Failure to wake up

I'm breaking my radio silence just this once, due to an urgent sense that someone needs to read this now, or at least sometime before my scheduled resumption of posting. This is, God willing and the crick don't rise, the last post you'll get until January 17. One mustn't be too inflexible.

I think most people have experienced this from time to time: You have a dream that ends with some sort of loud noise which starts to sound more and more like your alarm clock, and then you wake up. The dreaming mind tries at first to incorporate the noise into the dream, but as the noise persists, this becomes harder and harder to do, until finally the spell is broken and you wake.

⁂

Last night I slept very deeply and had two long, detailed dreams.

The first was a discourse on how the eyes of "halflings" (hobbits) differ from our own. They can perceive shortwave infrared and also, strangely, hear it. They perceive it with their eyes, not their ears, but by some quirk of their brain circuitry, the visual qualia are accompanied by a sort of shrill hissing sound, louder as the IR radiation is "brighter." I tried to imagine what this would be like, and how strange it would be for too much infrared to make it hard to hear other things.

The second dream was set in southern India, perhaps somewhere in Goa or thereabouts, where I discovered that an Indian man had surreptitiously "borrowed" my motorcycle ignition key and made a copy of it. At first I assumed that this was so that he could later use the bike without my knowledge or consent, but later I encountered him trying to sell someone a car, and the key for this car was the copy he had made of my own key. So instead of stealing my motorcycle, he had apparently made a car so that it would be easy for me to steal. The motive behind this was opaque.

I was traveling with an Indian woman, and I began to suspect that she was this man's accomplice and had facilitated the theft of the key. Later, this woman asked me, "What do you think of Hagar?" After thinking first of Abraham's concubine and then of the comic-strip Viking, I said, "Sammy Hagar? I don't know much about him. Why?" She said, "I'm sleeping with his stepson." I thought this was meant to impress me, and it reminded me of a waking-life incident when I was 17 and one of my professors kept trying to set me up with her daughter. For some reason, she thought I would be impressed to hear that her daughter had once dated Marilyn Manson, but I was so out of touch with popular culture that I assumed she was talking about some sort of lesbian liaison.

⁂

I was then awoken in the early hours of the morning by my wife coming to bed. She had been unable to sleep, she said, and had sat up reading for a while.

We both lay down, and before I had fallen asleep again, my alarm rang. I remembered that, wanting to get some things done in the morning before work, I had set two alarms: my usual one and another an hour earlier. That way, if I was too tired to get up early, I could just go back to sleep until the second alarm.

I reached for my phone to turn off the alarm but found that I couldn't. I tried various things, and finally tried to power off the phone itself, but nothing worked. Then I realized that it wasn't my phone. "Sorry," I said to my wife. "I grabbed yours by mistake."

I found my own phone on the bed and again tried to turn off the alarm, but I soon discovered that this wasn't my phone either, but rather the old GPS device we used to use in the pre-smartphone days.

I found yet another phone on the bed and picked it up. Was the sound coming from this one? Was it vibrating? I couldn't really tell. Then I noticed it had a keypad and must be one of my wife's old phones.

This continued for what seemed like an impossibly long time. I wanted to ask my wife why she had kept so many of her old phones and put them all on the bed, but she had somehow fallen asleep, despite the continual racket of the alarm, and I didn't want to bother her. Having exhausted the bedroom, I ventured out into the study, the bathroom, the balcony, trying to find where I had put my phone. I never did find it. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the alarm stopped, and I went back to sleep.

After what felt like a very brief period of dreamless sleep, the alarm sounded again. I woke up, immediately found my phone on the nightstand, and turned off the alarm. My wife was not in the room. I remembered that she was sleeping in the guest room on another floor because I had been snoring. Th clock showed that this was my second alarm.

Apparently, the first alarm had sounded for the full 30 minutes it takes for it to shut itself off, but despite hearing it very clearly and recognizing it as my alarm, I had failed to wake up. Why? Because it fit too well into my dream, and the longer it continued, the better it fit into the dream's developing storyline. Thus it could not shock me into enlightenment. I could not recognize it as something coming from outside the dream world, calling me to wake up into a different world. I was in no such dream when the second alarm rang, and thus woke up effortlessly.

