Amber sun

Just putting this out there, since both the name Amber and the sun have been in the sync-stream.

Yesterday, the preschoolers acted out a Chinese legend associated with the upcoming Moon Festival: the story of how one day ten suns rose in the sky, and the great archer Houyi saved humanity by shooting down nine of them. Ten kids played the roles of the suns, each one's costume consisting of a large crayon drawing of the sun (all kinds of colors, though regrettably not blue) they had drawn, cut out, and taped to the front of their shirts.

After the play was over and the costumes had been removed, one girl who hadn't been in the play took one of the sun drawings, taped it to her own shirt, and showed it to me. Her surname (which comes first in a Chinese name) is Yang, pronounced exactly the same as the second element in taiyang "sun." I said, in Chinese, "Look at that. Yang so-and-so has become Tai-yang so-and-so," saying her full Chinese name.

I think that's the first time I've ever used any of those kids' Chinese names. As their English teacher, I always address them by their English names. Miss Yang's English name is Amber.

Pumping iron into a sword

Inspired by "Rolling the bones" and "Sympathy and dice," I'm trying a different version of my reading with my eyes shut experiments. I have a dice cup-and-tray set that looks like this:

You put the cup over the tray, shake it a few times, and then remove the cup to see what you rolled. Instead of putting a Tarot card under my pillow, I put three dice in the tray, covered and shook them, and left them still covered in a drawer in my nightstand while I slept. Later, I will check the dice and map the roll to one of the Minor Arcana using the Seven Eleven system. As discussed in "Dice and the Minor Arcana: Outlining the challenge," there is some uncertainty as to whether the highest-ranking suit should be Swords (historically the highest) or Wands (generally considered the highest in divinatory Tarot). With any luck, these experiments will clear that up.

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I dreamt that I was in some kind of sprawling stone building that may have been underground. I was with a small group of other people, and it had a very Dungeons & Dragons feel -- a little party of adventurers navigating a dungeon. (Dice-rolling is a big part of D&D, so the dice themselves may have suggested this theme.)

I found a sword that was very old and rusty and seemed to lack the normal rigidity of a metal blade. I was afraid that if I hit anything with it, it would not break but bend, and even that holding it out horizontally for too long might cause it to droop slightly and warp. I wondered why it was like that.

The sword itself answered my unspoken question telepathically: "It's because I haven't touched a folded pocket in a very long time."

I adjusted my shirt so that the breast pocket was folded in half and touched the flat of the sword to it. The blade immediately firmed up and felt more like a normal sword, but it was still pretty rusty and useless-looking.

I suddenly had the idea that if I could find a dumbbell, I could hold the sword in one hand and use the other to literally "pump iron" into the blade and rejuvenate it. It just seemed obvious that that was what I needed to do.

(Earlier in the dream, another man in our group, possibly my brother Joseph, had found a quarterstaff that was in similarly sorry condition and had to do something strange to restore it. I can't remember any of the details, though.)

I found a tiny 2-kg dumbbell, the kind girls use in "yoga," and started lifting it, but it created no resistance and thus had no effect. After searching a bit more, I found a 14-kg dumbbell and started pumping it as fast as I could. After a few seconds of this, I felt a sort of pulse of energy, and not only the sword but also the dumbbell and myself were transformed. I suddenly had bulging muscles -- it felt like a less extreme version of an Incredible Hulk transformation -- and the dumbbell was now huge, maybe 80 kg. The sword was now bright shiny steel, as good as new. However, it was much shorter than before, and I realized that it didn't look so much like a sword now as an Okinawan sai, except that the central part still had the shape of a sword blade rather than a simple prong. Besides being too short, it also didn't seem sharp enough, and I thought I would have to pump more iron to further improve the weapon.

I had begun to feel that we might be in a video game, and that perhaps this game had been designed to force obese neckbeards to physically work out in order to level up their characters.

Looking around, I noticed that the other members of my party who were in the room had also had their physiques improved by the iron-pumping, though their changes were much less extreme than my own. Three members of our group -- three sisters who were all named Amber -- were not in the room, so I thought I should go find them and bring them in so that they, too, could get an upgrade. Before I could do that, though, I woke up.

