain -- like the Tinleys in the story.

Yesterday's other post, "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask," also featured both a griffon vulture and a buried treasure. In the second of the two dreams it recounts, Joseph Smith (or someone claiming to be Joseph Smith) is trying to sneak into the basement of his own house, where unbeknownst to anyone else, he has hidden " a massive treasure." The only treasure unearthed by the real Joseph Smith was the golden plates -- which, like the treasure in "One Tin Soldier," were buried under a stone on a hill and consisted of written material.

The vulture's name, Odessa Grigorievna ("daughter of Grigory"), suggests the Grigori, the name given to the rebellious Watcher angels in the Slavonic Book of Enoch. After the Watchers are overthrown, they are imprisoned underground. Near the end of the Tinleys fragment, we find similar imagery. On the island where Donchatryan Peak is located, the knights find that things people say on the island sometimes cause bizarre miraculous events to occur, and it is revealed to the reader that this is caused by spirits that are imprisoned inside the mountain -- not Watchers but "listeners":

Meanwhile the gods and spirits of the island sat inside their mountain prison, listening. Centuries ago, the evil Griffon King had trapped them there. They wanted to know what had happened to their island, so they listened to what the islanders said and tried to make sense of it. Through their supernatural powers, what they believed to be true became reality.

So the griffin, which appears at the beginning of the story to be nothing but a troublesome predatory animal, turns out to be an ancient godlike being powerful enough to imprison major deities. (Among those shut up in the mountain are the wind god, the sea god, and the god of reptiles.) I guess who is "evil" in this story is a matter of whose side you're on. Certainly in the Enoch literature it is the Grigori who are portrayed as evil, not the one who imprisons them.

In the Joseph Smith dream, the "Joseph Smith" who wants to sneak into the house to get the treasure appears to be an impostor. ("You don't look like him," says Martin Harris, who knew the Prophet personally.) Odessa Grigorievna -- who appears first as a griffon vulture and then as a Russian woman -- may also be an impostor. She is not a real "griffin" but has assumed that form as a disguise, as evidenced by the fact that she is apparently unable to fly even in vulture form. She first claims to have no name, since a vulture wouldn't have a name, but then lets slip that her name is "Odessa someone's-daughter." She keeps her patronymic, Grigorievna, secret because it is what reveals her true nature.

Sunday, April 28, 2024

A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask

I had two strange, rather detailed dreams last night, which I document here in case they should turn out to be significant:

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I dreamed that I was with a "friend," a man, whose identity was not clearly defined. We were outside and saw in the distance some kind of large carcass with carrion birds flocking around it. My friend pointed out one unusual-looking corvid, which I identified as a pied crow, an African species.

My friend wanted to get a closer look at the birds. As we got closer, it became clear that one of them was a vulture, a really enormous vulture, bigger than a man. Was it a condor, I wondered? Was it Garuda? But no, it was unmistakably an African white-backed vulture, only many times larger.

We got too close to the vulture, and it chased us for some time, on foot for some reason. Eventually, though, its aggression dissipated, and we began to think of it as our friend.

"Do you have a name?" I asked.

"No," the vulture replied telepathically. "I don't have a name."

"We usually use names here," I said. "Do you mind if we call you Sally? Wait, first are you a boy or a girl?"

"A girl," she said, and now she looked like a middle-aged Russian woman, not a vulture. She didn't want to be called Sally, though, as it was an embarrassing reminder that she had been a vulture when we found her. She explained this by telepathically conveying an image of a skull with several teeth missing. I figured that among scavengers "bald-headed Sally" (from the Little Richard song) was slang for a carcass that had been picked clean. (Why I thought of this, rather than of the obvious fact that vultures are themselves bald-headed, beats me.)

If not Sally, what should we call her? Any random female name, I guess, like Odessa or something.

Before I could say anything, she said, "Actually, my real name is Odessa someone's-daughter."

I told her I had just been thinking of Odessa as a random name we could give her and what an astonishing coincidence that was. (Somehow I didn't make the connection that she was telepathic.) She was being cagey about her patronymic, but I was sure I could guess that, too: She was Odessa Grigorievna.

I didn't tell her I knew her patronymic.

"Okay," I said. "We'll just call you Odessa. That's good because it sounds like Odyssey, and we can tell people that we call you that because we met at the -- uh, the Achilles, uh, the Iliad --"

"At the 2001 Odyssey Fencing Club," she put in. Fine, we'd go with that.

