From the Narrow Desert: Snails

Showing posts with label Snails. Show all posts

Friday, July 5, 2024

Fire and Ice 2: Geothermal Boogaloo

The first synchronicity that registered with me as such had to do with Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice." It happened around 1991, and I discussed it in my 2019 post "Fire and Ice."

I was reminded of this today when I received an English magazine with this on the cover:

I also noticed "The Little Helicopter on the Red Planet" in connection with "The Gospel of Luke on Lobsterback." In that post, I discussed the transportation of the "Gospel of Luke" from "Britain" to "Armorica" on "lobsterback" -- all in scare quotes because probably none of those terms is meant literally. "Snails" were involved in this transportation. A helicopter could also be used to transport things across the sea, and the first element in that word is the combining form of Helix, which is a genus of snails. In the post I noted that lobsterback was historical slang for a British soldier, referring to the red coats they wore, and that previous dreams and syncs had introduced the idea of "Britain as another planet." The planet the lobsterbacks are from would naturally be the Red Planet, just as the planet the little skinny creatures are from is the Little Skinny Planet. In fact, in my post "Britain as another planet," I explicitly bring in Mars, referencing, among other things, a Muse music video featuring "a planet that looks like Mars but turns out to be Britain."

Coming back to the main cover story, though, it sent me back to my 2019 post, which included a still from This Is Spinal Tap. (That absolutely perfect movie, together with The Princess Bride, is why I will never denounce Rob Reiner, no matter how much of an ass he has made of himself since then.) The scene I was referencing was this:

Derek Smalls says of his bandmates:

We're very lucky in a sense that we've got two visionaries in the band. You know, David and Nigel are both, like, like poets, you know, like Shelley and Byron and people like that. They're two totally distinct types of visionaries. It's like fire and ice, basically, you see, and I feel my role in the band is to be kind of in the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water.

Rewatching the clip just now, I noticed the Luke reference ("lukewarm water") and the names Shelley and Byron. Byron is, by a very wide margin, the English-language poet I have read the most and whose poetic style has most influenced my own. I haven't read too much of him recently, but just a few days ago, as documented in "No more a roving," I was nudged by Claire to take down his collected works and see what page was bookmarked. It was "So, we'll go no more a roving." This poem is very prominently featured in Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, so that's another link to the Red Planet.

I'm fairly indifferent to Shelley as a poet, though he's been in the sync stream from time to time, mostly in connection with "The Sensitive Plant." When I heard the name Shelley in the video, though, my thoughts immediately went to a children's book I have at my school called What's in My Classroom? It's a very short, very simple book, only 10 pages, in which children give each other clues and try to guess what in the classroom they're thinking of. It ends with this:

Shelly appears to be a red-eared slider, a fairly close relative of the box turtle. In "Fruit grown from a ruby in a cup (with a turtle)," I recount a vision involving a box turtle and compare it to a story by William Wright about a Herbie the Hamster. Herbie lives in a glass enclosure which apparently has no lid, because in the end he succeeds in climbing out of it. Shelly the Turtle, as you can see, also lives in a glass enclosure with no lid, and also gets out of it in the end.

Also, take a look at the books the children are reading on p. 9. The boy's book has pictures of golden autumn leaves -- a major theme here recently. The girl's book has golden flowers, something William Wright has just posted about in "Gold and Red Stars: El-Anor and the Sawtooth Stone." His "Red Star" reference is of course another link to the Red Planet.

Finally, I should mention the possible significance of the book title What's in My Classroom? In a comment on his post "Behold, God's gift! Peter-Pharazon to come back together with John," William Wright links the idea of a classroom with the Mountain (i.e., in his reading, planet) of the Lord's House:

In my story, shoes are associated with reach the Peak, just as changing one's shoes in William's school is also required to ascend the stairs to the classroom. The classroom reference at the top of the stairs is interesting because Isaiah mentions that when the Mountain of the Lord's House is again established in the top of the Mountains, people will want to go there so they can learn, like one does in a classroom.

Update (later the same day): Hours after posting the above, I was preparing for a class and saw these three pictures:

All together on the page, there’s a turtle, a snail, Mars, and a red coat (“lobsterback”).

I also got word that a new student is going to join one of my classes, and the English name he uses is Byron.

Then this evening I checked Slate Star Codex for the first time in months and found a newly posted review of Byron’s Don Juan written in the style of the poem itself.