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It's not hard to imagine -- or, rather, it's hard not to imagine -- what Dr. Freud would make of this dream about a flaccid sword that can be made hard by touching a "pocket" and by pumping iron (blood) into it. But, despite my genuine reverence for der große Wiener Quacksalber (uh huh huh, you said wiener), we are not Freudians around here but synchromystics. As such, I note that the staff, the sword, and the sai are the trademark weapons of three of the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who have been identified with the four Flour Boys. (See "Flour Boy symbolism roundup.") The sai, which is what I ended up with in the dream, is the weapon of Raphael, the Turtle we have tentatively identified with me. Raphael is also the most muscular of the Turtles and, in the nightmarish 2014 rendition, bears a certain resemblance to the Incredible Hulk.

For a minute I thought the Turtles' human friend was even called Amber, but I'd misremembered. Her name is April. There's still an Amber link, though. The Greek equivalent of the female name Amber is the name of Agamemnon's daughter, who avenged him by murdering her mother, Clytemnestra (and who thus, in another nod to the GWQ, gave her name to a gender-flipped version of the Oedipus complex) -- Elektra, from elektron "amber."

Red is Raphael's color, and the sai is Raphael's weapon.

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So, what are my predictions for the Minor Arcanum to which the dice will correspond? Swords, obviously -- but due to my indecision as to the ranking of the suits, a full half of the 56 possible rolls are potentially Swords. To get more specific, here are my ranked guesses:

1. Three of Swords: The number three appears in the three-pronged sai and the three sisters named Amber. This card depicts a heart, which "pumps iron" through the body.

2. Page of Cups: This is the card associated with Raphael in the Flour Boy schema. The cup also somewhat resembles a dumbbell.

3. Three of Cups: The only card to show three women. Past syncs (not posted here) have associated this card with the swastika, and some versions of the sai (manji sai) also resemble that symbol.

4. Five of Swords: A man dressed in red and green (Raphael's colors) picking up swords (somewhat similar to lifting weights). Although there are five swords in the picture, he's only holding three of them.

5. Ace of Swords: In the Rider-Waite this shows a very short sword, comparable in length to a sai.

6. Six of Swords: The only Minor Arcanum to show both swords and a staff.

Stay tuned for the answer, which may not be posted until tomorrow. I'm away from home at the moment and can't check the dice immediately.

CBGB and the BGCB

I started my "Tom Petty death sync" post by mentioning that I had been listening to "mostly New Wave kind of stuff." At the time, I was also thinking about the Blue Green Crystal Ball, which I typically abbreviate to BGCB in my handwritten notes. Today I noticed the similarity of BGCB to CBGB, the New York club that is usually considered the birthplace of new wave, so I decided to look up that club on Wikipedia.

Despite its association with punk and new wave, CBGB originally stood for Country, Bluegrass, Blues -- so it could just as easily have been named BGCB if bluegrass had been given top billing. Bluegrass is a good match with Blue Green, since grass (including bluegrass) is green. As for the Crystal Ball part, it turns out that CBGB was founded by a Jew named Kristal, so if you went out dancing at CBGB it would in a certain sense be a "Kristal ball." I also noticed that the club's street address corresponds to my birthday, the Ides of March.

Wikipedia has this to say about the origins of new wave:

The term "new wave" was originally coined by Seymour Stein of Sire Records as a catch-all for more accessible music that emerged after punk rock in the United States. At the time, due to the emergence of the Sex Pistols, the American media portrayed punk rock as dangerous and violent, leading to a stigma that made music "virtually unmarketable," emerging groups who stemmed from the American punk scene, began to adopt "new wave" as a form of marketing that distanced themselves from the "punk" label.

Seymour Stein -- a "see-more" stone -- fits right in with the crystal ball theme. Note also that new wave is described as a reaction to the Sex Pistols.

Last night I started reading The Cryptoterrestrials by Mac Tonnies, a classic I had somehow heretofore neglected. The foreword by Nick Redfern compares Tonnies's new perspective on ufology to the emergence of punk rock:

I rather liken Mac to a Fortean equivalent of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones (Mac would probably prefer I cite the Smiths or R.E.M.; but, hey, that's how it goes). When, in 1976, both bands firmly saved rock music from the bloated stodge of groups like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Yes, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, they didn't do so just because they could. No, their actions were prompted by the fact that (A) the dinosaurs of rock had become utterly irrelevant and redundant; and (B) a new, fresh approach was sorely needed.

I don't think anyone would call the Smiths "new wave," but the label is often applied to R.E.M.

