Aurora, batless baseball, and the Cunning One

1. Aurora

Yesterday, while on the road, I suddenly had the John Denver song "Rocky Mountain High" pop into my head, and I started singing to myself some of the few lines that I know: "Colorado Rocky Mountain high / I've seen it rain fire in the sky" -- at which moment a woman came into view wearing a black T-shirt with the word AURORA in large white letters.

Aurora is a city in Colorado, very close to Denver. An aurora, the atmospheric phenomenon, could aptly be described as "fire in the sky." Seeing the word also made me think of Aurora Mace Potter (1898-1990), who was my mother's mother's mother and the only one of my great-grandparents to have survived beyond my infancy.

2. Batless baseball

I had two memorable dreams last night. In the first, I had gone with some other people (not clearly defined) to watch a baseball game. The game took place on a grassy field, and the spectators, of whom there were not many, sat on picnic blankets in the grass in the same are where the players were playing. There were no uniforms, and it was sometimes a bit hard to tell who was on which team and who was just a spectator. Actually, I'm not even sure there were two distinct teams involved.

The game was played without bats, gloves, or visible bases. The pitcher would roll the baseball down the field as if bowling, trying to make it bounce in unpredictable ways, and the batter-equivalent would cup his right hand and try to scoop up the ball as it rolled (without actually grasping it; use of the opposable thumb was against the rules) and send it flying. Doing so was the equivalent of a "hit," and he would then run the bases or be tagged out as in regular baseball. Being tagged out was called being "given the gift." Nothing on the field was marked, not even the bases, so you just had to know which areas of the grass were considered to be bases.

A dog was also participating in the game. It was a smallish beige-colored dog somewhat similar to a pug in size and shape. Something about it reminded me of a whiteboard eraser, and I referred to it as a "Japanese eraser dog." I'm not sure why I thought it was Japanese.

I've never had the slightest interest in baseball, and at first I was bored and kept dozing off on the blanket. Later I became more interested, and later still I began to participate in the game. (The distinction between players and spectators was quite porous.) I successfully scooped the ball that was bowled to me and started running. One of the other players had retrieved the ball and was running after me, trying to tag me out. I had no idea where the bases were, and the directions shouted by the spectators didn't help much. I just ran as fast as I could, bobbing and weaving as I went, in the hope that I could just tire out my pursuer. In the end, he got me, and I heard a spectator say, "They gave you the gift, man. They gave you the gift."

After the game, I was full of enthusiasm both for the sport and for the "Japanese eraser dog" and couldn't stop raving about them. I said I wanted to buy a dog of that breed, and that I could probably just Google Japanese eraser dog to find out what it was really called. I had also decided that I definitely had to learn how to play baseball. I kept talking about how it worked every single muscle in the body. In particular, the fact that you had to scoop up the ball in a cupped hand and catch it without a glove meant that it was "just as good as rock climbing" for the finger flexors.

I immediately went to a park where I could practice baseball techniques. Even though the sport I was so hyped up about was played with a ball but no bat, I found myself practicing with a bat but no ball. There was a tee-ball tee with no ball on it, and I was supposed to practice swinging the bat at the spot just above the tee, where the ball would have been if there had been one. On my first try, I hit the tee itself and sent it flying. I wasn't sure if that was good or bad. Then I noticed that most of the other people doing this exercise weren't using bats but rather bullwhips. The idea was to make the whip crack just above the tee, where the baseball would be. What this skill had to do with actually playing baseball is unclear.

Upon waking, I thought that this is what a game of baseball would look like in Alice in Wonderland. I also thought the ball-with-no-bat and bat-with-no-ball permutations might tie in with the "dick with no balls" syncs from a while back.

3. The Cunning One

In the second dream, my wife said, "Did you remember to record your voice for Peggy? Your forget, didn't you?" I protested that no one had ever asked me to record my voice for Peggy, so I couldn't very well have forgotten it.

"Peggy" then turned up -- a dark-haired woman in her early thirties who could have been either White or Chinese (not clear in the dream) -- and explained what she wanted me to do. She was making a video about her baby for YouTube, and she wanted me to do a voice-over for her in a basso profundo "James Earl Jones voice." Here's what she wanted me to say:

Joseph Smith said that he would have a successor. The Cunning One. The One Mighty And Strong. And then, years later, a boy was born . . . .

At that point, I was to say her infant son's name, obviously implying that he would grow up to be that successor to the Prophet. I was hesitant to do this for her and tried to persuade her that making this video maybe wasn't the greatest idea. She tried to downplay it as "just for fun," but I could tell she was seriously invested in this idea of her son's destiny. I said something like, "I'm just worried that later, like when he's nine or ten, he's going to find this on YouTube, or his classmates are, and it's going to be really embarrassing." I left unspoken the further concern that maybe someone would recognize the voice as mine. We reached an impasse, and in the end she dropped the subject.

A few minutes later, I found her singing to her baby, who was not present: "If you've been kissed by a California prince without a crown . . ." (or perhaps it was "without a throne"). I immediately understood what she was referring to and had a vivid mental image of it: She and her baby had been hanging out in a cave a few days after he was born, and Prince William had come to pay his respects to the baby. Something along the lines of the Wise Men visiting Christ.

Upon waking, I of course knew that Harry is the prince who lives in California. Nevertheless, the man I saw in the dream was unmistakably William, Prince of Wales. I also thought upon waking that "the Cunning One" certainly doesn't sound like a good guy and is in fact a direct translation of the name Saruman.

Googling James Earle Jones, I find that he was in a couple of well-known baseball movies: Field of Dreams and The Sandlot, neither of which I have ever seen. The poster for the latter film, as shown on Wikipedia, ties in with the idea of a dog playing baseball: