Budd Hopkins and rats running around

In January 2023, I posted "Gordon Lightfoot's UFO song," a post I just had occasion to refer back to last week in "Cold Brother, the Background Brethren, and Christopher Walken." The 2023 post included this account of a dream:

I dreamed that I was watching [the 1989 movie Communion], but some of the scenes were different. There was a scene where Strieber was having a beer with Budd Hopkins (who does not appear in the real film, having been replaced by a fictional female psychologist) and kvetching about the aliens that had been making themselves at home in his cabin. "I'm telling ya, Budd," he says, "these rats run around like they own the place!"

Tonight I listened to part of an interview with Joe Lewels on Whitley Strieber's show. Here's a transcript of the part that caught my attention:

WS: Now John [Mack] later on became much more friendly with Budd Hopkins. At that time, John was, he felt like Budd Hopkins was very wrong.

JL: Well, Budd had attacked him, and David.

WS: Yeah, I noticed that. He attacked a lot of people, including me.

JL: Yeah, yeah, for being "New Age," whatever they call it. They had a name for it, for people who though there was anything that had to do with spirituality.

WS: Or people who sold more books than they did. That was another thing. Both me and John.

JL: They were so into this atheistic way of thinking, and they never talked about their religious backgrounds. I never --

WS: Because Budd did not believe in anything. He didn't believe in the soul.

JL: I think David Jacobs was the same.

WS: I have no idea about David, but I had discussions with Budd about this, and he said that this is what we are and this is what we have.

JL: Right, so if you believe that, you run into a dead end right away with this phenomenon.

WS: Which the entire scientific community has run into. They're now at the far edge of quantum physics and can't figure out where they are.

JL: Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, they're still -- it's amazing -- our top scientists are still relying on that old kind of science that relies on the scientific method, and the scientific method relies on the idea that everything is separate. That we're separate from each other, we're separate from the planet, we're separate from the labs and the rat, the rats that are running around our maze that we do experiments on. And if everything is separate, we can study them objectively. That's the whole idea behind the scientific method.

Here's the interview. I've only listened to 15 minutes of it, so I don't know how worth listening to it is.

And here's "Circle of Steel," the Gordon Lightfoot song that Strieber was quoting in my 2023 dream:

Notice that the Strieber video is titled "Is Earth a Soul Trap?" and the thumbnail is the planet earth with a big steel chain wrapped around it. When I googled circle of steel meaning, the second result said this:

In general, he's talking about people who are living trapped in poverty on that symbolic "Wheel of Life"

Strieber's thumbnail also made me think of the similar image that occurs in Joseph Smith's account of the visions of Enoch:

And he beheld Satan; and he had a great chain in his hand, and it veiled the whole face of the earth with darkness; and he looked up and laughed, and his angels rejoiced (Moses 7:26).

"Circle of steel" is also a link to Budd Hopkins as abstract artist. He really had a thing for circles. Here are a few of his pieces. There are many, many more where these came from.

I knew nothing about Hopkins's art until I googled it just now.

To Serve Man

In the dream I posted in "Going to church on Easter Sunday," I was trying to find the hymn "Do What Is Right," which in the dream was hymn #24 (#237 in the actual CJCLDS hymnal), but discovered that the hymnal I had been given was actually a recipe book.

St. Anselm left a comment saying "Hymn #249 in the hymnal was replaced by How to Serve Man." In the real hymnal, #249 is "Called to Serve," the Mormon missionary anthem. I got the joke in a general way -- "to serve man" is ambiguous and could refer to serving human flesh as a dish, something you might find in a rather macabre recipe book -- but, not being a Boomer and having grown up in a family that didn't really watch television, I didn't get that it was a reference to a 1962 episode of  The Twilight Zone until after the googling occasioned by a follow-up comment in which Anselm wrote, "To Serve Man is episode #24 by the way." A later comment by Debbie made the allusion explicit and included a link to a clip from the episode in question:

Given that the comments about The Twilight Zone were in a post called "Going to church on Easter Sunday," with Anselm joking that an LDS hymn had been named after the episode, I thought it was bit of a sync when I checked Synlogos this morning and found a link to a post titled "From the Church of the Twilight Zone." It's tradcath kvetching about the inroads being made by Teh Gay in the Catholic Church, and it includes the following passage, which juxtaposes service with "hymn" in scare-quotes, thus linking it to the made-up hymn "How to Serve Man."

