Philip as a Christmas reindeer in polyvalent perspective

With sufficient sleep deprivation, you get to the point where you can be fully conscious, close your eyes for a second, and immediately enter REM without skipping a beat. (I believe Salvador Dalí used to do this.) Open your eyes again, and you're back in the waking world, without the break in continuity (and amnesia) that usually accompanies waking from a dream.

I get junk mail almost every day from Academia.edu. About half of these are notifications that some poor schmuck from Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest has once again mistaken me for a Shakespeare scholar and cited me in a paper, and the other half are recommendations of papers having to do with the Fourth Gospel.

A few days ago, after 50 hours or so without sleep, I checked my email and found an Academia.edu missive of the latter kind, giving me a heads-up regarding the publication of "'Come and See!' Philip as a Connective Figure in the Fourth Gospel in Polyvalent Perspective" by Paul somebody. (I didn't click to see the rest of his name.) I closed my eyes and proceeded to read the paper chez Morphée.

The opening sentence was: "Philip first appears as a Christmas reindeer, with horns upon his head." As I read it, I had a clear vision of Philip -- as a man, not a reindeer, but wearing a rather elaborate headdress in the shape of a pair of caribou antlers which, as they were covered in red satin, did look rather Christmassy. The rest of the paper went through every single mention of Philip in the Gospel (at least that was the concept; I doubt the dream actually covered them all) and pointed out how he was showing reindeer-like characteristics or playing a reindeer-like role.

For example, the paper used the titular quotation -- "Come and see!" (John 1:46) -- to connect Philip to the four "beasts" who say that when each of the first four seals of the apocalypse is opened (Revelation 6:1-7). It pointed out that θηρίον (Greek for "beast") is cognate with German Tier, English deer (which originally just meant "animal"), and the second element in reindeer (which, despite what you might assume, does not derive directly from English deer). Thus, by saying "Come and see," Philip was fulfilling his role as a Christmas reindeer.

My waking self is aware that the Greek word used for the beasts who say "Come and see!" is not θηρίον but ζῴων -- whence Blake's Four Zoas (a double-plural in the spirit of the KJV's cherubims) -- and that the similarity between θηρ and Tier is believed to be a coincidence without etymological significance. And even if all the linguischticks checked out, the connection would still be an extremely tenuous one! Still, I thought it was a rather game attempt on the part of the old subconscious. If someone were to challenge me, while awake, to prove through textual analysis that the apostle Philip was a Christmas reindeer, I confess I should be rather at a loss!

So why am I posting this load of nonsense? Four reasons:

1. out of a sincere and heartfelt love of the absurd
2. as a specimen of the sort of hyper-verbal dream I often have, but which I believe is fairly rare in the population at large
3. as a warning to myself, in my ongoing Bible-commentary project, not to get so caught up in my own exegetical ingenuity that I lose the thread
4. in the hope that Paul somebody will somehow find this post, perhaps by googling the title of his own paper, and have a really surreal experience (which will be compounded, of course, when he reads this note at the end)