(Don Juan has its moments, but writing it in clunky pentameter stanzas was a mistake. Tetrameter with an irregular rhyme scheme suited Byron perfectly, and a Don Juan written in Giaour-style verse would have been brilliant. No, I’m not going to do it myself.)

Thursday, June 27, 2024

Nautical Newts

At this rate I'm going to go through the whole freaking alphabet.

A newt is a kind of salamander. Although the picture is captioned "Nine Nautical Newts Navigating Near Norway," there are only six newts in the boat. The remaining three are in the water and are only partially visible. This immediately made me think of the Knight of Wands, recently discussed in "More on Joan and Claire." The Knight's outer garment is printed with salamanders -- six full salamanders plus a few partially visible ones.

The newts are navigating the open sea, while the Knight and his salamanders are traveling through the deserts of Egypt. That's a pretty big discrepancy, but as it happens, I just mentioned in a comment on "The horrible hairy homeward-hurrying hogs of Hieronymus" that "Egypt was also underwater when it was discovered" according to the Book of Abraham. This was following a train of thought started by the fact that the Hog Knight on the cover of Animalia is accompanied by an ostrich, which had made me think of a passage from The Satanic Verses related to the Norman Conquest. The Nautical Newts are also accompanied by an ostrich.

Actually, the Hog Knight has a lot in common with the Knight of Wands:

Both are wearing armor and riding in the same direction. The helmet of the Knight of Wands even appears to have one of those hounskull-style visors which, when closed, would give the Knight a "pig-faced" appearance. The Hog Knight holds a flagpole with a banner; the Knight of Wands holds a staff which, in my post, I connected with a flagpole as well. The Knight of Wands is in Egypt; the Hog Knight's banner, as seen inside the book, is decorated with what appear to be Egyptian hieroglyphics:

In the comment, I quote the statement that the discoverer of this underwater Egypt was "the daughter of Ham" and that she "afterward settled her sons in it," and I suggest that "hogs could be a punning reference to 'Ham.'" That Ham pun in its classic form, the one famously referenced by Bloom in Ulysses, includes a desert reference:

Why should no man starve on the deserts of Arabia?
Because of the sand which is there.
How came the sandwiches there?
The tribe of Ham was bred there and mustered.

Ham, bread, and mustard -- a very respectable pun. "Mustering" is something that military men do, which fits with the warlike portrayal of the tribe of ham in Animalia. Mustard is also interesting in connection with the Nautical Newts. It is the scholarly consensus that "eye of newt," the famous witches'-brew ingredient, originally referred to mustard seed. The Synoptic Gospels have Jesus compare the Kingdom to a grain of mustard seed, and Joseph Smith adapted the parable to apply to the Book of Mormon:

Let us take the Book of Mormon, which a man took and hid in his field, securing it by his faith, to spring up in the last days, or in due time; let us behold it coming forth out of the ground, which is indeed accounted the least of all seeds, but behold it branching forth, yea, even towering, with lofty branches, and God-like majesty, until it, like the mustard seed, becomes the greatest of all herbs. And it is truth, and it has sprouted and come forth out of the earth, and righteousness begins to look down from heaven, and God is sending down His powers, gifts and angels, to lodge in the branches thereof.

The mustard seed is planted and grows in a field, but the mustard seed is also mentioned in Luke in connection with the idea that a tree could be planted in the sea by those with sufficient faith:

And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you (Luke 17:6).

Joseph Smith connected the mustard seed with a book of scripture buried in the earth. The Nautical Newts appear to have their own seaborne scripture -- a Nautical New T., or New Testament. Keeping in mind that the word translated as gospel in the Bible literally means "good news," the symbolism is pretty clear:

The name of the newspaper is The Northern Star, which makes me think that this "gospel" is the writings of the Lost Tribes, as mentioned in 2 Nephi 29, since those tribes are traditionally thought of as being "in the North." We typically speak of the Ten Lost Tribes, but they could also be reckoned as nine, if (as is often the case in the Bible) Joseph is counted as a single tribe rather than being divided into the half-tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. The Book of Mormon never gives them a number, though we know that there were 12 tribes in all and that three (Judah, Benjamin, and Levi) were not "lost."