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In a second dream the same night, I was Jim Carrey playing Joseph Smith, who had come back from the dead and was trying to sneak into his own house, which had been inherited by Martin Harris, who was played by Alan Rickman. Even though these were American characters, I understood that the whole thing was set in Russia.

The above-ground portion of the house was in ruins, and Martin Harris and his wife lived in the basement. I was trying to figure out how to get into the basement but couldn't find the entrance. Then I heard voices and saw that the Harrises were coming out. This showed me where the entrance was, so now I just had to hide until they left and then go down there. I crouched down in the shadows, confident that they wouldn't see me because it wasn't in the script.

The Harrises were dressed all in black and looked like necromancers or something. They were talking in a way that seemed very unnatural but was designed to fill in the viewer on necessary background information. A poorly written script, I thought.

Martin said something abut Joseph Smith III, complaining about him, and his wife said, "Why do you still call him 'the third'? His father's been dead for so long it's scarcely necessary."

"I know," said Martin, "but we're on a first-met basis." I understood this to mean that he had to continue calling him what he had been called when they first met, which was Joseph Smith III.

"As you know," said Mrs. Harris, "we inherited this house from him. And I've never complained, and I don't even mind trying to pay off the debts we also inherited from him." As Joseph Smith, I knew they'd also inherited a massive treasure from me -- I hadn't been such a failure at money-digging as commonly supposed -- but they didn't know where it was.

As Mrs. Harris said this, she went up to a large round table on the ruined first floor, which was covered with a black tablecloth, and began making perpendicular cuts into the cloth with a pair of scissors. I realized they were going to be here for a while.

For some reason, I decided that I'd better move from my current hiding place and hide on the table, under the tablecloth. I somehow did this without Mrs. Harris noticing, but now the problem was that she was making more and more cuts in the cloth, which was bound to expose me sooner or later.

Finally, so much of the tablecloth had been cut away that all that was left was a small black cloth covering the upper part of my face -- like Batman's mask -- with four long strips hanging off to either side like the legs of a spider. It looked like I was wearing some kind of Halloween mask intended to make my head look like a spider.

I stood up and was able to see myself from a third-person point of view: Jim Carrey, wearing this ridiculous black spider mask.

"Look, Martin," I said, "It's me, Joseph!"

"You don't look like him," Martin said -- and then proceeded to ignore me completely, as if masked strangers showed up in his house all the time.

"No, look, it's me," I insisted.

"Nope. I remember what he looked like, and he never wore a spider mask."

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Note added (7:20 p.m. same day):

About four hours after posting the above, I clicked on a webm version of a TikTok video on 4chan. The webm had no sound, but apparently the original had background music, which was credited with this text at the bottom:

Apparently there's an American electronic music group called Odesza (a nice compromise among the Russian, Ukrainian, and Hungarian spellings!) that did a remix of something from another musician called Zhu. Looking both acts up just now, I find that Zhu was born Steven Zhu on April 28, 1989, so I've posted this on his birthday.

I thought running into a form of Odessa -- and as the name of some people, not a city -- was quite the coincidence.

Sunday, April 14, 2024

A Prince of the Family

I dreamed that I was in some sort of public place when I heard a chorus of disembodied female voices announce, “And now you’re a Prince of the Family!” Then they all started laughing. I laughed, too, because it was such a funny idea. Nevertheless, it was true: I was a Prince of the Family and had better start walking like one — which turned out to mean moonwalking like Michael Jackson.

As I was moonwalking down the street, I passed a sidewalk cafe, and an old man using a laptop waved and nodded in a perfunctory way. I recognized him as the Mormon historian Dan Vogel. I thought about stopping to chat but didn’t want to stop moonwalking.

A bit later, I noticed to my deep embarrassment that there was a small tattoo on my right forearm: two circles, one larger than the other, each with several dots inside, plus a few other dots outside the circles. My first impression was that they looked like poorly drawn chocolate-chip cookies. I knew people were bound to notice the tattoo and ask me about it, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember when I had gotten it or why, or what it was supposed to mean.

“I can’t be out in public like this,” I said to myself. “I look like a tool.” (Moonwalking down a public street is one thing, but doing so with a tattoo?)