⁂

Upon waking, for real, I immediately thought that this experience was meant to teach me something. It seems likely that some of us, before incarnating, will arrange for certain experiences to happen at some point in our mortal lives to wake us up, to help us remember who we are and what we're supposed to be doing. But if this wake-up call fits too neatly into our mortal life -- if we reach the point where impossible things become "normal" and are accepted as part of life -- it fails. I thought of a Russian rhyme I learned ages ago:

Я живу и не тужу,

Потому что я жужжу!

Loosely translated:

I live my life, and nothing upsets me,

Because I buzz.

If you're always buzzing, the buzz of the alarm is without effect.

I think this is one of the purposes of the current hiatus, during which syncs have slowed to a manageable trickle. This is going back to sleep after the first alarm has gone on and on and on, in the hope that the second will do the trick.

⁂

Thinking about this on the road today, I thought that perhaps people whose "normal life" is very normal indeed might more readily awaken into another world -- and for some reason, as (rather dubious) examples of this, I thought of Ted Rice, whose story is told in Karla Turner's Masquerade of Angels, and of Karla Turner herself. Just then, a motorcyclist pulled in front of me with this on her backpack. At the next red light, I snapped a photo.

This is the black-and-white cover of my bootleg copy of Karla Turner's Into the Fringe:

I will have more to say about Dr. Turner at a later date, but now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to sleep. My second alarm is set for January 17.

This blog is on hiatus until January 17, 2027

Mark your calendars, and in the meantime find something else to read.

Note added: For those who have asked, nothing is wrong, and my decision has nothing to do with any of the commenters here. I just need to take a break to focus on another project, which I cannot share with the public at this time, and which I anticipate will be finished by the date indicated. My other blogs will be on hiatus as well, but my posting there is already so irregular that perhaps no one will notice. Emails are still welcome, though (as usual) timely replies are not guaranteed.

Traveling eternity road in a Suit of Many Colors

Over lunch, I read in Normon Spinrad's sci-fi novel Child of Fortune about Pater Pan, known for his distinctive patchwork Traje de Luces, or Suit of Many Colors, deciding to leave the planet where he is the king of the Gypsy Jokers, intending to travel to every single inhabited planet, in search of immortality.

This reminded me of something I saw here in Taiwan roughly 20 years ago. I thought I might still have a photo of it somewhere, but I can't seem to find it. It was a box of tissues, on the bottom of which were these lines of English verse:

We wish for eternal life

It may be all that will suffice

Like the myriad clothes we wear

We will wish everywhere

I connected this with Pater Pan because of his Traje de Luces, made up of patches taken from countless garments, so that he is in a sense wearing "myriad clothes"; and because his "wish for eternal life" is going to take him "everywhere" in the inhabited universe.

The association of eternal life with space travel made me think of the Ray Thomas song "Eternity Road," from the Moody Blues' 1969 concept album To Our Children's Children's Children.

Approximately 10 minutes after reading that passage in Child of Fortune and thinking of the tissue box and the Moody Blues song, I was on the road, and this scooter stopped in front of me at a red light.

The lady on the scooter is wearing a garishly colorful jacket -- suggestive of Pater Pan's Suit of Many Colors -- with the word ETERNITY in big letters. As in the Moody Blues song, she's on the road, and the alphabetic portion of her license plate is MDY, suggesting Moody.

An MDY plate that reminded be of the Moody Blues was previously featured on this blog, in "The Moody Blues, Embody the Soul, snails and ammonites, stars and stones, blue ball of light" (September 2023).

⁂

Note added: I guess I'll put this here, since it relates to Child of Fortune. A few nights ago I had a dream of which I can't remember much except that people in the dream referred to me as Fortune. In a moment of hypnopompic lucidity, I thought, "Oh, that must mean that the point-of-view character in this dream is not me but Dion Fortune." Upon fully waking, I of course realized that Fortune could just as easily refer to me. As mentioned in "Voyage d'ark" (May 12), I bought Child of Fortune "for no other reason than that it had my name on it."

Speaking of voyages d'ark, I recently started reading The Synchronicity Key by David Wilcock. I'd been exploring those strange corners of the Internet where Mormonism overlaps with Raëlian-style Space Brothers beliefs, and Wilcock's name kept coming up. When I looked him up, I naturally chose to start with the book with synchronicty in the title. I downloaded it, not really knowing what to expect, and was surprised to find in the table of contents that the 12th chapter is titled "Joan of Arc Rises Again."

