The confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates

I had a dream last night which I don't remember very clearly, but another man and I were preparing to hike upstream in the bed of a large river. I was wearing a black suit and dress shoes and was belatedly realizing that this was not the best way to dress for such an activity, and that my suit and shoes were going to get pretty wet and muddy. My associate was even less appropriately dressed, in a white suit and white shoes. He explained that this was because on our way we were going to meet a woman who wanted to be baptized, and he wanted to be ready to perform the ceremony without delay. (In a Mormon baptism, both the baptizer and the baptized dress all in white.) He suggested that I might be able to help out with the baptism, but I said, "I can't actually do that, you know. I've basically been excommunicated."

As we trekked up the river, we soon came to a fork, where a narrower river on our left and a wider one on our right flowed together. Neither of us was sure which of the rivers we should follow to reach our destination, though I was leaning more towards the one on the left. I woke up before we had made a decision.

In the afternoon, I started reading Why Beauty Is Truth by Ian Stewart -- one of my two books with blue morpho butterflies on the cover -- but before opening it up, I had a strange hunch. In The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity by Trish and Rob MacGregor -- the other blue morpho book -- there had been a section on stichomancy, which means divination by opening a book (typically either Virgil or the Bible) at random. I decided that before starting Stewart's book, I would ask what I could expect to find in it and then get a truly-random Bible verse to answer that question. The Truly Random Bible Verse Generator gave me this:

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat (Gen. 1:29).

This is God speaking to Adam and Eve, explaining that there will be plenty for them to eat in the Garden of Eden.

I opened up the Stewart book and read the preface, which was about Évariste Galois and had no relevance to the Bible verse. Then I finished the preface and came to page 1 of the book proper. Here are the opening sentences:

Across the region that today we call Iraq run two of the most famous rivers in the world, and the remarkable civilizations that arose there owed their existence to those rivers. Rising in the mountains of eastern Turkey, the rivers traverse hundreds of miles of fertile plains, and merge into a single waterway whose mouth opens into the Persian Gulf.

That very specific reference to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates reminded me of my dream, which had also had two rivers merging into a single waterway. The rivers in my dream could not have been those rivers, since the Euphrates (on the left) would have been wider than the Tigris (on the right), but it was nevertheless a sync. Then I read this in the second paragraph:

The rivers brought water to the plains, and the water made the plains fertile. Abundant plant life attracted herds of sheep and deer, which in turn attracted predators, among them human hunters. The plains of Mesopotamia were a Garden of Eden for hunter-gatherers, a magnet for nomadic tribes.

Right there on the first page, Stewart refers to "a Garden of Eden" and clearly means by that expression a place where there is plenty of food because of the "abundant plant life" -- a stichomantic bull's-eye.