If you have the stomach for it the video of the service is here. Watching the entrance procession and the closing "hymn" with the band at the center of the sanctuary grieved my heart. Please join me in a rosary of reparation today. When the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass becomes a celebration of perversion, we should mourn and do penance.

May God have mercy on those who advance a faux church with faux sacraments and desecrate the Body and Blood of the Lord to become, not a source of salvation, but an instrument of condemnation. Pray for all the poor souls who attended that sacrileges "mass." 

The perversion she is talking about is sodomy, but if a church really did have a hymn about "how to serve man" in the cannibalistic sense, that would be a desecration of similar magnitude and might provoke a similar response. I've also bolded the phrase "faux sacraments," since that's how a Catholic might perceive the Communion in my dream, which used water in place of wine.

Around noon today, I was catching up on recent posts at Anonymous Conservative. One of the links there had the linktext "Interesting piece making the case things today could fit with the return of the Nephilim," which piqued my curiosity enough to click. It's a post from someone going by The Wise Wolf, titled "The Nephilim: Those Who from Heaven Came to Earth." The basic thesis -- that "aliens" are actually demonic beings in disguise -- is a familiar one, at least to someone with my reading habits, but one of the illustrations certainly got my attention:

It's not just an image from the "To Serve Man" episode of The Twilight Zone. It appears to be the very same still that serves as the thumbnail for the clip Debbie posted.

Seeing what hasn't happened yet

I've been reading Gary Lachman's book about precognitive dreams, Dreaming Ahead of Time. One of the points he makes is that, even compared to other forms of ESP, precognition is uniquely problematic because

knowledge of some event that hasn’t happened yet seems to contradict everything we know, or think we know, about reality.

Having just put down Lachman, I opened the YouTube Music app. The very first song the algorithm recommended was a Metric song I hadn't heard before, called "Breathing Underwater." I gave it a listen and found that the lyrics include these lines:

I can see the end

But it hasn't happened yet

I can see the end

But it hasn't happened yet

Is this my life?

Am I breathing underwater?

This repeats not just the general theme of precognition but the exact phrase "hasn't happened yet." 

Going to church on Easter Sunday

My dreaming mind is apparently rebelling against how Jewish this blog has been recently.

I dreamt that I was traveling with a group of very conservatively dressed people -- and by "conservatively," I mean they would have been considered very well-dressed in maybe the 18th century. It was Easter Sunday. We were all independent Christians who fancied ourselves much too enlightened to be churchgoers, but one of the men in the group said that we should definitely go to church on Easter Sunday just to "stick it to the Man" -- meaning, I thought, to show solidarity with Christendom in defiance of the anti-Christian powers that be.

The church we were going to was one none of us had ever been to before. It was not in a building of its own but in an upstairs floor of an old stone building. We had to go up a big stone spiral staircase to get to the entrance.

Throughout the dream, I simultaneously thought of it as a Protestant church and therefore somewhat exotic (a handful of Lutheran and True Jesus services being the extent of my experience) and as a Latter-day Saint church about which I, having been raised in that tradition, would know more than the other members of the group. (I never said or thought the word "Mormon," though. Russell M. Nelson would have been proud.)

The church was rather grand-looking inside, and everyone in it was, like my traveling companions, dressed like 18th-century gentry in their Sunday best. I was impressed and said something like, "I should give the Protestants a fair shake, I guess. They're not all electric guitars and 'we just wanna thank you Lord' after all."

(Note added: I forgot to mention that I myself was not well-dressed at all. I was wearing jeans and a black Hawaiian-style shirt printed with large white flowers.)

During the service, someone started setting up equipment in the back of the chapel to record the sermon. One of the women in the congregation stood up and insisted that they stop immediately. "That is not permitted," she said, speaking very clearly and emphasizing the words I have italicized. "The only record is to be made by Father, who will distribute it to anyone who wants it. You must disconnect your equipment. You are in honor bound."

All the congregants said in unison, "And so say all of us." I understood that any point of order required this ritual assent of the entire congregation. (In real life, I associate that line with the lighthearted song "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," but in the dream it was completely convincing as something people would say in a rather formal church service.)

