Dreams, shifty-eyed owls, and the white Starbucks cup

Last night I had another of those "channel-surfing" style dreams, a disjointed series of vignettes.

In the first vignette, I was ascending a spiral staircase inside what I reckon was a lighthouse or something of that nature. The interior walls were white stucco, and the stairs were white as well. I was with a Spanish gentleman (shortish, mid-thirties, bearded, a bit nebbishy, wearing a brown suit and black-rimmed glasses) named Marcelo. Up ahead of us on the stairs was a group of young Spanish children. They kept calling "Marcela! Marcela!" and Marcelo kept thinking they were addressing him, pointing to his own chest and looking around quizzically while mouthing "Who, me?" Indicating one of the niñas on the stairs, I said (in English), "I think they're talking to her. Her name must be Marcela." She turned back and replied, "Así es, pero no me llamo Marcela, me llamo Gabriela." Later, one of the boys came down the stairs and started getting mouthy with us, and I was considering whether or not it would be acceptable to punch him in the face.

In the second vignette, I was with my parents and siblings. We were outdoors somewhere admiring a tall "tulip tree" -- not the familiar American Liriodendron, but simply a red tulip flower scaled up to the dimensions of a coconut palm. It had no leaves, just a long green stem with an enormous red flower at the top; the overall effect really was palm-like. Not far from this tree, I found a stump where another such tree had been cut down, and it was wide enough for a person to sit on it. I had the idea that I should take a photo of my youngest sister sitting on the stump, with the towering tulip tree in the background, and that the stump and the tree together would make clear the impressive size of these trees. I couldn't really make the photo work, though. The stump was far enough from the tree, and the tree tall enough, to make it quite difficult to get everything into a single shot.

In the third vignette, I stepped out my front door at twilight and saw two large owls circling overhead. Even in the half-light, I fancied I could identify them as an eagle owl and a great horned. I thought, "About time! After all these owl syncs, I finally get to see some flesh-and-blood owls!" Then the two owls swooped down, and I noticed that they were really enormous -- the size of condors -- and didn't look much like owls at all. I still thought of them as "owls," but what they really looked like were Chinese phoenixes (fenghuang) with the buff-and-white coloration of barn owls.

Like this, but less colorful; note the owl-like "horns"

One of these "owls" swooped down and grabbed a rat; the other picked up what I was horrified to see was a medium-sized white dog -- scruffy, white, and a bit elderly-looking, obviously a stray. This second "owl" landed on top of my neighbor's parked sedan, depositing the dog on the roof of the car. I quickly grabbed the dog and took it down, relieved to see that it had not been harmed by the bird's talons. I shooed the dog away to safety and made a Chinese fist-palm salute to the "owl," an expression of apology for taking away its prey.

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In my September 1 post "Since we're doing knocking syncs . . .," I posted a picture of the cover of the March 4, 2019, Time magazine (recently seen in an FBI photo of items seized from Trump's home).

In the comments, Debbie focused on the man with a white cup, thinking it might be George W. Bush, and connecting it with a dream she had just before the Heaven's Gate mass suicide. In the dream, a "spaceman" had told her "It's time to go," but offered her a white Styrofoam cup from which she should drink if she wanted to stay on Earth and remain human. Later, commenters here identified the man with the cup as Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who in March 2019 was considering a presidential run.

After the identification had been made, Debbie noted that a cup was a yonic symbol, and that the original Starbucks logo -- a two-tailed mermaid spreading her "legs" -- featured that symbolism much more explicitly. Interestingly, even though the Starbucks logo had been changed to its present form in 2011, the Time cover seems to show Schultz drinking from a cup with the original logo.

Debbie also wrote that on the Time cover, "Trump's shifting eyes looks similar to an owl looking sideways" -- to which I replied that actually it's physically impossible for an owl to do this. Owls can turn their heads remarkably far, but the eyes themselves cannot turn at all because they are not actually eye "balls" but rather cylinders. Nevertheless, the owl graffiti Debbie sent me earlier does show an owl turning its eyes off to the side.

This morning as I went out, I passed the recycling bins that are set out by the gate of my community, and this caught my eye:

There it is again -- an owl looking sideways without turning its head (something owls are noteworthy for not being able to do) -- and printed on a disposable white paper bowl (b-owl), which is basically another form of the disposable white cup the Starbucks CEO is drinking from on the Time cover, and the one the spaceman offered to Debbie.

The Time cover said "Knock, Knock, . . .," and recent syncs have associated the owl with the Green Door (often a circular green door; cf. the current Starbucks logo) and knocking. Debbie's dream connects the disposable white cup with Heaven's Gate, and thus with "Knock knock knockin' on heaven's door."

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The relevance of the dream fragments recounted at the beginning of this post is not yet entirely clear. I note that Marcelo shifted his eyes from side to side -- like Trump, or like the impossible owls -- while mouthing the words "Who, me?" Owls say "who," and the Hebrew word for "who," pronounced like the English word me, is the first element in the name Michael. The archangelic link is strengthened by the presence of a girl named Gabriela.

As for the "tulip tree," it was a sync related to red tulips that first led Debbie to contact me, and I replied with a story about a man who had been unrealistically excited about seeing the "tulip trees" of Ohio.

The condor-sized "owl" picking up a white dog is also a link to the Tintin book Prisoners of the Sun, in which Tintin's white dog Snowy (Milou) is carried away by a condor but later rescued unharmed.