Speaking of the BGCB and music, if you play the sequence BGCB on a piano, it sounds like the beginning of the Mormon hymn "Come, Follow Me." (The hymn actually begins ECFE, but the intervals are the same.) No obvious relevance other than a few mentions of "spheres" in the lyrics.

Note added (9:20 p.m.): This post puns on ball as meaning both a spheroid and a dance party. I've also been posting about the Metric song "Gimme Sympathy," and its repeated line "something like Here Comes The Sun" made me think of Shakespeare's "nothing like the sun." Today Bruce Charlton published a post called "Nothing like a ball: Instead of appointing mediocre middle managers or psychopaths as leaders; what should churches do?" He was quoting Jane Austen and meant ball in the sense of "dance party," but the sun is also a "ball" in the other sense.

Seven Eleven, dice, and crispy foam

This morning I went to the local 7-Eleven to pick up something my wife had ordered. (In Taiwan it is common to have parcels delivered to a convenience store rather than directly to one's home.) One of the other customers there was wearing a T-shirt that said "If only I had a coffee and a donut!" Taking this as a sign, I decided my next stop would be a coffee shop called Donutes (sic).

When I walked into Donutes, I was greeted by this sign, which wasn't there last time I visited.

It was Amber that first caught my eye, since I had just had a dream (on which I will be posting later) featuring three sisters who were all named Amber.

Then I noticed the dice.

I had come to Donutes because of something I had seen at a 7-Eleven. My recent post "Rolling the bones" recounts a dream about a dice game called Seven Eleven.

Something on the menu also caught my eye: some ungodly concoction called "Crunchy Cheese Foam Coffee." (I only ever drink plain black coffee myself, so I'd never really looked at the menu.)

Crunchy foam is a strange concept -- it makes me think of those "Without objective morality everything is permissible" memes -- but as it happens I was just thinking about crispy foam yesterday.

The music video for "Gimme Sympathy" by Metric (also featured in "Rolling the bones") ends with a group of small children running into the room where the band is performing, running around a bit, and then running out the door. The first time I watched that video, those kids scared the bejesus out of me because my brain processed them not as children but as trooping fairies. (The kids are wearing butterfly wings and seem to be invisible to the band members, so this was perhaps intentional.) Something about seeing trooping fairies running triggers a very deep and primitive fear response -- Panic terror in the original sense -- like seeing a coiled snake tensed and ready to strike.

Trooping fairies as objects of fear made me think of Allingham's haunting poem about "fear of little men." I began mentally reciting what I could remember of it, and the mention of the fairies living on "crispy pancakes of yellow sea foam" struck me as potentially relevant in connection with recent posts (e.g. "The Golden Age") about the yellow sea. It turns out I'd misremembered that line -- it's actually "yellow tide-foam" -- but it was weird to run into "crunchy cheese foam" (cheese is often yellow) the very next morning.

When I walked into Donutes, the song "A Place Like Home" by Birgersson Lundberg was playing in the background. When I left some 45 minutes later, it was playing again.

These lines got my attention:

They don't get what it's like

To be no one, no one, no one, no one

This is a pretty clear link to "You don't know how it feels to be me" -- "me" in this case being Tom Petty. I posted that song in "Tom Petty death sync," which, as the title suggests, emphasizes the fact that Tom Petty is dead and could thus be said to be "no one." The mortal man known as Thomas Earl Petty no longer exists.

The repeated line "We don't wanna be running from the sun" is also a link back to the Metric song, with its repeated references to the Beatles song "Here Comes The Sun." The idea of running from the sun suggests another Beatles song: "When the sun shines / They slip into the shade."

For me, it is this one song that establishes Ringo's claim as the greatest rock drummer of all time. Remarkably, though, Sid and Susie managed to pull off a successful cover with no drums at all.

Sympathy and dice

I noticed that the songs featured in my last two posts -- "Gimme Sympathy" by Metric in "Rolling the bones" and "You Don't Know How It Feels" by Tom Petty in "Tom Petty death sync" -- have a lot in common. For starters, sympathy literally means knowing how it feels to be someone else. There's also a strange correspondence between the two music videos. In the comments on the Tom Petty post, Debbie brought up syncs related to the name Lola. My first association with that name is the Kinks song about a transvestite who "walks like a lady and talks like a man." The Tom Petty music video has a part where an actress lip-syncs to Tom's vocals, giving the effect of a lady with the voice of a man. The Metric music video has the converse, with male band members lip-syncing as we hear the voice of Emily Haines. Here are the two videos for reference:

Tom Petty, the famous rock star, is singing about how we don't know how it feels to "be" him. The Metric song also references the idea that the listeners could "be" famous rock stars:

Gimme sympathy

After all of this is gone

Who'd you rather be?

