Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion

In "A very pale White guy with a Phrygian cap" (May 23), I referred to my habit of clicking for randomly selected /x/ threads as a "sort of cleromancy" -- meaning divination by casting lots. It's not really proper divination as I practice it, though, since I generally just click without any question in mind.

This evening I decided to try it as actual divination, with a query. Having just received an email wondering about Debbie's "part in things" -- meaning the question of why the sync fairies brought us together and what role she is meant to play -- I concentrated on that question and clicked for a random thread. I got this one from October 3, 2013. The OP just says "Lets go. Creepy gif/images thread. gimme your best" and opens with this image:

It appears to show a woman levitating, which fits. Debbie frequently mentions levitation, and one of the first things she told me when first began communicating in 2021 was that she had started having levitation dreams in 1965 and that a past-life reader had told her in 1974 that she had "had the power of levitation" in a past incarnation. A reply in the /x/ thread identified the photo:

This is by Colette Saint Yves, a French photographer. I think it's called Levitation.

The attribution appears to be correct. See for example "Ten pictures by… Colette Saint Yves."

Then I noticed the date of the post: October 3. Wait, wasn't that the date that Debbie first contacted me? I searched my email and found that first message. It's timestamped October 4, 2021, at 10:00 a.m., which would still have been October 3 in Debbie's time zone. She begins with "My name is Debbie and today I found your blog while researching a dream that I had today" -- and follow-up messages make it clear that the date of the dream was October 3, 2021.

Revisiting that old email exchange just now, I found that Debbie's second email to me, sent the next day, mentions both levitation and "a 1960's TV show called The Ed Sullivan Show." In my last post, "Four-legged insects, six-legged spiders, and eight-legged crabs," I quoted a passage from Remarkably Bright Creatures in which a Sullivan family takes in an eight-legged crab which they name Eddie.

I'm not sure my question has really been answered, but it's definitely been acknowledged.

⁂

The OP on the /x/ thread had two direct replies, one of which I have already quoted. The other just says "is this one legit?" When I clicked to see that one, I noticed another message a little further down on the screen:

I hadn't scrolled through the thread at all at this point. I had only clicked for the two direct replies. When I saw the post circled above, though -- "oh fuck, that freaked me the fuck out as a kid" -- I immediately knew what it was referring to: the scene in the 1989 film Communion in which a Gray peeks out from behind a door. Kids get freaked the fuck out by any number of things, of course, but somehow I knew with complete certainty that the post was referring to that particular scene in that particular movie. I clicked to see what it was replying to, and confirmed what I already knew:

I had been primed to think of that because last night I was thinking about Alfred Molina -- the actor who plays both Otto "Doctor Octopus" Octavius and Marcellus the octopus -- and had the thought that the Communion movie (starring Christopher Walken, with a soundtrack by Eric Clapton) was directed by someone named Molina. I had misremembered; the director's name is Philippe Mora, not Molina. But in looking that information up, I had somehow ended up not on Wikipedia or IMDb but on a 2008 blog post called "Communion | kindertrauma," which focuses on that very scene. Here's the opening paragraph:

What is up with COMMUNION, the 1989 CHRISTOPHER WALKEN movie based on WHITLEY STRIEBER's best seller about alien abduction? A thread on IMDb's discussion board for the film entitled "Worth seeing for one scene" currently has 91 responses. Somebody hit a nerve. The scene in question takes place early in the film where WALKEN, as STRIEBER, wakes up in the middle of the night and wonders aloud if there is another presence in the room. His suspicion is validated in the form of a half obscured, dark-eyed alien face staring back at him. Many who had watched the film as children claim that this scene still remains the scariest that they have ever witnessed, some revealing that it still haunts them even to this very day. It is undeniably eerie, but its real strength lies in the fact that it strikes a familiar, recognizable cord. Who amongst us, especially as children, has not awoken in the dark with just such a feeling? Squinting our eyes, trying to make out shapes, perhaps not being too comforted by what we imagine we see lurking in the shadows.