When it came time for Communion, most of our group opted not to participate, thinking it inappropriate to take Communion in a church where we were not members. Two of our party did go up to the altar to receive it, though. I said to the woman on my left, "They're going to be surprised when it's bread and water instead of wafers and wine." That is, I understood that this would a Latter-day Saint sacrament. It wasn't served that way, though, with deacons walking through the pews passing around "sacrament trays" with pieces of bread and disposable cups of water. Rather, communicants went to the altar and were given a piece of bread and a sip of water from a very simple glass chalice.

Then it was time to sing a hymn -- "Do What Is Right, Let the Consequence Follow." I again thought I would be helpful with my LDS background and help the others find the right page in the hymnal. It was (in the dream) hymn number 24.

When I tried to turn to it, though, I found that there was something wrong with my hymnal. "This isn't a hymnal," I said to the woman on my right (one of the congregation members, not part of my group), who had given it to me. "This is a recipe book!"

"Are you sure?" she said. "I gave you four hymnals just to be safe. I'm sure they can't all be recipe books!"

Poltergeists and spiders (and the Shadow, and Hermes, and Thoth, and Debbie's dress)

This past weekend, we finally got around to repairing the last of the damage done by the 2019 poltergeist. (One of the doorknobs it broke turned out to be pretty hard to find a replacement for.) As you may recall, my wife had a strong sense that the geist was in some way a spider:

When a brass doorknob somehow spontaneously cut itself neatly in half, we began to get the feeling that something paranormal was involved.

Then classic "poltergeist" phenomena began. Strong odors, such as sulfur and camphor, would suddenly appear and disappear. Small objects, especially shoes, would suddenly jump up, fly across the room, or skitter across the floor. I had a very strong sense that I was being watched, and by something that was not human. I had a vague sense that it felt like "some kind of animal," while my wife had a much more specific apprehension of it as a spider. Sometimes a brief image of an enormous spider would suddenly flash across her mind. She began to be quite frightened and to press me to "do something" about it.

Cleaning out one of my email inboxes today, I found an October 18 notification from WordPress that someone had "liked" a post on one of my old blogs. Here's a screenshot of the message:

WordPress suggested three posts from this person: "The Eight Stages of a Poltergeist Haunting," "The Spider in Celtic Myth," and "Fear Dorcha: Shadow Creature from the Land of the Celts." You don't see poltergeists and spiders juxtaposed too often. My posts about our own poltergeist haunting have been here, not on my WordPress blog, so it seems unlikely that my posting influenced which specific posts WordPress chose to recommend.

The post this person liked, "Why Waite switched Justice and Strength," is pretty critical of the Rider-Waite deck, which has since become the main deck I work with. (I formerly favored the Tarot de Marseille.) This is a reminder that I've promised Bruce a post about how and why the Rider-Waite eventually won me over. I'll get around to it one of these days, Bruce, just as I did eventually get that doorknob replaced!

Note added (11:30 p.m.): It was the poltergeist an spider posts that got my attention, but then I realized that the Shadow (the pulp-magazine character) had also been in the sync stream, so I checked out the third link, about a "Shadow Creature" called Fear Dorcha ("the dark man"). At the end of the post, after the comments, it says this:

Pingback: Sons of Dionysos | Aldrin is the Hermês Boy

Normally, that sort of thing would be a link you can click on, but in this case it isn't. Searching the web for "aldrin is the hermes boy" yielded zero results -- because, if you can believe it, Google is now so dysfunctional that if you omit the circumflex over the e it can't imagine what you were looking for. Searching with the circumflex, I found a blog called Aldrin is the Hermês Boy, which hasn't been updated since 2013 and which has nothing about sons of Dionysos or Fear Dorcha. Finally, after following three successive links-to-my-new-blog, and switching browsers to get past a "privacy error" in Brave, I found the post in question: "Sons of Dionysos," which does indeed link back to the Fear Dorcha post. It's apparently by a gay mestizo Filipino who adheres to Greco-Roman neo-paganism. (I thought that might be a joke, but apparently it's legit.)

The about page on the first blog I found specifies that the Hermês Boy moniker refers to "Hermês the god, not the bag." This is a sync because I discovered this guy's series of blogs due to a synchronistic interest in the Shadow. The post that first brought up the Shadow, "Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger," also deals with Hermes Trismegistus, who according to Wikipedia "originated as a syncretic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth."

Going back to that Wikipedia article now to get the quote, I noticed this image of a turquoise-colored statue of Thoth.

That blue-green Egyptian figure, with a mane suggestive of a pharaonic headdress, is obviously related to this picture from a dress belonging to commenter Debbie:

The above photo of the dress was belatedly added to the same post that introduced the Shadow and Hermes Trismegistus. The reason for its inclusion was that it resembled a character from a music video who in turn resembled a dream-image of Hermes Trismegistus.

"Low-level" superhuman strength

Last night I was skimming the Wikipedia page on the Shadow. The sidebar listed one of his abilities as "Low-level superhuman strength (able to lift a sturdy armored car with only one hand)." Doesn't sound too "low-level" to me!

Today I read this in Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox. Ari has been met at the airport in Israel by a very large man, "seven and a half feet tall, maybe eight." Ari thinks of him as a "giant," but so far he doesn't appear to be a giant in any supernatural sense, just a very tall man. When it's time to leave the airport, this happens:

He set Ari’s bags down on the sidewalk, then positioned himself behind the trunk of the sports car. He leaned over the trunk, reached his enormous arms in a kind of embrace around the back of the car, and gripping it firmly, he lifted it clear into the air. Ari goggled as the giant pivoted and staggered about twenty meters over to a vacant parking space, and gently lowered the BMW into the space.

He needed two hands. And just for a little two-seater sports car, not a sturdy armored car. Very low-level superhuman strength by the standard set by the Shadow.

When I went back to Wikipedia to get the quote for this post, I found that I had misread it. The Shadow is actually able to lift a sturdy armored warrior with one hand. I misread it first, though, and read the scene in Ari Barak later, so it still counts as a sync.

Melatonin and a black fedora

Yesterday, en route to archive.org, I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got #31375960. It begins with this photo of dried "Montemorency" (sic) cherries and the question "Does this food cause you to have the most absurd dreams?"

The thread then rather weirdly turned to the question (seldom asked!) of whether eating tart cherries was a sin -- apparently because they contain the hormone melatonin. As one post said,

Taking melatonin would be a sin regardless of if we produce it. Actually this is a really good example,

>naturally producing melatonin = good

>artificial increasing melatonin levels = sin

Get it?

This led me to read up a bit on melatonin, which I hadn't really known anything about. I recognized it as the name of a hormone but prior to the reading inspired by this thread I wouldn't have been able to tell you anything about its effects. One of the things I learned is that melatonin pills are sometimes used to treat insomnia, jet lag, and other sleep issues. (I never suffer from insomnia or jet lag and am certainly not deficient in the "most absurd dreams" department, so my reading was just out of disinterested curiosity.)

This morning, I started reading a free sample of Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox by Rabbi Shaul Behr, the religious Jewish young adult sci-fi novel whose accompanying music video (how many novels have that?) was the subject of my last post, "Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger." I found this on p. 24. Ari Barak, the young protagonist, is on a plane to Israel and has just scared his elderly seatmate into business class by talking too much.

Ari had been disappointed, but it did come with the upside of having two seats to himself. So he had davened Maariv in his seat, popped some melatonin pills, and curled up to sleep with his legs stretched out, appreciating one of the advantages of being shorter than average.

How shockingly sinful! And just after davening Maariv, too! (Praying the evening prayer service. Footnotes explain all the Jewish lingo)

The cover art on the free sample pdf is different from that in the music video. Since the cover art was synchronistically important, I checked Amazon to see what cover art the published version had. (It's the music-video version.) While there, I noticed this:

The photos on Rabbi Behr's website, where I got the free sample, show him wearing a yarmulke, but his Amazon bio not only shows him in a black fedora but highlights it in the very first sentence. My sync post about the "Free Will Paradox" music video included a pulp-cover picture of the Shadow, whose big nose and black fedora I said made him look "something like a stereotypical Jew."

Incidentally, Lewis Carroll never specifies what kind of tarts the Knave of Hearts stole (theories include pepper and treacle), but artists usually portray them as red and thus possibly cherry. Eating tart cherries may or may not be a sin, but eating stolen cherry tarts certainly is!

Note added: I forgot to mention that the reason I was going to archive.org, getting the tart-cherry melatonin thread en route, was specifically to see if they had Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox, the very book in which I later found a melatonin reference. So that's a pretty direct link,