The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?

My post about the Metric song was called "Rolling the bones" -- because the line "I feel it in my bones" had triggered a dream about rolling dice and being able to feel them on the table. Bones as slang for "dice" presumably comes from the origin of dice as astragali -- the talus bones of sheep and goats. These ancient dice had four faces, with the non-consecutive values 1, 3, 4, and 6. The dice in my dream also had non-consecutive values: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11.

Here's how Wikipedia defines astragali:

The talus (/ˈteɪləs/; Latin for ankle or ankle bone; pl.: tali), talus bone, astragalus (/əˈstræɡələs/), or ankle bone is one of the group of foot bones known as the tarsus. The tarsus forms the lower part of the ankle joint.

Note that these bones form "part of the ankle joint." Here's the chorus from the Tom Petty song:

So let's get to the point, let's roll another joint

And let's head on down the road

There's somewhere I gotta go

And you don't know how it feels

You don't know how it feels to be me

Just as "I feel it in my bones" in the Metric song obviously had no intended reference to dice, the "joint" Tom wants to "roll" is clearly a marijuana cigarette, not an astragalus -- but we all know the sync fairies aren't sticklers for original intent. The "get to the point" line is interesting, too. In my 2019 post "The linear ranking of dice rolls" -- to which I linked in the post about the Metric song, and which discusses ancient astragalomancy in some detail -- I take issue with a translation of a medieval sermon, insisting that a particular word means "points" rather than "rolls":

Bernardino is comparing the missal to a single die (taxillum), and puncta obviously refers to the points on the die rather than to the number of possible throws of two dice. (Each face of a die is marked with a different number of points, from one to six, and 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 21). So, not only does Bernardino not list specific mappings from rolls to letters, but it seems unlikely to me that he had possible rolls of the dice in mind at all.

My interest in the linear ranking of dice rolls had to do with systems for mapping Tarot cards to rolls of the dice. There are 21 possible rolls of two dice and 56 possible rolls of three dice (or five astragali) -- corresponding to the Trumps Major and the Minor Arcana, respectively. (The Fool is a Major Arcanum but not a Trump.) Thus, "let's roll another joint" -- i.e., let's throw in one more die -- could be an injunction to consult the Minor rather than the Major Arcana.

If we take Tom's joint-rolling as dice-throwing, the fact that it is followed by heading on down the road suggests these lines of Dylan that have been a motto of mine for so long:

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense

Take what you have gathered from coincidence 

Tom Petty death sync

I was listening to some music, mostly New Wave kind of stuff, when I suddenly wanted to listen to something entirely different: "You Don't Know How It Feels" by Tom Petty. I put it on on YouTube and watched the video, too.

At one point, Tom was singing "You don't know how it feels to be me" as a human -shaped target behind him took a bullet. I'd seen the video before, but this time the imagery struck me as an omen, and I had a sudden hunch that if I searched for Petty's name right that minute, I would find breaking news of his death.

I ran the search and found out that Petty had actually died eight years ago. I was interested to see, though, that it was exactly eight years ago. Tom Petty died in California on October 2, 2017. It was a few minutes into October 3 here in Taiwan that I had my hunch, but it's still the 2nd in California.

Note added (October 4, 7:30 p.m.): In the comments on this post, I mentioned a dog who walked into my school shortly after it opened, whom I named Lola. Today I opened up Google Photos and found a photo of Lola right at the top. The day she showed up was October 12, 2017, just ten days after Tom Petty died.

She was a cute little pup. Fortunately, we managed to find a home for her with a family that loves her very much.

Rolling the bones

As I drifted off to sleep, the 2009 Metric song "Gimme Sympathy" was playing in my head.

As I entered the hypnopompic state, most of the song had fallen away, leaving the pre-chorus:

We're so close

To something better left unknown

We're so close

To something better left unknown

I can feel it in my bones

That last line -- with bones understood in the slang sense of "dice" -- led into a brief dream scene. I was sitting at a large round table in some kind of casino, rolling a handful of dice. Just as you can "feel" the tip of your pen on the paper or the tires of your motorcycle on the road, I could feel the dice hitting the tabletop, rolling, and coming to rest, and I could feel on which face each had landed without looking.

