Whales and narrow roads

I think this must have been triggered by Debbie, who left a comment on "A hyena winning the Boston Marathon" -- a post which mentions no other animals than hyenas, zebras, and velociraptors -- beginning "And speaking of whales and dolphins," but last night I had another of my "Whale-watching from the shore" dreams. This was a recurring theme in my dreams circa 2016-2018, in which I walk along a coastline of rocky cliffs and look at the whales in the sea below. It's been many years since I've had such a dream.

Last night's dream was different in that the whale-watching was done not from a high cliff but from a low-lying rocky beach. It was still a sheer cliff underwater, though, as even the water immediately adjoining the beach was extremely deep.

It also differed from my past dreams in that I wasn't the one who saw the whale. Instead it was a small, conservatively dressed man of about 60, whom I thought of as "the professor." The professor was stooped down at the edge of the beach, staring into the water. For some reason there were absolutely no waves, and the surface of the ocean was as flat and limpid as a pane of glass. I was behind the professor, some distance from the shore, and couldn't see anything in the water from my angle. The professor could, though, and he told me not to come any closer, afraid that I might carelessly dislodge a stone or something, causing ripples in the water and obscuring his view.

"I see it!" the professor said. "I see the Humpback Whale! My God, it's enormous!"

Although I couldn't see the Humpback Whale myself, I had a telepathic sense of what the professor was seeing, and it was indeed enormous -- "the size of a railway station" is how I thought of it in the dream -- many times larger than any real whale. Here's the sketch I scribbled down upon waking:

Later it occurred to me was that what the professor had said was actually, "My God is enormous," and that he was using that word in its older sense of "outrageous."

In a later dream the same night, I was in the passenger seat of my car, navigating for my wife, who was driving. We were on our way to Washington, D.C., to see the Cherry Blossom Throne. (Mencius Moldbug used to use this as a facetious metonym for the U.S. presidency, but in the dream it was an actual tourist attraction.) However, we were driving though rocky, mountainous terrain quite unlike anything in that part of the country.

As we drove, the road became increasingly narrow and convoluted, making it harder and harder to follow. At one point my wife started to panic and said, "Where do I go? Where do I go?"

I said, "Just keep following the road. It's narrow, but just keep following it."

The road was slippery, though -- it seemed to have water or ice on it-- and she wasn't able to keep on it. The car went off the road and down a steep, rocky slope toward the sea below. I considered our now unavoidable fate with equanimity and said calmly, "Okay, brace for impact." I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, there was no cliff and no sea. The car was parked on a perfectly flat plateau of stone. Its perfect flatness reminded me of the sea in which the professor had seen the whale, and I thought for a moment that perhaps the sea had been turned to stone.

There were several people on the plateau, and my wife was standing out there talking to some of them. I got out of the car and asked her, "What happened? How did we survive that?"

She said, "Oh, I dreamed it. It was all just a dream."

"You dreamed it? But so did I! I was there!"

And then a few moments later I woke from my own dream.

Since I began with a reference to a marathon, I'll close with this. Early this morning, I happened to see someone wearing a T-shirt with this logo:

The name caught my eye because I am currently reading Words of the Faithful, and one of the characters is called Dyacôm.

Update (same day, 3:00 p.m.): In the dream reported here, the professor reacted to the Whale by saiyng, "My God, it's enormous!" -- and I wrote that my own sense of the immensity of the Whale was that it was "the size of a railway station." This afternoon, I stopped at a red light, and the motorcyclist in front of me was an old man (like the professor in the dream) with this on the back of his T-shirt:

Right at the bottom it says "Jesus! STATION!" Jesus with an exclamation point suggests that the name is being used as an exclamation, comparable to "My God!"