James, Santiago, Eru, and Charles Wallace

I got to sleep in this morning (day off for the typhoon), which means an extra dose of dreams. Here's what I can remember:

Vignette 1: I was supervising a group of children of various ages who were "writing scriptures." This meant they were copying out Bible verses as a handwriting exercise, but the phrase we used for it, "writing scriptures," can obviously have other meanings. One of the children wasn't writing anything, and I kept asking him, "James, where's your scripture? Where's your scripture, James?"

Vignette 2: A man called Santiago, the patriarch of a large family, was telling me how one day, relatively late in life, he "turned on," started using the name Santiago, and adopted his wife's son to be one of his own sons. I think he had 11 sons of his own, and his wife's son made 12; or perhaps he had 12 of his own, and his wife's son made 13.

Vignette 3: There was an aluminum box with a slot in it, and you could write a question on a strip of paper and put it in the slot. I wrote, "Eru, when did you become Eru?" and put it in the slot, not expecting an answer. (Eru is Tolkien's name for God.) The voice of Eru did answer, though: "Like you, I was not created but born. Like you, I have existed for all eternity, but it was at the age of five that I 'turned on' and began acting as Eru."

Vignette 4: In a hypnopompic postlude, there was only a voice, with no visual component: "At the age of five, he became truly conscious. He became able to meditate and began to understand the nature of things. And that's the story of" -- I thought we were still talking about Eru and was surprised when the sentence instead ended with -- "Charles Wallace."

Comments:

Santiago is the Spanish form of the name James, and both names originally derive from Jacob, the original name of of Israel, the ancestor of the 12 or 13 tribes. (We have 13 distinct tribe names, but each list of the tribes includes only 12 of these; which one is left out varies.) In connection with "writing scriptures," the Book of Mormon refers to scriptures being written both by the Twelve Tribes of Israel (Jacob) and by the Twelve Apostles of the Lamb (two of whom, in New Testament tradition, were called James).

In the dream, I understood the "turning on" references as meaning that an already existing but latent consciousness was suddenly activated and became truly conscious. Of course, the phrase can also refer to using psychedelics. I also thought of the Simon and Garfunkel line, "Pigeons plot in secrecy / And hamsters turn on frequently."

Regarding Eru's answer, it's hard to know how to interpret "at the age of five" in reference to a someone who has "existed for all eternity." I guess it means five years after he was "born," even though he existed before being born.

Charles Wallace -- who apparently also "turned on" at the age of five -- is a character from the novel A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle, which I haven't read since I was nine or ten. His name showing up in the dream was quite unexpected. I don't remember too much about this character except that he's a sort of child prodigy and psychic, which I guess fits with his apparently becoming enlightened at the ripe old age of five. Incidentally, the title A Wrinkle in Time refers to the idea (called a "tesseract" in the novel) of traveling by folding the fabric of spacetime, a theme that has come up a lot recently.

The name Charles Wallace also made me think of the poet Wallace Stevens, and upon waking I took down his collected works and opened it at random. I found myself reading "World Without Peculiarity," and these lines jumped out at me as synchronistically relevant:

The red ripeness of round leaves is thick

With the spices of red summer.

Leaves aren't usually described as "round," but on August 8 I posted "Round leaves and chip monks," introducing the "chip monk" idea that William Wright would later take and run with.