These were ordinary six-sided dice -- Asian-style, with the aces and caters in red -- but the game we were playing with them was called Seven Eleven because the four had a value of 7, and the six had a value of 11, while the remaining four faces were counted at face value. The value of a given throw was not the sum of the numbers rolled but their product. Thus, for example, if you rolled a two, a four, and a six, that was worth 154.

After I woke up, I realized this was a perfect system for solving a problem I have blogged about before, that of "The linear ranking of dice rolls." If each die face (except the ace) has a prime value, and we take the product rather than the sum, then each possible roll yields a unique integer, and these can be ranked straightforwardly from greatest to least. I may experiment a bit with the Seven Eleven system and see if I prefer it to the Air Hexactys.

A censored lucid dream

I had a dream that was set on a college campus in the 1960s. The atmosphere was that of a zany sex comedy of that era, but anytime anything sexual was about to occur, a flat opaque gray circle would appear in front of it, hiding it from my view. This happened again and again.

"Where do those gray circles come from?" I said, not expecting anyone to reply.

I was answered by a disembodied voice: "It's for your own protection. It might be illegal for you to view some of this material."

"Illegal? How?"

"Come on. This is the sixties. You just know half of those girls are going to be underage."

"But this is a dream! How can it be illegal to see something in a dream?"

Saying this made me realize it was true: It was a dream. I was dreaming. Everything, including the gray circles, was coming from my own mind and was subject to my control. I could just will the circles away if I wanted to.

"So do it," said the voice, "if you're so sure all of this is coming from your own mind."

I found myself unwilling to do so. A sexual dream that just happens spontaneously is one thing, but . . .

"That would be degenerate," I said.

"It's the sixties," said the voice, meaning that degenerate behavior would hardly be out of place. "And weren't you just kvetching about the gray circles a second ago?"

"I'm not going to use my first lucid dream to create some lame-ass peep show!"

"You only think it's a lucid dream," said the voice. "The slave who never tests his chains believes himself to be free."

And then I woke up. I guess I'll never know whether or not I really had the power to override the censorship.

The death of Nelson

When the surname Nelson is used without further qualification, it typically refers to "Britannia's god of war," Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, whose birthday is tomorrow and who died in 1805 at the Battle of Trafalgar, depicted in this painting by William Lionel Wyllie (1851-1931).

Note Wyllie's unusual choice, in this painting depicting the death of Nelson, to portray the sea as yellowish-orange in color. A similar choice was made by Pixie Smith (1878-1951) in her design of the Three of Wands card for the classic Rider-Waite Tarot deck. Both pictures also show a yellowish sky and depict ships sailing from the right side of the picture to the left.

As WanderingGondola has noted, this is the only card in the suit of Wands to depict the wands planted in the earth as if they were trees -- young oaks, perhaps. The man's arm, extended to the right, makes a horizontal bar between two of these "trees," forming a capital letter H.

So, if you wanted to choose a single Tarot card to represent the death of Russell M. Nelson and the anticipated accession of Dallin H. Oaks to the Apricot Throne, you could do a lot worse than the Three of Wands.

Hours after the death of Russell Nelson, but hours before it had been reported by the press, I took two short naps with the above Tarot card under my pillow. I did not know which card it was, and my intention was to try to guess the card's identity by analyzing the dreams I had while it was under my pillow. I have, for complex psychological reasons, decided that this is a paranormal ability I ought to have and need to develop.

After analyzing my dreams, I came up with a ranked list of nine guesses as to the identity of the card. None of the nine was even the right suit. I declared the experiment a "complete failure."

My first guess had been the Hierophant -- a character who, much like the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is a pope in all but name. My second guess had been Death, with particular reference to the fact that the card shows Death coming for a mitered church leader.

One of my dreams had shown a pope dropping and breaking a pair of scissors, which one of the other characters in the dream called "death scissors." Prior to his ecclesiastical career, Russell Nelson was a heart surgeon, and surgical scissors were among the tools of his trade.

Another dream had a newly elected pope announcing a campaign to plant more trees -- including, implicitly, oaks.

The details of my dreams and predictions, all published before I knew of Nelson's death, may be read in my post "Nineteen years inside the sphere."

Nineteen years inside the sphere

I did another reading with my eyes shut experiment, sleeping for 45 minutes with an unknown Tarot card under my pillow and trying to identify the card using clues from my dreams.