“Yes!” said the chorus of voices. “Like a perfect tool!” Then they again devolved into giggles. I had the impression that they meant the word in a portentous “instrument in the hands of God” sort of way but were simultaneously mocking that idea.

I’m not entirely sure the voices were human. They had that weird too-bright quality one associates with Grays.

Thursday, April 11, 2024

A loaf of bread is dear

When I'm doing some tedious task that doesn't require much brainpower, I sometimes like to listen to something in the background. This morning I was preparing a glossary for some of my students, adding Chinese glosses to a fairly long list of English words. While doing this, I was listening to something YouTube had suggested and I had randomly clicked on: Tucker Carlson interviewing Tulsi Gabbard. This is not at all the type on content I ordinarily consume, politics just not being my shtick, but for whatever reason today I thought "why not" and clicked on it:

I was using a school computer which is set up, for the convenience of my Taiwanese employees, to use Mandarin Phonetic Symbols for typing in Chinese. I'm pretty proficient in that typing system, but I can type Chinese much faster if I can use the Roman alphabet. Since Google Translate accepts Hanyu Pinyin (Romanized) input for Chinese, I often type Chinese that way into Google Translate and then copy and paste it to the document I want it in. One of the words I had to gloss this morning was loaf, so I typed 一條（麵包） -- literally "a loaf (of bread)." The parenthetical note was necessary because 一條 by itself literally means "a strip" and is the measure word used for all sorts of long thin things such as ropes and rivers, but also for bread (when counted by the loaf), fish, and for some reason dogs. (In Chinese, you generally can't use a number with a noun directly; instead of "a pen" or "two dogs" you have to say literally "a branch of pen" or "two strips of dog.")

I typed that, copied it, and pasted it into my document -- and at exactly that moment, Tulsi said "a loaf of bread." I don't mean a second or two later; we're talking about perfect simultaneity (which is of course the literal meaning of synchronicity). I pressed Ctrl-V, and 一條（麵包）appeared in my document while Tulsi Gabbard helpfully read out the English translation. She was talking about inflation; here's the immediate context:

You know, a loaf of bread is three times more expensive today than it was six months ago, or a year ago.

I considered posting about the sync but at first decided not to. As impressive as the form of the sync had been, the content -- just "a loaf of bread" -- was about as boring as it gets.

That made me stop and think, though, if "a loaf of bread" might have any deeper significance, and I remembered that the word loaf had been featured in my 2011 post "Dreaming in a forgotten language." I had dreamed about having a student recite a Greek prayer which was known as the Chliep Doroch because it was with those two words -- meaning "Dear Lord" -- that the Greek text of the prayer began. Upon waking, I of course realized that that wasn't Greek at all and tried to figure out if there was any linguistically plausible way of torturing the meaning "Dear Lord" out of it. One of my speculations was that chliep was "perhaps cognate with the Old English hlaf -- as in hlafweard, 'loaf-guard,' from which our modern word lord is derived."

Eventually, I realized that the phrase from the dream was obeying the rules of Russian phonology, and looking it up as Russian (the "forgotten language" of my title) yielded a near bull's-eye: хлеб дорог, literally "bread is dear" -- and хлеб and related Slavic words for "bread" are generally held to derive from a Germanic loan-word, related to loaf and this indirectly to lord.

I also noted in that 2011 post something directly relevant to Tulsi Gabbard's "loaf of bread" reference:

The Russian word for "dear," like its English equivalent, can mean either "beloved" or "expensive." A Google search for "хлеб дорог" turns up David Ricardo in translation: "не потому хлеб дорог, что платится рента, а рента платится потому, что хлеб дорог" -- "Corn is not high because a rent is paid, but a rent is paid because corn is high."

The post further noted that хлеб дорог could also mean "bread of the roads." That caught my eye in connection with today's sync because in Chinese, roads are one of the many long thin things to take the measure word 條. That is, in Chinese "a road" -- 一條路 -- is literally "a 'loaf' of road." (You can put "a loaf of road" into Google Translate to confirm this.)