I never watched that movie until I was in college, but I got my own Communion-induced "kindertrauma" in book form. Far and away the scariest thing I've ever read. Whit originally wanted to call the book Body Terror, which would have been truth in advertising.

Whit has also experienced levitation, by the way, and wrote about it in Transformation.

Four-legged insects, six-legged spiders, and eight-legged crabs

In "The ladybird, the six-legged spider, and the dandelion" (May 2025), I discuss this image from an English book for preschoolers:

I noted that the black bug looks a lot like a spider but quoted some kids saying this about it:

"Is that one a spider?" asked one of the kids in Chinese.

"No," said one of the others. "It has six legs. If it has six legs, you can be 100% sure it's not a spider."

I then noted Bill's objection to this reasoning:

Bill protested that a spider could have six legs, if it had lost some of its original eight, and in support of this he connected the spider with the octopus and brought in the logo of Hydra, an evil organization in Marvel superhero movies, which looks like an octopus with six tentacles and which has definite Ungoliant energy.

I conceded his point:

I found this synchronistic reasoning convincing. I noted that the the smaller ladybird illustrating the word bug in the sentence above even has four legs, reinforcing the idea that leg-counting is not an infallible way of classifying arthropods.

So we have a ladybird with four legs instead of the usual six, and a spider with six legs instead of the usual eight. As mentioned above, Bill has seen the octopus as being essentially the same symbol as the spider, and the same is true of the crab.

Last night I read this in the novel Remarkably Bright Creatures, the title of which refers to the octopus.

At sunset, Sowell Bay’s public beach teems with rock crabs. One summer when Erik was small, the Sullivans were on an after-dinner walk when Erik found one who, by some cruel fate, had lost its hind legs on one side. Naturally, he insisted on bringing it home. He named it Eight-Legged Eddie because it was supposed to have ten limbs and was missing two.

This repeats the theme of arthropods with two fewer legs than the usual number, and the eight-legged crab also reinforces the symbolic connection between the crab and the spider.

The Z-L swap and the sons of Jared

Last night I listened to a Zion Media video about the Mentinah Archives, a.k.a. Nemenhah Papers, which I guess would be classified as channeled Book of Mormon apocrypha. That made me think of the channeled Book of Mormon apocrypha my own circle is into -- Daymon Smith's Words books -- so I searched YouTube with various keywords to see if his books had any footprint on that platform. Apparently not, or not the channeled books, anyway. Putting in a broader search for book of mormon tolkien, I found this Ganesh Cherian video, released on May 26:

I'm familiar with Ganesh, who mostly comes to boring anti-Mormon conclusions but notices some interesting facts along the way. His work prompted my January 2025 post "The parallelism in Mosiah 9-10," for example. So I gave it a listen. This part caught my attention:

Alma 37 also talks about the directors that Joseph is using, including a seer stone called Galezem, which Joseph uses later as a code word to refer to himself in Doctrine and Covenants revelations. 

It really is a pity that we don't have the lost manuscript. It would tell us so much about the development of Joseph and his world view and this mythical world that he is creating in the moment. But we are fortunate to have The Hobbit which tells us a lot about Tolkien's early adventurous spirit and the ways that he expanded that then on into the Lord of the Rings series.

One of the cute similarities between The Lord of the Rings and the Book of Mormon is the idea of quests and the fact that there are four usually young men sent out to perform some kind of incredible task. In the Lord of the Rings, these four young men are Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry, and they're sent on this grand quest by none other than Gandalf the Grey, who's this great wizard who during the process elevates into Gandalf the White with his increased knowledge and understanding. In the Book of Mormon, it starts off with Lehi as a visionary prophet who sends his four sons, Nephi, Sam, Laman, and Lemuel, to retrieve the records of his people. And this is repeated again when King Mosiah sends his sons Aaron, Ammon, Omner, and Himni off to the Lamanites to preach to them and to recover them to the true nature of the gospel. And then with the Jaredites in the book of Ether, there are four sons of Jared, who's kind of the founder of this new world, and his sons' names are Jacom, Gilgah, Mahah, and Orihah. The idea of a wise seer sending out four companions to find treasure, to uncover something special, or to inhabit a land is a really interesting idea that permeates the Lord of the Rings and throughout the Book of Mormon,

The sons of Lehi and the sons of Mosiah both work as groups of four men sent on some sort of mission or quest -- but the four sons of Jared? Except for Orihah, who goes on to become a king, they literally don't do anything at all in the Book of Mormon. They list the four names, and that's it. Seeing this as a parallel to Tolkien is pretty weird. In Daymon Smith's work, though -- which is what occasioned the search that led me to this video -- the four sons of Jared are much more substantial characters, particularly Jacom.

The other thing I've bolded in the transcript above is the error Galezem. In fact the word is Gazelem in the Book of Mormon, and Gazelam in the Doctrine and Covenants. The specific error Ganesh makes here -- putting z in the place of l and vice versa -- is also an indirect link to Daymon's channeled work. When I started posting about William Alizio on this blog, Bill mentioned that he kept misremembering the name as Azilio. It turns out that this error was caused by his familiarity with Daymon's work, as Daymon twice uses the word azilio in the writing-in-tongues portion of his first Words book.

A gal named Gal and the rollin' Mississippi

In a comment on yesterday's "Julio-Claudian octopods and cats named Cat," I wrote:

I happen to be feeding a stray tom these days in addition to the permanent-resident felines. It is my practice to name everything, though, so the stray is called Timofey.

One of my own toms is called Scipio on account of his uncanny facial resemblance to a particular bronze bust of that general, so there's an indirect link to Octavius and Marcellus. I don't suppose it's terribly common to name either cats or octopuses after figures from Roman history.

Cat as a name has been in the sync stream in the person of Cat Stevens. I suppose a guy named Guy (Fawkes) is also not dissimilar to a cat named Cat. It's a pity he never got to meet the gal named Gal (Gadot).

That's actually an oversimplification of how Scipio got his name. When we first took him and his sister in, I immediately saw the black tom's resemblance to this bust of Scipio Africanus and wanted to name him after it. (Apparently, the bust is no longer believed to depict Scipio.)

However, my wife had already named his sister Arizona because of a dream she had had, so she thought the brother should be named after a state as well. Just then, the black tom started rolling around on the floor, which made me think of the Doobie Brothers song:

Old black water, keep on rollin'

Mississippi moon, won't you keep on shinin' on me?

And so he was named Mississippi. I didn't even notice at the time the similarity to Scipio (which we Americans pronounce with a silent c; really, Brits? Skippy-o?). Later, both cats' names were abbreviated. Arizona became Zoe, and my wife at first started calling Mississippi Missy. I insisted that was too girly for a tom, though, so his abbreviated name became Sippi instead, and this soon evolved back into the name I had originally proposed: Scipio.

After the mention of Scipio, my comment talks about a guy named Guy and a gal named Gal. After I posted that, it reminded me of the They Might Be Giants song "They'll Need a Crane," which I hadn't listened to in many years. The two main characters in the lyrics are referred to as Lad and Gal as if those where their names:

Lad's gal is all he has

Gal's gladness hangs upon the love of lad

The love of lad

Some things gal says to lad 

Aren't meant as bad but cause a little pain

They cause him pain

At that time I just thought this. I didn't listen to the song, didn't look up the lyrics, and didn't write or even say anything about it. Nevertheless, when I opened up the YouTube Music app this morning and put on one of the algorithm-generated playlists, the third song it played -- after "Norwegian Wood" and Eric Clapton's "Change the World" -- was "They'll Need a Crane." Immediately after that was Emily Linge singing "Proud Mary" by CCR.

I'm not really familiar with "Proud Mary," but once it started I recognized it as something I'd heard before. The chorus, like that of "Black Water" by the Doobie Brothers, says "keep on" and "rollin'" and is about the Mississippi River.

Big wheel keep on turnin'

Proud Mary keep on burnin'

Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river

Julio-Claudian octopods and cats named Cat

Not only does Alfred Molina play both Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2 and an actual octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures, but the names of the characters also sync. Doc Ock's real name is Otto Octavius, while the octopus in Creatures is called Marcellus. In Roman history, Octavius is the birth name of Caesar Augustus, and Marcellus is his nephew.

In Creatures, the main human character begins feeding a stray cat and names it Cat. In Noah Hypnotik, which I read very recently, there is a long summary of the cat-named-Cat subplot in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Evil twins and the Odyssey

Three days ago, on May 24, I posted "Charlie Kirk, Ulysses, and twin flames," part of which deals with the They Might Be Giants song "My Evil Twin" and why I have interpreted it as being about Odysseus.

Today, fishing for new alt-Mormon content on YouTube, I was putting in various search prompts that I thought might turn up off-the-correlated-path "deep doctrine" kind of stuff. One of these returned a Mormon Stories episode called "The Ancient Devil & Joseph Smith w/ John Larsen | Ep. 1839." Mormon Stories is mostly normie content, but the title was sufficiently intriguing -- the way it specified "the ancient devil" suggested that it might refer to some other being than the common-or-garden devil -- that I gave it a chance.

It soon became clear that all they meant by "the ancient devil" was the devil as portrayed in (or retroactively inserted into) the Old Testament, and that the presenter's research on the topic had been a bit sloppy, so I stopped listening maybe a quarter of the way in. I found a sync right at the beginning, though. Here's how it starts:

John Dehlin: Welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin, with goatee. It is November 21st, 2023, and we are super excited to have back on Mormon Stories Podcast the John Larson and the Carah Burrell, or NuanceHoe. It is another John Larson Carah Burrell Mormon Stories episode - woohoo!

John Larson: How do we know -- you got the goatee and the black hat -- how do we know that you're the actual John Dehlin and not the evil twin?

Wondering if there might be other synchronistic links to my "My Evil Twin" post, but not wanting to listen to the whole thing, I opened the transcript and word-searched it for Odyssey references. I found a hit, but it's an obvious error:

right so the The Odyssey is God the author of evil or is he subjected to it and I would think that it's clear from these passages and maybe we have to uh knit them together a little bit that Smith's theodicy meaning Smith's solution to the problem of evil is to place evil outside of God

Obviously the speaker said theodicy, not The Odyssey. Scott Alexander uses this pun in Unsong, where a particular house is known as Ithaca because "it's where theodicy happens."

Powerless

Last night, Laeth sent me an epub of his latest novel, Powerless. I haven't started reading it yet, but I know in a general way what it's about. In the author's May 5 post "about a shift," he explained that it was inspired by a day last year when "the power went out for the entire iberian peninsula for ten hours" -- so the title most literally refers to being without electrical power, but this setting is "used to tell stories about human powerlessness against the randomness of life." Particularly, the novel focuses on "failure to communicate," with the failure of electrical communications systems mirroring failures of a more social or spiritual nature: People "can’t use their phones to call, but also can’t talk properly to the people next to them."

During my lunch break today, I was about to start reading Powerless, but I decided that I really ought to finish at least one or two of the other books I'm currently reading before starting a new one. So instead of starting Laeth's book, I continued with Remarkably Bright Creatures. On p. 75, I read this:

Cameron's phone battery blinks red, nearly drained. He digs in the bottom of his duffel for his charging cord, but it's sitting on Katie's nightstand. He can practically see it there. Left behind, leaving him literally powerless.

Katie is Cameron's former live-in girlfriend, who has just kicked him out. The issue was communication, or the lack thereof.