I didn't get much dream content this time. The first hypnagogic imagery to appear was a vague glimpse of two figures, viewed from behind, with their hands raised as if in worship of something in front of them. I was still semi-conscious at this point, and my first thought was that this indicated the card was likely the Devil -- or, this second thought rapidly following the first, the Hierophant.

The imagery here doesn't really match what I saw in any direct way. The two figures in the foreground of the Devil card have their backs to the devil and are not raising their hands. The two monks on the Hierophant card have their backs to us and appear to be kneeling before the pope, but the pope is the one who has his arms raised. Anyway, these two cards came immediately to mind while I was still in the hypnagogic state, so I note them.

Later, in a deeper sleep state, I was looking at a floor plan.

"Where's the cage where they lie down?" I asked. "I can't see any place for it."

"It's inside the sphere," I was told.

The central room on the floor plan was circular, and in the center of it was a large sphere on a pedestal. Although the floor plan was just a simple line drawing without color, I understood that this sphere was made of some kind of black stone.

"Inside the sphere?" I said. "Isn't that bit excessive?"

"It's for sensory deprivation," the voice said. "They stay there for 19 years, getting used to it."

"Nineteen years? Who would volunteer to spend 19 years of their life in a state of sensory deprivation? Maybe you meant to say 19 days, or 19 hours?"

Before I could get an answer to that question, I woke up.

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Based on that rather meager dream content, here are my ranked guesses as to the card under the pillow:

1. Judgement: People raising their hands as if in worship after emerging from tombs in which they have slept for years.

2. The Devil: My first hunch. It has a black background, and the chained captives are conceptually similar to the idea of people lying down in a "cage."

3. The Hierophant: Again, a hypnagogic hunch seems worth trusting.

4. Nine of Swords: A person who has just been lying down, with a black background that could be the inside of the black sphere. Even now, awake, she is covering her eyes, suggesting "sensory deprivation."

5. Four of Swords: A person lying down. A "worship" image in the background.

6. Ten of Cups: Two figures viewed from behind, with their arms raised.

7. The Sun: The number 19 was emphasized.

The card is still under the pillow. As soon as I've published this, I'm going back dans les bras de Morphée for another 45 minutes to see if I can get any more data, after which I'll update my predictions if necessary and then check the card.

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Update: Here is the content from my second sleep session with the same (still unknown) card under the pillow.

First, there was a scene of a pope -- I think it was the pope played by John Malkovich in the video clip with Marilyn Manson on "A mistake about Pius XIII, a circle-lemniscate logo, and a lost city found in 2012" -- attempting to use a very small pair of scissors. The rings were too small for him to fit his fingers into. Finally he dropped the scissors on the floor, the handles popped off, and lots of tiny nails or screws that had been inside spilled out onto the floor. A young man knelt on the floor to look and said, "What are these? Death scissors?" I thought the idea was that the scissors must have been some sort of miniature pipe bomb, with the tiny nails and screws intended as shrapnel.

This brief scene was followed by a couple of non-visual dream segments, each consisting only of a spoken sentence. The first was, "A wife but no house. Period." The second was, "Let's get naked, and let's get together." I understood that this second was meant to sound sexual but that this was deliberate misdirection; the nakedness was intended to disguise the nature of some non-sexual action that was being planned.

In a final scene, the news was announcing the election of a new pope, who was taking the name Pius XIII. At the same time this was on the news, someone claiming to be the new pope (and I believed him) was posting on 4chan. I anticipated that he was going to say that he didn't want to take the name Pius XIII, that the name had been suggested by someone else and given to the press prematurely. Instead, he posted a photo of his hand holding a plastic bag containing some kind of plant material. Many posters thought this was marijuana and that it meant the new pope intended to campaign for the legalization of that drug worldwide. Later, though, it was clarified, on 4chan and the news simultaneously, that the new pope had announced a global campaign for people to plant more trees.

I then woke up.

⁂

All this papal material obviously makes the Hierophant a stronger candidate. In particular, the scissors scene seems to suggest this part of the card:

At the pope's feet, as if on the floor, are a pair of crossed keys, suggesting the general shape of a pair of scissors, with rings into which it would be difficult or impossible to insert one's fingers. Just above these "scissors" are the pope's feet in papal slippers, the cross markings of which suggest stigmata and thus, indirectly, nails. And on either side of the crossed keys is a man who is probably kneeling.