Agog for the Cola Wars

As I have mentioned before, I regularly have to create cloze tests for which write a brief article using a dozen or so of the vocabulary items from a list the students have memorized. I then blank out those words, and the students have to decide which word goes in which blank. Since the lists of target words have no thematic unity (Paul Nation has shown to my satisfaction that memorizing groups of semantically related words is less effective), coming up with a topic which can incorporate several words from the list is an enjoyable challenge, and past topics have ranged from Stonehenge to sleeping sickness to the Gunpowder Plot. Yesterday (August 1), inspired by the inclusion of the words sip and similarity on the target list, I wrote an article about Coke, Pepsi, and the Cola Wars.

Today I was catching up on some blogs and read Maolsheachlann's post "The First Defenestration of Prague," which was published on July 30 but which I did not read until just now. It's a list of historical events that have "unique and often poetic names," and here's how the post ends:

The Battle of Britpop: When Oasis and Blur both released their new singles on the same day in 1995, prompting intense media speculation on which of them would reach number one. Blur won the battle, although Oasis won the war. (I like to joke: "I saw some hard times. I lived through the Cola Wars and the Battle of Britpop.")

You get the point. Any other suggestions? I'm agog.

Janelle Monae doesn't really enunciate the final consonant in cold, and I like to imagine that she's singing, "This is a Cola War / You better know what you're fighting for."

Maolsheachlann's use of agog -- the last word in his post -- reminded me of "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose" (March 2024), in which I tried to decipher some of Bill's "words." Here's what I wrote about a gog:

a gog:

The sync fairies seem to be insisting that this is what G stands for. Gog is proper name, so the use of a is anomalous. Various interpretations suggest themselves. It could mean not the Gog but just a Gog, or it could be meant to suggest the word agog -- which could be (a) the English adverb, (b) the Greek for "leader," or (c) a word halfway between Gog and Magog. I don't really get what Gog means, even at the symbolic level, so I'm not really sure where to go with this.

Then in the comments I added

Perhaps a gog relates to French à gogo, "galore."

The Janelle Monae song, with it's repeated lines "You better know what you're fighting for" and "Do you know what you're fighting for?" made me think of the Country Joe and the Fish song "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" (1967).

I don't know that song at all well. I didn't even know what it was called or who sang it until I looked it up just now. I was thinking of these lines from the chorus:

And it's 1, 2, 3

What are we fighting for?

When I looked up the lyrics, I was surprised to find that they also include this:

Well come on Wall Street don't move slow

Why man, this is war-a-go-go

Misinformation about a big light

Yesterday, Maolsheachlann posted "A Big Light on Misinformation," owning up to a blatant falsehood he had been peddling about what those big lights on movie sets are called. He vowed to Do Better and to "work hard to regain the trust of my blog readers."

This morning, I read this in Missing Time (1981) by Budd Hopkins (italics in the original, boldface added):

“Sure, I knew him,” said the lieutenant. “He used to work nights. I came in about six-thirty that morning and he had some wild story about this big thing with lights on it that came down in the park. He thought it was involved with the broken window, but you can’t believe a story like that. He must’ve been drinking or something.”

Apparently misinformation about big lights has been a problem for decades. Truly there is nothing new under the sun.

From snowy crown to frizzen feet

In "Many are cold, but few are frozen" (July 25), I quote a reference in Elias: An Epic of the Ages to one of the mountains of Utah (Mt. Nebo?) as a "hermit of the hills" with important knowledge stored in his "frozen snow-crown." Then, in "Cold but not frozen" (July 26), I quote from a loose translation of Balzac the line "My feet are frizzen," with the context making it clear that the last word is a humorous alteration of frozen.

Today I read in the final canto of Elias this personification of "Zion's land," understood by the poet to include the entirety of the Americas:

She sits, a sovereign queen, ice-crowned, to lave

Her glowing hands in tropic tides, while brave

Her snowy feet in faith the southern sea.

Again it is specific the crown and the feet that are frozen. The two crown references are from the same poem, making them less of a coincidence, but the context is still quite different -- the peak of a mountain vs. the Arctic "crown" of a continent. The Balzac novel, though, is very far removed from Elias, and my reason for looking up that passage (its use of the "libfix' -rama) had nothin to do with that poem or with icy imagery.

A rabbit that is seen and loved by Jesus

I dreamt the title phrase at approximately 2:40 this morning, with no context and no visual aspect.. Perhaps it means something to someone.