Phoenix syncs

Remember the abandoned restaurant I explored in July 2022? I recently had two dreams set in an environment resembling that restaurant, a long-abandoned building where everything was covered with dead leaves. On the night of August 26, I dreamed that I was searching such a building with my brother, trying to find "plates" -- meaning further records like the Golden Plates from which the Book of Mormon was produced. In the second dream, during a nap on September 1, I found a large mantis inside the restaurant, and it kept unfolding more and more of its joints until, its limbs fully extended, it was larger than I was. I was trying to think of a way to get it out the door without hurting it.

The two dreams made me want to go check out the restaurant again, so yesterday afternoon I did so. I was there from about 1:30 to 2:00, walking through the whole place and taking lots of photos.

About half an hour after leaving the restaurant, I saw the "NEVER STOP ROLLING" T-shirt mentioned in my last post in connection with a Rickroll sync.

A little before midnight last night, I was on /x/ looking for something else when I happened upon a post, apparently written by an AI, about Rick Astley's new song -- the second half of the Rickroll sync. One of the replies -- referencing Rick's line "Can't stop this world from turning; the fire's already burning" -- was a picture of this book cover, featuring a phoenix:

Today, looking through the photos I had taken at the restaurant, I noticed this one, which also features a phoenix-like image:

It's a bag of drinking straws. The Chinese reads 元凰 (a brand name; the second character means "phoenix") 衛生吸管 ("hygienic drinking straws").

I was in my study when I discovered this and connected it to the Manley P. Hall book cover. Minutes later, I walked into the next room and saw this:

Pareidolia is sort of an occupational hazard for synchromystics, but doesn't that look like a bird getting ready to fly up out of the trash can? I guess it looks more like a dove than anything else, but doesn't it also suggest a phoenix rising from the ash-tray, as we Pig Latin speakers call it? Of course it's really a discarded tissue, which in Taiwan is called 衛生紙, "hygiene paper," the first two characters of which also appeared on the pack of drinking straws.

I then got on my motorcycle and headed for my school. While on the road, I was thinking about phoenixes. The first thing that came to mind was "Phoenix the Cat," since one feature of the Taiwanese accent is that /l/ tends to be pronounced as /n/. Then, since cats and owls are connected in Chinese, I remembered my dream of a year ago in which I saw two "owls" that resembled Chinese phoenixes:

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.

I was stopped at a red light thinking about the two phoenix-like "owls" when it started to rain lightly. The motorcyclist in front of me took out a raincoat and put it on. The back of the raincoat was decorated with, of all things, two owls.

The first owl is saying 中山二甲子, which doesn't mean anything to me, and the second is saying 風華三世紀, which I think means something like "the third century of glory."

Remember the tissue-bird, which I said looked like a dove but was conceptually a phoenix? Just now as I was preparing this post, I went on the /x/ catalog page and did a Ctrl-F for astley so that I could find and download the Manly P. Hall picture. Close by the post I was looking for was another combination of dove and phoenix imagery:

The "fox" reference in the middle isn't irrelevant, either. The browser now known as Firefox originally had a different name and logo:

Update:

The 4chan screenshot above shows a post that says "What exactly IS the Holy Spirit?" I included it because of the accompanying image -- a dove surrounded by fiery radiance -- which synched with an earlier phoenix-dove combination.

A couple of hours after publishing this post, I was doing some reading -- Vol. 4B of Daymon Smith's Cultural History of the Book of Mormon -- and found this:

[T]he character of the Holy Spirit . . . during the nineteenth century remained characteristically ambiguous. Both deity and substance, what that name referred to could be imagined in any way necessary to one's theology. This was true then, and it remains true today . . . .

Was the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost a person or an animate, agentive substance-form akin to the [abstract divine] attributes or to spirit itself? "I cannot fully make up my mind one way or the other," Orson Pratt confessed . . . .