Scissors also suggest the Two of Swords, which shows a blindfolded woman and thus ties in with the earlier "sensory deprivation" theme. Out of curiosity, I googled which tarot card shows scissors and found this. Interestingly, the first two results both, in different ways, referenced death:

The first is, no surprise, the Two of Swords -- but from the Santa Muerte Tarot. That's Spanish for "Saint Death." The second is the Death card itself in "Madame Dulora de la Haye's Tarot" (Tarot hiéroglyphique égyptien). The name is interesting in connection with my recent "Ether genius Michael Hayes" dream. So both of these link to the "death scissors" reference. Here are the two cards in question:

The Rider-Waite Death card is also relevant, since it features a bishop, the Roman numeral XIII, and of course the word Death -- all of which also featured in this last round of dreams.

In the John Malkovich scene with Marilyn Manson, we learn that Pope Pius XIII is still alive but is in an extended coma, which fits with the dream about someone staying in a sensory deprivation chamber for years.

Here are my updated ranked predictions:

1. The Hierophant
2. Death
3. Judgement
4. The Devil
5. Two of Swords
6. Nine of Swords
7. Four of Swords
8. Ten of Cups
9. The Sun

And now I'm going to go check the card.

⁂

Final update: It's the Three of Wands. Another complete failure. Interesting that card should turn up again, though.

Lake Tirza, the rivers of Serbia, and swift Blue-Green Tara

In a comment on "The devil's tattoo," Bill suggests that Tirza in my September 18 dream (see "To Tirza" and "Further notes on the Tirza dream") might be the Great and Spacious Building from the Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 8, 11, 12). I found that somewhat improbable, given that the Tirza in my dream is a lake.

When I searched for Lake Tirza just to see what would come up, the results were all about the very similarly named Lake Tisza, the largest artificial lake in Hungary. Since one of the bloggers I follow is Francis Berger, who lives in Hungary, I wondered if he might have mentioned that lake on his blog at one point, and if a subconscious memory of that might have been the source for Lake Tirza in my dream. All I found was a 2019 post called "Mednyansk - Hungary's Best Landscape Painter," which highlights his 1880 painting Fishing on the Tisza.

This is the Tisza River, though, and the post makes no mention of the lake. The idea of rivers in that part of the world reminded me of something else, though. This past Thursday (September 25, a week after the Tirza dream), I was teaching a group of young children. Their textbook has this photo of a tiny house on a tiny island in the Drina River in Serbia:

One of the boys commented, in Chinese, that living in that house would be very scary because there might be sharks. I said, in English, "No, there can't be any sharks, because that isn't the ocean. It's a river."

"What about octopuses?" said another boy.

"No, octopuses live in the ocean, too. Does anyone know what kinds of animals live in a river?"

Finally the children began proposing more plausible animals -- fish, frogs, turtles, water rats, and so on. The first two animals they had thought of, though, were sharks and octopuses, in that order.

This is a fairly major sync because in "Further notes on the Tirza dream," I had connected the Tirza dream with an earlier dream I had had in 2023. I quoted this paragraph from my account of that earlier dream:

Last night, I had a dream in which I did not appear as a character but simply observed the story as if watching a movie. It was about a man who had decided he wanted to visit a place "where the ocean empties into a river" (sic) because of all the amazing things you could see there -- "Imagine, you could see sharks, octopuses, all kinds of things -- in a river!" So he was walking off to a place like that, with a female friend tagging along rather unenthusiastically. She asked if they were going to Africa, and he said, "No, Michigan. It's a bit north of Africa, but the ocean empties into a river there, too, so it's just as good."

This map of the Danube basin shows both the Tisza and the Drina. The Tisza flows directly into the Danube. The Drina flows into the Sava, which flows in to the Danube. All three of these confluences are located in a fairly small region of Serbia (Novi Sad is an hour's drive from Belgrade).

The Drina, according to Wikipedia, "originates from the confluence of the rivers Tara and Piva." That name Tara has also come up in connection with Tirza. In a September 24 comment on "Blue Green Crystal Ball," I wrote:

Another of Jo Sun's songs is the Green Tara mantra in Sanskrit. Possibly relevant in connection with Tirza/Terra and other mantras that have come up before.

According to this page from the Tourist Organization Republic of Srpska, the similarity between the Serbian river name and the Sanskrit mantra may not be a coincidence:

The word Tara has a double origin. Based on one interpretation, the name is old Indian i.e. Sanskrit and means speed and impetuousness or a fast-flowing river, while the other meaning of the word is the name of an Ilyrian tribe which lived on river banks and whose name was Autariatae.