Touching the newspaper is a snail shell. Well, I suppose it's actually a nautilus shell, given the alphabet theme, but it certainly looks like a snail shell. In "The Gospel of Luke on lobsterback," I specifically brought in snails as a symbol of a Gospel being transported across the sea. The snail in that analysis (from Lewis Carroll) was paired with the whiting, and here the snail shell is white. In Carroll, the idea of whiting having their tails in their mouths is emphasized; we see the same pose in the salamanders on the Knight of Wands.

To the right of the snail shell, we can see the ghostly image of what I suppose is meant to be a nurse, but her hat -- a rectangular shape marked with a cross -- is symbolic shorthand for "Bible," confirming our interpretation of the newspaper.

The Newts are navigating "Near Norway." Norway is, etymologically, "the northern way," which fits in with the Lost Tribes theme. The Old English name for Norway was Norðmanna land -- "Northman Land" -- which is also the etymological meaning of Normandy. Since Armorica (comprising Normandy and Brittany) has been so prominent in the sync-stream of late, we could think of "Near Norway" as referring to the Northman Land nearer to Britain -- i.e., Normandy as opposed to Norway in Scandinavia.

Finally, coming back to Ham for a moment, note that he is also implicitly present in the Nautical Newts picture, as one of the eight passengers on Noah's Ark:

By the way, I wasn't kidding about going through almost the whole alphabet. Stay tuned next time for the esoteric significance of Zany Zebras Zigzagging in Zinc Zeppelins.

Thursday, November 16, 2023

Giant slugs, twirling girls in green costumes, pools in the west of Ireland, frenzied dancing, renovated megaliths, invisibles among us -- you name it, we've got it!

In my November 9 post "Well, that didn't take long," the Chrysler Building (which I wouldn't have been able to pick out of a police lineup a month ago) entered the sync-stream. I looked up the etymology of Chrysler and found that it came from the German word for a spinning top, which in turn made me think of a line from Twelfth Night: "And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." It also made me think of Calvin's reference to "a slug the size of the Chrysler Building":

This in turn led me to search my own blog for slug and revisit the June 2021 post "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness."

Whirligig isn't a word you see everyday, so it jumped out at me when I found it on p. 177 of The Philosopher's Pupil a day or two ago:

"There's Alex!"

"Where?"

"There."

"You mean the girl in the green costume who's kicking up the water and twirling round and round like a corkscrew?"

"Yes. She likes doing that."

"She reminds me of something I saw once in a pool in the west of Ireland."

"Well, I'm going swimming now. Be good."

Tom dived in and swam towards Alex. Like Adam, he felt easier with her in the water. She had stopped her whirligig and waved to him.

So far, Scarlett-Taylor hasn't explain what he saw in the pool in the west of Ireland; perhaps it will come into the story later. For now, all we know is that it was a something, not a someone.

Two pages later, Tom is discussing gastropods with Adam. Asked to come up with a good line for a pop song, the latter suggests "It's only me," and then explains:

"Yes. There's two snails on a leaf, one on each side. Then one comes round the leaf and says to the other one, 'It's only me.'"

"Must they be snails?" said Tom after a moment's though.

"I see them as snails," Adam said firmly.

"I think it's brilliant," said Tom.

I had actually encountered that line about the two snails before, as Jorn Barger (who introduced me to Murdoch's work lo these many years ago) used to quote it. So this is where it's from.

⁂

Last night, after my staff had gone home, I was doing some final paperwork and such before closing up the school for the night. I had YouTube Music playing on my phone, using the "tuner" function, so that music was chosen for me by an algorithm. I wasn't paying much attention to the background music until I heard the line "no more counting dollars" while I was literally counting a stack of banknotes. This made me stop and look at the video, which was "Counting Stars" by OneRepublic, a group I'm unfamiliar with:

In the video, the band is playing downstairs, while upstairs there's some kind of charismatic revival meeting going on, with people jumping around and dancing and being "slain by the Spirit" and that sort of thing. One and only one of them twirls round and round like a corkscrew: a girl in a green costume.

Near the end of the video, one of the holy rollers, like Rumpelstiltskin, stamps too hard and falls through the floor. We then look down through the hole in the floor and see five men standing there looking up.

This syncs with the "Little Talks" video, where five men fall through the ice they are walking on into the sea, where they are menaced by a gigantic sea monster before it is zapped by their fairy protectress.

