Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus

I took a brief nap after lunch today, which is not something I ordinarily do, and I had a verbal dream. My unseen interlocutor (there was no visual aspect to this dream) was a woman who wanted me to think of her as Claire, but I understood that this was definitely not her real name; she was using Claire Delune as a sort of jokey nom de guerre, chosen precisely because it was ridiculous. She never actually told me this, and I never actually addressed her as Claire; it was just understood. Although I could not see Claire, my mental image of her (for even in dreams there is a distinction between what we "see" and what we picture) was of a blonde woman who looked as if she might burst into laughter at any moment.

Claire and I were having what I understood to be a ritualized dialogue, with each of us reciting lines from a memorized script. I thought of the whole thing as being "Masonic" in nature:

Claire: Do you know what a week is?

William: I do.

Claire: Will you tell me?

William: I will.

From none to half, or half to all,

Or all to half, or half to none

Takes seven days, and this we call

A week, and now my tale is done.

Claire: That is well said. Do you know the True Song of Wandering Aengus?

William: I do not.

Claire: I will give it you.

Claire then recited the "true" version of the Yeats poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus." Unfortunately, my memory of this disintegrated almost immediately upon waking. I can only remember a few details: It was told from the point of view of the Glimmering Girl rather than from that of Aengus, and there were only two long stanzas. The second stanza ended with the well-known lines "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun," and the first stanza ended with the same two lines in reverse: "The golden apples of the sun, / The silver apples of the moon." Aside from that, the only specific wording I can remember is the phrase "viper dragon," which appeared in both stanzas. (The second stanza mirrored the first in many ways, after the manner of "The Two Trees.")

After I awoke, the first thing I did was look up "The Song of Wandering Aengus" and refresh my memory. No viper dragons. Then I ran a search for "yeats" "viper dragon" just in case anything should turn up. This yielded what Google humorously terms "about 0 results" -- but not exactly zero:

The Witch's Tower! That caught my eye because William Wright's two latest posts -- "Disney's 'Tangled', Galadriel's Hair, and linking the Anor and Ithil Stones" and "New Moons Shining and Karma Chameleons" -- have dealt with the story of Rapunzel, specifically as told in a Disney movie I had never heard of, in which Rapunzel's animal sidekick is a chameleon. I had read these shortly before my nap, and the reference to the Anor ("sun") and Ithil ("moon") Stones may have occasioned my dreaming of Wandering Aengus. I had also watched a clip from Tangled that William had posted, in which I learned for the first time that the traditional name of Rapunzel's witch captor is Gothel.

"Viper dragon" has no obvious connection to Rapunzel, though, so imagine my surprise when I clicked on the third image above and enlarged it. (Only a low-resolution image is available, sorry.)

I'm pretty jaded when it comes to seemingly impossible coincidences, but this is really a seemingly impossible coincidence! Just after learning for the first time that Rapunzel was held captive by a witch called Gothel, I have a dream in which the phrase "viper dragon" appears in a Yeats poem. I then search for "viper dragon" "yeats" -- and the only results are from a Rapunzel story, including the page in which Gothel introduces herself!

The Witch's Tower was published in 2019 by Tamara Grantham and is the first book in a series called Twisted Ever After. (Disney's Tangled was released in 2010, with a 2012 sequel called Tangled Ever After.) The sample available on Amazon shows that it begins with an epigraph from Yeats:

A Google Books search shows that the string "viper, dragon" appears only once, in a list of potion ingredients:

Both excerpts above include references to drops of Gothel's blood, which I suppose is an additional coincidence.