William, meet Nile

Notes on a dream I had on August 3, 2011:

I'm in a car, driving down the road very fast. The scenery is so covered with clouds that it looks like the view from a plane, except that the clouds are occasionally broken by wooded hills and crags.

Two voices -- apparently of people in the car with me, but I don't see them. In these notes I'll call them A and B.

A says, "In Chinese we say 'foothills' -- is it the same?"

I say, "Yeah, for the small ones." (We just passed an enormous crag with a couple of very, very tall trees.)

A says, "The small ones?"

B, referring to me, says, "Yeah, he believes in much bigger things, like that tree." (When he says "much bigger things," I understand him to be insinuating that I believe in God.)

After a pause, I say, as if making a difficult but necessary confession, "I once saw a bear as tall as that tree." (The bear I picture when I say this is black.)

They say, "What? No way! Come on…"

"I saw it," I insist.

"Are you sure?"

"I saw it. I was there. And it was standing right by the tree."

They still don't believe me, but I still insist: "Come on, why is it so hard to believe? Why can't a bear be that tall? Dinosaurs were that tall!" (Actually, dinosaurs were not that tall. The tree in question is a good 30 meters high.)

Later, in a hypnopompic state, I discovered the name of one of my interlocutors:

After I woke up (or so I thought), I did as Dunne recommends and, with my eyes still closed, reviewed the details of my dreams so as to establish them more firmly in my memory before they disappeared. Realizing that I didn't know who I had been talking to in the car, I thought to myself, "I don't know his name."

In response, another mental voice immediately said, "I don't know his name. Hey, what's your name?"

A third mental voice answered. What he said was originally garbled and hard to understand, but after a second it became clear: "My name is -- Nile."

Why am I thinking of a dream I had more than 12 years ago? Because I just read this little exchange in The Tower, Colin Wilson's second Spider World book:

Niall asked: "What are you called?"

"Bill."

"That is a strange name."

"No, it's not. Where I come from it's a perfectly normal name. What's yours?"

"Niall."

"That's not a name, that's a river!"

This appearance of a character named Bill who knows of the River Nile is the first clear indication of a connection between Spider World and the world we know.

Incidentally, a slightly earlier dream, on July 7, 2011, had also featured the name Nile in the context of driving a car with two unknown speakers:

I'm driving my car down a broad, slowly winding road in a slightly hilly, grassy rural area. The different areas I drive through are physical spaces but are also different schools of philosophy and perhaps also literary or artistic movements. (My general impression was clearly that I was driving through schools of philosophy, not literature, but when I try to remember any of the specific areas I drove through, the first thing that comes to mind is "Romanticism.")

Someone asks, "Did you find the solution of the Nile?"

Someone else answers, "No, I didn’t get that far yet." (It's not at all clear who is speaking or even whether or not I am one of the speakers.)

I think to myself, "That's appropriate, because the Nile is a geographic place, but a solution is something you find in philosophy."

 Actually, the Nile itself might be termed a "liquid solution":

Note added (1:50 p.m.): One of the first comments under that King Friday video is "Mr. Rogers, I presume" -- a reference to Dr. Livingstone and his quest to find the source of the Nile. When I wrote my "Milkommen" post a few days ago, I looked up references to the "milk of the word" in the New Testament and found this:

As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ (1 Pet. 2:1-5).