⁂

Today during my lunch break (which is several hours on Thursdays), I read a little more in The Philosopher's Pupil. On p. 194 there is mention of a Stonehenge-style monument which has been restored in modern times:

The priest and the philosopher gazed at the megaliths which were arranged in a broken circle some sixty yards in diameter. There were nine stones. The earliest reference to them is eighteenth-century, when four of them were standing. The others were uncovered and collected and erected in their present still-disputed positions by a nineteenth-century archaeologist.

After reading, I was in my study when a book inexplicably caught my eye. It was on a shelf with a lot of other short paperbacks, mostly children's literature, which my wife had picked up somewhere at a flea market or something. One of these was World Famous Strange but True by Colin, Damon, and Rowan Wilson. Colin Wilson is a writer I know and like, but I'd never paid any attention to this book before because it was on a shelf I rarely looked at and anyway appeared too tabloidish to be worth reading -- like a side-gig potboiler, not a serious part of Wilson's oeuvre. Today, though, I felt a strong nudge to take it down from the shelf, something I had never done before. I looked at the table of contents, which had summaries for each chapter. The summary for Chapter Six began "The monster of Lough Nahooin. The Loch Ness monster. UFOs and monster: Ted Holiday's theory. . . ." That seemed relevant, given the recent water-monster syncs, so I read that chapter -- only 10 pages, not counting the full-page photo of Nessie.

Here's how it begins, on p. 58:

Lough Nahooin is a small brown-coloured lake in Connemara on the west coast of Ireland.

A monster is spotted in the lake by Stephen Coyne and his family:

Describing it later to an investigator, F. W. Holiday, the Coynes said the monster was about twelve feet long. It had no eyes, but there were two horns like those of a snail on top of its head.

Holiday was the author of a book on the famous Loch Ness monster, which he believed to be some kind of giant slug. From the description of the Coyne family, he had no doubt that this Lough Nahooin monster was another member of the same species. Since Lough Nahooin is a mere 100 yards long -- compared with the twenty-four miles of Loch Ness -- there seemed a reasonable chance of catching the Irish lake monster.

A mere hundred yards long -- so really more of a pool than a lake. In the west of Ireland. Inhabited by "some kind of giant slug." The monster had "two horns like those of a snail" -- or of a giraffe.

Later in the chapter, on p. 64, we are introduced to T. C. Lethbridge and his theory about Stonehenge:

Lethbridge's starting point is the mystery of ancient stone monuments like Stonehenge and the Merry Maidens. . . . Lethbridge became convinced that the power that apparently emanates from such monoliths is a form of energy that comes from living creatures. He calls it bio-energy, or bio-electricity. He believes that such energy can be generated by the frenzied kind of dancing that forms part of many ancient religious rituals.

Frenzied dancing as part of a religious ritual appears in the "Counting Stars" video.

On p. 65, we even get a reference to modern renovations of Stonehenge:

When modern engineers set about replacing one of the giant lintels at Stonehenge, they had the full benefit of modern cranes and lifting equipment, and the operation was still a difficult and costly one.

On p. 66, another theory of Lethbridge's is discussed:

Lethbridge also points out that if these other levels are characterized by a higher vibrational rate of energy, then creatures from these levels could actually be walking among us now -- completely invisible to us.

In a July 2021 comment on "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness" -- the post I recently revisited because it contains the word slug -- I write:

"Aliens" (or whatever the hell they are!) walk our streets undetected.

This post is a good illustration of what makes it so hard for me to get a handle on synchronicity or what it means. That I should be "prompted" to read a relevant book by some spiritual agency -- God, Tim, the sync fairies, my own psychic subconscious, whatever -- is an understandable hypothesis, and we can ask who or what did it and why. But something much more involved than that seems to be going on.

Both The Philosopher's Pupil and World Famous Strange but True were, let us say, brought to my attention by the sync fairies. But how to account for the fact that in an 18-page section of the former book and a 9-page section of the latter, we find references to (a) a lake or pool specified as being in the west of Ireland, (b) snails, and (c) an ancient circle of standing stones in England being repaired in modern times. These three things have no logical connection whatsoever. The books were written in 1983 and 1994, respectively, and belong to entirely different genres. Are we to suppose that the sync fairies were feeding ideas to one of both of these writers, setting up my little syncs decades in advance? Or that they travel back in time and edit the past to keep the sync-stream going? Colin Wilson and Iris Murdoch knew and liked each other -- she offered to get him a scholarship at Oxford, which he declined -- but is that a possible mundane explanation (Wilson being unconsciously influenced by his friend's novel of a decade before), or is it just another improbable coincidence to add to the list? The unconscious-influence theory would be more believable if it went the other direction, from the nonfiction writer to the novelist. After all, Wilson didn't choose for a snail-horned monster to be seen in a lake in the west of Ireland; that happened in 1968. And of course the links between these two texts are just a tiny part of the vast interconnected web of syncs in which they are embedded. How does it all get set up, and by whom, and why? Even if we postulate that syncs are the work of an omnipotent God (and something pretty close to omnipotence seems to be called for), it's still hard to make sense of what exactly he is doing and how and why. And hypothesizing that sync is instead a naturally-occurring phenomenon, or something my own mind is doing, doesn't make it any more comprehensible -- au contraire. It's starting to feel more and more as if there must be some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey shenanigans involved.

And for what? All these borderline-impossible coincidences painstakingly orchestrated for what? What's the point of having me experience all this?

Sunday, September 24, 2023

The Moody Blues, Embody the Soul, snails and ammonites, stars and stones, blue ball of light

Yesterday, September 23, I happened to see a bright blue scooter with the license plate MDY-0098. I thought that MDY-00 was the best way of encoding the word moody in the ABC-1234 format (keeping in mind that there are no Os on license plates, only zeroes), and this combined with the color of the scooter made me think of the Moody Blues -- the very first band I got into as a teenager. The remainder of the plate number was 98, and I was pretty sure that in '98 the Moody Blues were in Italy, recording their album Strange Times. This was released in 1999, during a time when I had no access to secular music, but buying it was almost the first thing I did after returning to secular life in 2000. It served as my main soundtrack during that in-between time, after my mission and before entering the linguistics program at Ohio State. I used to play it in the car on my many drives from Kirtland out to Lake Erie to wander around the saltless, surfless beaches, meditate, and compose not-very-good verses on the metaphysical significance of erosion.

The cover of Strange Times shows the Earth inside what looks like a transparent snail or ammonite shell, on a beach.

Anagrams were very much my stock in trade at that time in my life (almost as much as synchronicities are now), and of course I had subjected the Moody Blues to the treatment. Their band name yielded such pleasing anagrams as The Bloody Muse and Embody the Soul. As for this album, Strange Times is an anagram of Granite Stems -- i.e., crinoid fossils, complementing the possible ammonite fossil on the cover.

Running into a license plate that evoked Strange Times was a bit of a sync because just two days previous (September 21), in my Book of Mormon post "Lehi, Nephi, and the pillar of fire that 'dwelt upon a rock,'" I had revisited my 2022 post "Snail on shingles," about a remote-viewing image of an enormous snail shell on a shingled roof. At the end of the post, I note a sync with the Mock Turtle's Song from Alice in Wonderland, which mentions a "snail . . . on the shingle" -- meaning of course not roofing shingles but pebbles on the seashore.

On September 22, one day after revisiting "Snail on shingles" and one day before the Strange Times sync, I received an email from a correspondent who always emails me about synchronicities related to the number 555. This time it was about a rock shop where most of the items had been labeled "555." He sent me several photos of these items, but the one that got my attention -- and the only one I mentioned in my reply -- was a rock with fossils of Orthoceras, a primitive genus of ammonites.

Though the shell on the Strange Times cover has the familiar shape of a snail shell, the rough edge at its mouth makes it look more like a fossil, suggesting that in fact it is an ammonite. I suppose the word Plates is also a sync with the Book of Mormon context in which I revisited my remote-viewed snail shell. Come to think of it, Orthoceras is "straight horn," a standard iconographic attribute of the Angel Moroni.

That was all yesterday, and I didn't think it quite synchy enough to be worth posting.

Today (September 24), I unexpectedly had an hour to kill while away from home, so I camped at a coffee shop and read Joshua Cutchin's Ecology of Souls -- to which I have recently returned after taking a break to read all eight volumes of Daymon Smith's Cultural History of the Book of Mormon.

Almost all of the background music they were playing in the coffee shop was unfamiliar to me. As soon as I sat down, a song started which repeated "Time to wake up, time to wake up" an inordinate number of times. Given the recent syncs related to "Wake Up Time" by Tom Petty, this got my attention. I looked it up on my phone and found that it was a song by the band Cacti, called -- no points for guessing! -- "Time to Wake Up."

"Wake Up Time," as you will know if you've read the linked post above, was connected by William Wright with a dream he had about a man who called himself El-Anor ("sun-star"), and who Mr. Wright thought represented simultaneously a man and a stone. Just as the song "Time to Wake Up" was ending, I read this in Ecology of Souls:

One informant living in Belize told Ardy Sixkiller Clarke that he met the "stone woman" of Mayan legend . . . describing her as "magnificent," "beautiful," "glow[ing] like a star," . . . .

A stone woman like a star is an obvious sync with the stone man who called himself Sun-Star. Note also that yesterday I posted "Who were the 13 luminous beings Lehi saw in his Jerusalem vision?" -- about a vision of one whose "luster was above that of the sun at noon-day" and "twelve others" whose "brightness did exceed that of the stars in the firmament." The popular Mormon imagination associates the Book of Mormon peoples with the Maya and other Mesoamerican civilizations.

(Incidentally, in writing my post on the 13 luminous beings, I considered, but did not end up committing to writing, the possibility that the brightest being was the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is traditionally depicted with a crown of twelve stars.)

Some minutes later, I read in Ecology of Souls a long quotation from Suzy Hansen, about "the incarnation process":

The familiar soul, the blue ball of light, would accompany me in this life, as would two others from the group of souls present . . . . We would all become part of something together, but the blue soul is the one I have had a long connection with . . . .

The incarnating soul is depicted as a "blue ball of light." Just yesterday I had been remembering my old anagram habit: The Moody Blues = Embody the Soul. Furthermore, the cover of Strange Times depicts a literal blue ball, encased in rough shell as if it were a soul incarnate in crude matter.

Just then, another unfamiliar song came on in the coffee shop. The only lyrics I could make out were the repeated line "Would you turn to stone?" This syncs with the ammonite fossils, the "stone woman," and the man who was also a stone, so I tried to look it up. I had no luck finding the song itself. The only thing that came up was a song called "Losing My Shit" by a band called Breakfast In Silence. Here are the lyrics in full:

Feel a little crazy like I wanna shave my head
but their music makes me wanna grow out my hair again
Do I have much to lose?
I just want my head to cut it out.

Will you turn to stone if I put another hole in my head?
Got a Medusa last week --
Will you care if I still can't get out of bed?
I'm so moody, and I forget a lot of shit,
I'm so moody, and I forget a lot of shit.

I'm so moody -- you've got to be kidding me! Scrolling down their bandcamp page just now, I see that Breakfast In Silence is based in Salt Lake City, which syncs with the general "Mormon" theme (Ammonite is another Book of Mormon word, by the way) and with my specific mention earlier in this post of the saltlessness of Lake Erie.

I suppose it's also worth mentioning that I shaved my head today (as I do about once a week), and that I used to be called Tom Petty in college because my long blond hair made me look like him.

Monday, September 12, 2022

Snail on shingles

Yesterday, September 11, I did some remote-viewing practice using the app RV Tournament. I was given the coordinates 6156-4124, and these were my notes.

I was then given two possible target images to choose from, and I chose the correct one with perfect confidence.

I consider this a pretty good hit. The snail in the target image isn't actually on a shingled roof, but it is on a dark surface, slanting in the direction I indicated in my sketch. (Surprisingly, this was a "practice round," with immediate feedback, which I'm usually bad at. I've done 102 practice rounds and guessed only 47 of them right -- 0.8 SDs worse than would be expected by chance. For "tournament rounds," with delayed feedback, I've done 34 and guessed 24 right -- 2.4 SDs better than expected by chance. That's a whopping 3.2-SD difference between the two types of round!)

The next day, I posted my dream, "The coypu assembles a new zodiac," in which a coypu (nutria) calls one animal after another to "come and join the general dance." Otto left a comment quoting the Mock Turtle's Song from Alice in Wonderland. Note some of the words that show up in the first stanza:

"Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail,
"There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
They are waiting on the shingle -- will you come and join the dance?
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance?

I know the Mock Turtle is referring to pebbles on the seashore, not to roofing shingles, but it still seems like quite a coincidence. "Turtles" -- again, with a different meaning -- have also been in the sync stream recently.