Writing this post, which necessitated the explanation that a loaf of bread is literally a "strip" of bread in Chinese, made me think of the Pipkins episode I discussed in my 2022 post "Michael the glove puppet and X the Owl" and revisited in several subsequent posts:

Due to the influence of William Wright, I tend to connect the word strip with the Stripling Warriors these days. In the Pipkins episode, Pig explains that soldiers are thin strips of bread:

Boiled egg and soldiers! Oh, I love boiled egg and soldiers! Do you know what soliders are, apart from being men in the army? Well, they are little thin strips of bread and butter, and they are smashing for dipping into your egg. Oh, I love boiled egg and soldiers!

It was this "strips of bread" angle that made me think of Pipkins, but it turns out to be relevant in another way, too. The name of the episode is "The Glove Puppet," and the story is about how Hartley Hare uses a glove puppet named Michael to "be naughty" -- including stealing one of Pig's soldiers -- always blaming the puppet for the misdeeds rather than accepting responsibility himself.

Now look back at that Tucker Carlson video. The full title is "Tulsi Gabbard on Being Trump's VP, Who's Puppeteering Biden, and Corruption in Congress."

Besides this implication that Biden is himself a "glove puppet," there's also a bit where Tulsi says:

People like Hillary Clinton call me a traitor and a Russian asset or a puppet of Putin.

Here the idea of puppetry is neatly juxtaposed with Russian -- the language of хлеб дорог.

Note added (same day, 10:30 p.m.):

The thumbnail for the Tucker and Tulsi video shows a Venn diagram with a red circle on the left and a blue one on the right:

In "Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head," on of my 2022 follow-ups to the Pipkins "Glove Puppet" post, I included this tweet:

Saturday, April 6, 2024

The veil is thin near Erie, PA

I dreamed that there was an invisible interdimensional wall running along the north side of Interstate 90 in the United States, the purpose of which was to keep our world separate from alternate realities. However, near the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, there was a small gap in this wall, making it easy for a careless person to slip through into another universe, or to encounter something that had slipped through into ours. I was listening to something on the radio about a particular meditation technique or something, and they included a warning: “But do be careful attempting this if you happen to live near Erie, PA.”

My old home in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area in Ohio is about an hour west of Erie. Erie is also in the path of the upcoming solar eclipse.

Monday, April 1, 2024

Chips, clips, and the eclipse

On Holy Saturday night -- or rather the wee hours of Easter Sunday morning -- I woke up from a dream, scribbled down a few words on the notepad I keep by my bed, and went back to sleep. In the morning I read this:

White or yellow "chip" or plate found on Annunciation Day

I remember little about this dream. I know that I put the word chip in quotation marks because the object was referred to as a chip in the dream but due to its size -- a flat disc some 10 inches in diameter -- I thought upon waking that plate was more accurate. It was made of some light-colored metal (color perception in this dream was poor) and was covered with engravings. The environment in which it was found -- an indoor area full of dead leaves -- suggested the abandoned restaurant I started exploring back in July 2022. This is not the first time I have dreamed about finding "plates" in such a place. In my September 2023 post "Phoenix syncs," I wrote this:

I recently had two dreams set in an environment resembling that restaurant, a long-abandoned building where everything was covered with dead leaves. On the night of August 26, I dreamed that I was searching such a building with my brother, trying to find "plates" -- meaning further records like the Golden Plates from which the Book of Mormon was produced. In the second dream, during a nap on September 1, I found a large mantis inside the restaurant, and it kept unfolding more and more of its joints until, its limbs fully extended, it was larger than I was. I was trying to think of a way to get it out the door without hurting it.

On March 28, a couple of days before the "chip" dream, I had posted "Annunciation rescheduled to coincide with eclipse," about how the Catholic Church was celebrating the Solemnity of the Annunciation, which is normally on March 25, on April 8 this year, the same day as the solar eclipse.

On Easter morning I found something new on my refrigerator door, some random thing my wife had ordered online:

At first I thought it said "FRIES Chips" -- bilingual American/British packaging -- which made me think of my "chip" dream, but then I noticed that it actually says Clips, and that it's a box of plastic clips in the shape of crinkle-cut French fries. But clips is still synchronistically interesting, since it's part of the word eclipse. Then I realized that the whole word eclipse is actually there, since on either side of the text is a set of three horizontal lines suggesting the letter E.

In "Eclipse skull and crossbones" (and earlier posts linked there), I connect skull imagery with the eclipse. In "Turning suns into black holes," photos of a blacked-out sun are juxtaposted with a photo of a single eye. Today I ran into a skull with a single eye on /x/: