Whales and reptilians

I downloaded and read the book that came up in "If reptilian aliens are real . . .," Alien Invasion: Reptilians, Cetaceans, and Frequency Wars on Planet Earth by "Wuono" (channeled by Cynthia Hodges). I don't recommend it; it's just a run-of-the-mill New Age channeled text, with nothing very original to say. Reptilians are after your soul, but you can repel them by eating a healthy diet, wearing silver jewelry, burning incense, and listening to the Beatles (and particularly "Om Hare Om (Gopala Kirshna)" by George Harrison). That's the tl;dr. Bill had mentioned in a comment how similar the book's cover art is to a symbol from the movie Stargate. This is acknowledged in the afterword:

The symbol chosen to adorn the cover of this book is meant to invoke the symbol for Earth used in the Hollywood movie, Stargate. This movie and the TV series it engendered -- Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe -- revealed much Truth in a fictionalized scenario. The reader is encouraged to revisit all of the information presented in the movie and the TV series, keeping in kind that Stargate  was a vehicle for revealing information.

Following the afterword, there are some reader reviews, one of which compares the premise of the book to that of the movie Avatar, another theme from my post.

I finished Alien Invasion this morning and clicked for a random /x/ thread. I got this very short thread about cannibalism. The first reply after the original post contained this link: www.whale.to/b/reptilian_h.html. A page about reptilians on website called Whale is obviously a link to what I had just been reading. Wondering why the site -- which seems to be about all kinds of conspiracy theories -- was called "Whale," I went to the about page and found this explanation:

Whale came from John Lilly, the Cetacean researcher and spiritual pioneer (I met him in West Berlin, c.1984).  'To' is Tonga domain.  The name Whale was already taken in all the main domains at the time, and Tonga had just become available.  Of course, a big aim of mine is to end Whale and Dolphin killing (something Greenpeace will never achieve, only the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is on the right path), and for wider acceptance of the fact they are intelligent beings as John Lilly discovered.  I am sure it is no coincidence this website came to be called Whale.  There are no Coincidences.  I could be an agent of the Whales and Whale may be a Whale harpoon for the entity behind Whaling, as it does feel sometimes like I have created a weapon.

Cetacean with a capital C, just as in the book. John Lilly has appeared once before on this blog, in "The firehose of syncs relating to Dee's whale continues."

A lady in a lake, a strange curriculum, and the poltergeist's return

These dreams are from Tuesday night. I took extensive notes upon waking, but I wasn't able to type them up in a publishable form due to being out of commission all day yesterday with a migraine.

⁂

I was at a large lake with several other people. It looked something like a caldera lake, with steep rocky banks, but its shape was more rectangular than circular. Its shape made it seem artificial, and I was unsure whether I should think of it as a lake or a swimming pool. Inside the lake there were several submerged rock walls, reaching almost to the surface, and it was possible to get from one part of the lake to another on foot by walking along these walls, being careful to keep one's balance. From a distance, it would look as if one was walking on water, like Jesus.

We were there because we had reason to believe there was a body somewhere in the lake, and we had to find it. I had a hunch as to where it would be, and I started walking in that direction, balancing on one of the submerged walls. I reached a very shallow part of the lake, and there, lying face up in a water barely deep enough to cover her, was the pallid body of a woman. I discovered that a rectangular glass "lid" had been placed over the body, which was what prevented it from floating to the surface.

I removed the lid, and the body floated up to the surface. Then I realized that it wasn't just floating; the woman was still alive, despite her deathly pallor, and was trying to get up. I helped her out of the water and held her in a bear-hug, looking at the steep rocky bank and wondering how I was going to traverse it while carrying her. She recovered her strength very quickly, though, and was soon able to stand and walk on her own. In fact, she seemed to be completely normal; one would never guess that moments ago she had been mostly drowned.

She told me that the person who had put her in the water was also after her sister. I turned to the other people I was with and said, "Where are the police? Why aren't they here yet? They should have been called the moment we found the body, I mean the person."

⁂

I was teaching two young men, but not in my usual capacity as an English teacher. Rather, I was "responsible for their education" in a more general way. The curriculum I had chosen for them was mainly symbolic logic, theoretical geography, and the universal principles of architecture. I told them that in addition to studying these disciplines, it would be essential for them to maintain inspiration, and that historically this would be tied to what I called the "pre-Romantic notion" of the four components of the Cherubim and would involve choosing one of these with which to ally oneself. I thought, but did not say, that this would also mean identifying with one of the four Jacks in a deck of cards.

One of the logical exercises we did involved using a modified form of predicate logic to express the proposition "Most people are able to answer questions put to them by their parents."

One of the books I was teaching from was a thick volume bound in red leather, with gold lettering on the cover. I accidentally left that book in the trunk of my car and had to go downstairs to the basement-level parking garage to get it.

⁂

I was woken up in the middle of the night by my wife calling from downstairs, saying, "Come down for a minute. I got some paste for you."

As I got out of bed, put on a shirt, and walked to the door, I found that it was unusually difficult to move, as if I were walking through water. After a moment, I realized that I must actually be sleepwalking, and that my wife wasn't actually calling me. After all, she was visiting family overseas and wouldn't be home for weeks -- and even if she did come home early for some reason, "Come down for a minute. I got some paste for you" would be a pretty strange way of announcing herself. Having convinced myself that I was dreaming, I went back to bed.

Then I heard my wife's voice again and, sure it was real this time, went downstairs. This time I was able to move normally but found that I had lost my voice. It was all I could do to rasp out a very hoarse whisper. She explained that she had come home early because she was sick. Noticing my voice, she said, "So you're sick, too?"

Most of the furniture in the living room was gone, and some of it had been moved. I asked my wife if she had moved it. When she said she hadn't, I said, "Then we've been robbed! . . . But wait, why is the television still here? Why would a burglar take the furniture but leave the electronics?"

Then I saw something in the dining room, behind my wife: a small table hovering in the air.

"Look over there!" I said. "There's a table levitating. That poltergeist is back!"

She didn't turn her head. "Don't -- expect -- me -- to -- look," she said, forcing out the words as if paralyzed with fear.

I turned back to the living room. Most of the furniture had reappeared, though most of it was out of place.

"I can't believe that poltergeist is back," I said again. I began calling to mind the Latin prayers that had banished it last time.

"I saw something before but didn't want to tell you," my wife said. "It -- killed everything."

I knew that she meant our cats. "Where are they?"

"Out back."

Although she was saying that all the cats were dead, and their bodies out back, several of the cats were walking around the living room at that very moment, looking perfectly normal.

When I finally woke up for real, I was sufficiently disoriented that I had to go downstairs to make sure that my wife hadn't come home early, that the cats were okay, and that there had been no  poltergeist activity.

⁂

I had shaken the dice before going to bed. I no longer try to predict from dream content what the roll will be, since that doesn't seem to work, but I still note any connections. I had rolled 18, which is the Ace of Swords. My immediate thought was to connect that to my first dream, in which we had found a woman in a lake, with the Lady of the Lake giving Excalibur to Arthur.

The second dream was interesting because just before going to bed I had been thinking about what the focus of my current studies and thinking should be. Various long-term projects -- my work on the Fourth Gospel, the Book of Mormon, Dunne's theory of time, etc. -- have all kind of stalled out, and I find myself treading water, reporting syncs as they come but not really making much intellectual progress. Then, the night after those ruminations, I dreamt about a special "curriculum" I had designed, focusing on some rather unlikely subjects. Is that supposed to be a hint? It's hard to take literally. Symbolic logic, I think I've already got a pretty good handle on, having taught it at the university level many years ago. I know absolutely nothing about architecture, and I wasn't even sure "theoretical geography" was a real discipline until I looked it up after the dream. "Universal principles of architecture" sounds closely related to "speculative masonry" -- that is Freemasonry as a symbolic and ritual system, divorced from the work of actual stonemasons. Taken together, the subjects on the curriculum suggest a high level of abstraction rather than a focus on facts or practical matters.

The idea of receiving inspiration by associating oneself with one of the four components of the Cherubim ties in with old traditions regarding the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Traditional iconography shows Matthew being inspired by the human aspect of the Cherubim, Mark by the lion, Luke by the bull, and John by the eagle. As far as I know, there has never been any suggestion that anyone other than those four should or could receive inspiration in such a manner. The idea that inspiration requires intermediaries, rather than being received directly from God, is what I think made me characterize this concept as "pre-Romantic." The connection to the four Jacks was interesting. I've mapped the four Jacks to lots of other foursomes (see "Flour Boy symbolism roundup"), but not to the Cherubim.

The last dream segment was unnerving, with its suggestion that the poltergeist of 2019 might come back. It felt seriously malevolent in the dream.

Transdermal stimulant sync

I'm preparing to do another round of experiments with dreaming under the influence of nicotine. I was just getting ready to take a shower, apply the patch, and go to bed, but I decided to read a bit in the Shaul Behr novel first. I read this:

Howard sighed. "Okay. Caffo is basically a patch that you stick on your skin, and it gives you a slow release of caffeine over a period of about eight hours. It’s very popular among tech workers who like their caffeine fix without the bother of having to break their flow to go to the bathroom to return used coffee. It also found a big market in the Jewish community for fast days. Not to mention the Muslims who buy it in industrial quantities during Ramadan."

"That’s amazing!" said Ari. "I want a supply of these! How come I’ve never heard of them before?"

"Because they’re only going to be invented in about seven years’ time."

The fasting reference is a further sync. I was going to start the nicotine experiments several days ago but decided to postpone them because I was in the middle of a multi-day fast and didn't want to use nicotine on an empty stomach.

Given the established link between nicotine and Mars, it's a further sync that the passage quoted above comes from a book called Red Warrior's Gift.

Note added: Besides the Mars connection, Red Warrior's Gift would make perfect sense as the title of a history of tobacco.

If reptilian aliens are real . . .

I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got this one, from June 30, 2021. The original post just says "What would you do if they're real?" with this image:

I immediately clicked for another random /x/ thread and got this one, from August 12, 2020. Despite having been posted nearly a year before the first random thread I got, the original post seems to be answering its question. It reads:

if reptilians are real, I wanna meet one honestly. Fuck it, have them stop shape-shifting and just show that natural body.

In the pic that reptilian seems to be just vibing

Here's the image accompanying the second post:

This is almost identical to the reptilian alien in the other thread. Here they are side by side:

They're not the same image, but the correspondence is so exact that one must be a copied from the other, or else both must have been copied from the same original.

Is this just a very common way of portraying reptilian aliens, then? No, not really. I ran a search for reptilian alien on Google Images and found nothing like the above until the 90th result (below left). I didn't find a second such image until the 185th result (below right).

Getting those two /x/ threads one right after the other just seems astronomically improbable. It's not just that they use essentially the same reptilian image. The first asks, "What would you do if they're real?" -- meaning aliens, including a reptilian -- and the second begins, "if reptilians are real, I . . . ."

I calculated the number of days between the two posts, assuming it would turn out to be a significant number. It's 322, which I guess qualifies.

I searched for 322 aliens just to see what would come up. The first image result was this:

The reason I got that result seems to be that image's original filename is "22322.jpg" -- obviously just a meaningless serial number. The fact that it features a human skull, when I had just associated the number 322 with the Skull and Bones logo, is a coincidence.

The "What would you do if they're real?" post was published on June 30, 2021. On that same date, I posted "Orkish synchronicity," linking to an article called "When Orcs Were Real." Orcs aren't reptilians, but the idea of monstrous humanoids being "real" is still a sync. The linked article also includes "skull and bones" imagery:

This "orcs were real" theme reminded me that the first thing I ever read by Bill Wright, three months before I became aware of his blog and our syncs got entangled, was his 2023 guest post on Bruce's blog, "Could Tolkien’s orcs be incarnated demonic spirits?", so I revisited that. The first comment on that post, by Inklings scholar David Llewellyn Dodds, begins thus:

Thanks for this! What a lot of fruit-of-thought that is food for further thought!

Immediately before clicking for the random /x/ threads that occasioned the present post, I checked the comments on this blog. The most recent was from Debbie, on "Cucurbits and pomegranates." Debbie usually leaves very long comments, but this one was short. It reads, in its entirety:

I forgot to add.

Yet again another 'food (fruit) for thought sync, no?

Note added: I decided to look up that Alien Invasion book I found while searching for reptilian-in-a-red-hood images. Here's the back cover:

The summary begins thus:

In the distant past, Reptilian star-travelers conquered humanity. These demon-possessed body-forms cruelly exploited the subjugated humans.

That's a pretty direct link to Bill's post proposing that orcs are "incarnated demon spirits."

Second note added: That Alien Invasion book also features "Cetacean" aliens. Just yesterday I was in an electronics store, and all the televisions were playing the trailer for the latest Avatar movie, which is called Avatar: Fire and Ash (cf. Alien: Fire and Stone above). The trailer has a few shots of whale-like alien creatures.

The word avatar refers to a physical manifestation of a spiritual being, so that syncs with the "demon-possessed body forms" and "incarnated demon spirits."

Something familiar about this facial expression:

Third note added (December 9): Here is the alternate cover for Alien Invasion, mentioned in the comments by Bill, side by side with what is apparently the "earth glyph" from the movie Stargate (1994):

That's not just a general thematic similarity; it's an exact match, right down to the relative thickness of the lines.

Cucurbits and pomegranates

My last post, "Cucurbits for Miriam," and the dream that occasioned it had to do with members of the gourd family -- the pumpkin, the squash, the wax gourd, and the watermelon -- and with the sister of Moses.

This evening I ate a pomegranate for only the second time in my life, the first having been some 30 years ago.

I then sat down to read Red Warrior's Gift, the second of Rabbi Shaul Behr's religious time-travel novels. (Mormons of my generation may think of it as the Jewish version of Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites.) The Red Warrior of the title is Esau, and so far most of the action has taken place in his time, long before Moses.

Tonight I read a scene in which a Canaanite attempts to assassinate Esau, only to find that his sword has, as if by magic, been replaced with a cucumber.

A few chapters later, the setting has changed to Mosaic times, and the first person we meet in this new setting, one of the spies accompanying Joshua and Caleb, is carrying a "gigantic pomegranate" under his arm.

Cucurbits for Miriam

I dreamt that I was getting foodstuffs down from high cupboards for a very short woman whom I understood to be Miriam, the sister of Moses. The cupboards were so high up that even I had to stand on a chair to reach them. Miriam addressed me as Angelo Gustav, a hybrid Italian-German name which I took to be an expansion of Angus.

I first took down a very large pumpkin. It seemed too soft to the touch, and I was afraid that it was overripe. Miriam was unconcerned and said that most of it was probably still good and that we could just remove any parts that weren't. When we cut the pumpkin open, it was indeed very ripe, but all of it appeared to be still good to eat.

I then went to a different cupboard and took down a large whitish cucurbit which Miriam called a squash but which looked more like a wax gourd, called a "winter melon" in Chinese. ("Winter" is a homophone of "east." The pumpkin or squash is called by contrast a "south melon." The "west melon" is the watermelon. The "north melon," mentioned in Ming dynasty literature as a sort of pun, is mythical.)

This white cucurbit, though large, was very light, almost like a luffa. Miriam didn't want it and had me put it back in the cupboard. This cupboard contained mostly folded winter coats, which I had to move out of the way to put the gourd back. I first moved the coats to the right and put the gourd on the left, but Miriam had me move it to the right and put the coats on the left. I then woke up.

The whole dream seemed symbolic, though I don't yet understand the symbolism. My immediate thought upon waking was that the differently colored cucurbits represented the golden and silver apples from The Song of Wandering Aengus (I had been listening to Donovan's musical setting of that poem) and that Miriam was an alter ego of Claire.

The name Gustav has the appropriately Mosaic meaning "God-staff" and may also be related to the recent dream appearance of Gustav Mahler.

Angelo obviously means "angel." I remember that in Calibrated Gematria the three canonical archangels, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, map to three of the cardinal directions (I'll have to check later which is which), but there is no angel of the north, just as there is no "north melon" in Chinese.

Note added (minutes later):

Michael = 0 = west (watermelon)

Gabriel = -40 = south (pumpkin/squash)

Raphael = -5 = east (wax gourd)

Second note added (9:00 p.m.):

This happened shortly after I published the original post, but I've been away from my electronic devices most of the day and haven't had a chance to publish the note until now. When I woke from my dream, I had the Metric song "Paths in the Sky" in my head and wanted to listen to it. Searching YouTube for it, I found that the top result was a fan-made music video, which I played:

The channel is called "Indie Club (AJ De La Cruz)." There are only five comments, of which this is one:

Translating, that says, "Angelo, what a great video edit! Do you remember who I am?" So apparently that's what the first initial in AJ De La Cruz stands for. Of course it would be pronounced differently from the Italian Angelo in my dream, but it still seems like quite a coincidence.

Corbin, imagination becoming real, and teenage boys startled by a cracking branch

Last night I listened to a video in which a pseudonymous ex-Mormon podcaster relates some seemingly demonic encounters he experienced in 1978 and 1979. Due to his sometimes linking to older apologetic articles he wrote under his real name, I know and must mention for sync purposes that this podcaster's first name is a somewhat unusual one: Corbin.

Here's the video, which is much more serious than the flippant title and thumbnail would suggest:

In one of the stories he tells, what he thinks at first is mere imagination begins to become more and more real:

I had heard these things [missionary tales of evil spirits] during the day when it really didn't bother me very much. But that night, it was to return to haunt me by playing upon my imagination and filling me with childhood fears. Imagination -- at least I thought it was my imagination at first. . . . I experienced intense feelings of dread and sensed the presence of evil entities swirling invisibly about me in the air. I attributed this too to an overactive imagination. I question now whether these feelings were purely imaginative.

As the story continues, what began as imagined fears induced by hearing a scary story eventually manifests as physically audible scratching sounds at his bedroom door. As many people know from experience, talking about and imagining such things can cause them to appear. (Caveat lector!)

This morning, I finished Gary Lachman's book Dark Star Rising. In the last chapter, "The Politics of Chaos," the name Corbin suddenly appears, never having been mentioned in the rest of the book, and is repeated seven times. This Corbin is a philosopher who wrote about how imagination can manifest in reality:

The French philosopher and scholar of mysticism Henry Corbin wrote extensively on the imagination and what he called the Imaginal World, a kind of realm in between the physical world and that of pure thought. It is the realm in which dreams take place and hypnagogic visions, and in which the "picturizing" that leads to the "actualizing" of our prayers goes on. . . . The Imaginal is real, Corbin argued, but it's a different reality from what we are used to.

The name Corbin, incidentally, means "raven." In Corbin the podcaster's story, he thinks at first that the scratching might be the family dog scratching on the door "for admittance." Poe's famous poem "The Raven" concerns  itself with a mysterious sound which the narrator at first thinks is "some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door." He then reports, "I opened wide the door;-- / Darkness there and nothing more." Corbin, too, opens the door and finds only a dark hallway.

One of the stories Corbin tells features the sound of a branch cracking. He and a high-school friend hear this while they are up on the roof talking about the pre-existence and the war in heaven, and they associate it with the demonic manifestation that preceded Joseph Smith's First Vision.

Our discussion was suddenly interrupted by a cracking noise, loud in the still night, which emanated from the shadow enshrouded trees just beyond the rooftop on which we were seated. Both Bruce and I jumped at the sound. We peered into the shadowy tree boughs, seeing if we could make out what had caused the sound. We saw nothing. This is just ten feet away from where we're seating, if that far. It might have been seven feet away. That's why we jumped so much. It was a loud snapping, cracking sound like a tree branch being broken. Neither could we figure out what could cause such a sound in a tree at a spot twenty feet off the ground. We both agreed that it had sounded like a dry twig snapping under a person's foot or being broken across a person's knee, but that seemed even more ridiculous. . . .

Bruce explained to me that one of the reasons the sound had startled him so much is that it was virtually identical to the sound Joseph Smith hears in the movie The First Vision, [which] the church had just created. . . . Stuart Peterson, I think, was the name of the young boy who played Joseph Smith. There is the sound of a cracking branch, which is supposed to presage the appearance of Satan. Now, why a cracking branch is supposed to presage the appearance of Satan is anybody's guess, but it does appear in that movie. So Bruce explained to me that's why he was so startled because he made the connection between the sound we heard up on the roof and the sound that Joseph Smith hears in the movie. And this happens as Joseph Smith gets down on his knees to pray in the grove just before the powers of darkness seize him. Later, when I saw the movie, I too felt that the sound we had heard on the roof that night was substantially the same as the sound heard by Joseph Smith in the Grove. I suppose one cracking branch sounds the same pretty much as another cracking branch.

I did not attach much significance to the coincidence of sounds at the time, since the use of that sound in the movie appeared to be a directorial device to dramatize the scene and nothing more. . . . But many years later, I was to discover that the use of that sound to represent the presence of dark powers in the movie came not from the director's imagination, but from a lesser known account of the first vision by Joseph Smith. . . . Joseph Smith doesn't out and out say he heard a twig or a branch snapping behind him. He says, "I heard a noise behind me like someone walking toward me." A cracking branch would definitely fit that bill, although Joseph Smith does not specify it as being such.

I've bolded so much of the above to emphasize Corbin's word choice. Though there is the odd reference to a "twig" or "snapping," his overwhelming preference is for the phrase "cracking branch" (a much less common expression than "snapping twig").

This morning, after finishing Dark Star Rising, I had several choices as to what to read next, but (possibly influenced by a recent dream featuring time travel and a Jew), I ended up deciding on Red Warrior's Gift, Shaul Behr's sequel to Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox.

I've only read a few pages, but the novel's very first scene has Ari and Howard -- two classmates of high-school age, like Corbin and Bruce -- are up on a large overhanging rock overlooking a path, just as Corbin and Bruce are up on a roof. Then this happens:

Suddenly, a branch cracked behind them. They spun around to find Thaddeus [a Greek soldier] about five meters from them, his face livid beneath the layer of dust, his sword pointed right at them.

In one of the stories Corbin tells, he is taken from his bed to a field and then finds himself back in his bed again, in a completely different position. He is unable to move, and he hurts his neck trying to move his head.

I was once again back in my bedroom, lying on my back on my bed, but now I was turned end for end so that my feet were up where my pillow was and my head was at the foot of the bed. I was lying on my back with my head hanging off the end of the bed. My eyes were still open, and I was looking down at the floor at the foot of my bed, upside down. . . .

I tried to move, but once again found that my body was paralyzed. All I could move were my eyes, so I could not vocalize my prayer. I thought it instead. Not feeling that I had the time to maneuver out of this paralysis by that slow finger-by-finger method I talked about earlier, instead, I gave a mighty frantic wrench of my head, hurting my neck in the process, so that I could sit up. . . . [A]s I sat upright, I found that my body position had once again reversed itself, so that now I was sitting up as I had originally laid down, with my head on the pillow at the head of the bed, as opposed to hanging off the foot of the bed. 

Here's what happens next to the Greek soldier in Red Warrior's Gift:

When questioned later, the bewildered Thaddeus could not recall how it had happened: one moment he was brandishing a sword at two apparently helpless Hebrew youths; the next he found himself suspended facedown from a nearby terebinth tree, a thick branch threaded through the backplate of his armor, and his sword nowhere to be found.

He and the three other soldiers who are with him then hear a voice behind them:

The three soldiers spun around. Thaddeus cricked his neck trying to see where the voice had come from.

So like Corbin, Thaddeus suddenly finds his body in a different position, with no memory of moving. Each man finds his movements severely limited in his new position, and each hurts his neck trying to move his head.

Update (1:00 a.m.): Just now I was listening to Whitley Strieber interview Dean Radin. Strieber says at one point, describing a close encounter, "There was a loud cracking noise. I couldn't move. I was in bed when it happened." This obviously syncs closely with the content of this post. I've read accounts of this particular experience in Strieber's books, and he usually describes it as a "crunching" sound like someone biting into an apple. But in this interview, the one I happened to listen to tonight, he said "cracking" instead.