By the way, I mentioned Green Tara in the comments on "Blue Green Crystal Ball" without knowing that her name can be otherwise translated. According to Wikipedia:

The Green Tara (or "blue-green", Skt. Samayatara or śyāmatārā) remains the most important form of the deity in Tibetan Buddhism.

The Serbian tourism site says Tara means "speed" in Sanskrit. Wikipedia disagrees:

Tārā (Devanagari: तारा) is a feminine noun derived from the root √tṝ, "to cross". It is causative, and as such means "to cause to cross", i.e., "to rescue".

However, the Green Tara mantra -- the one chanted by Jo Sun on her album The Blue Green Crystal Ball, which was my occasion for mentioning Tara in the first place -- does include a reference to swiftness. Wikipedia again:

The main Tārā mantra is the same for Buddhists and Hindus alike: oṃ tāre tuttāre ture svāhā. It is pronounced by Tibetans and Buddhists who follow the Tibetan culture as oṃ tāre tu tāre ture soha. The literal translation would be "Oṃ O Tārā, I pray O Tārā, O Swift One, So Be It!"

Here's Jo Sun's version of the mantra, which follows the Tibetan pronunciation: 

Jo Sun's real name is apparently Josephine Genese -- strongly suggesting "Joseph in Genesis," a character Bill has brought up repeatedly.

Ether genius Michael Hayes

I dreamt that I was reading what looked, from the appearance of the paper, to be a mass-market paperback printed in the 1980s or thereabouts. I read a reference to "ether genius Michael Hayes." I understood that this brief descriptor was intended to help the reader mentally categorize the person referred to, as one might write "ant expert Edward O. Wilson" or "jazz trumpeter Miles Davis." It also somehow reminded me of a crossword clue, the kind meant to elicit a surname with a prompt like "medical pioneer Sir William."

There are lots of people called Michael Hayes, none of which is of any obvious relevance, and I have no real idea of what an "ether genius" might be. Diethyl ether? Luminiferous ether? Quintessence? The Thirty Aethyrs? The Book of Ether?

Haze "opaqueness of atmosphere" contrasts with aether "pure, bright upper air."

The name Hayes appeared in a dream I had when I was 11 or 12 years old, in which I heard this rhyme:

I have shorn many sheep in my lifetime

I have shorn many sheep in my days

I have shorn many sheep that are pretty to me

But none is as pretty as Hayes

All in all, the meaning of this dream is quite hazy. It would take an ether genius to clear it up.

The devil's tattoo

In "Illusion turning into reality" I mention hearing the Natalie Imbruglia song "Torn" at a synchronistically opportune moment in a coffee shop on September 25. The reason I had even been paying attention to the background music was what had played just before "Torn."

The instrumental intro had started, and I recognized it as a song I knew and liked: "Dirty Paws" by Of Monsters and Men. Then the singing started, and it was something totally different. The lyrics name-dropped "pumpkin pie," which is a sync-fairy calling card these days, but mainly I was listening to the lyrics so that I could look the song up and see who had so shamelessly ripped off OMAM's instrumentals.

Then, finally, a verse of "Dirty Paws" was sung, and I realized that this was not a ripoff but a mashup. I found it online: "Home/Dirty Paws" by the Gardiner Sisters:

The other half of the mashup, a song called "Home," was credited to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, a group I'd never heard of. I looked them up and found that the lead singer's name is Alex Ebert -- a nod to the recent "Eb(b)ert sync."

The next day (yesterday), I had the Gardiner Sisters mashup in my head and realized that the non-OMAM parts of the melody were reminding me of yet another song. After a long tip-of-the-tongue moment, I pinpointed it: "Rose Tattoo" by the Dropkick Murphys.

I'm a big fan of that song and the video, and my longstanding private interpretation of it is rather improbably mystical. A Being wakes up on Earth, disoriented, and realizes he's incarnated again, his memory wiped clean. He's an old hand at this, though, and knows how to deal with that situation: take a drag of last night's cigarette that smoldered in its tray, down a little something and then be on his way. He's confident he can feel his way through this life and accomplish his mission, guided by a combination of instinct ("I was guided by a compass / I saw beauty to the north") and externalized memories in the form of signs he and others have arranged for him to encounter ("I had these memories all around me / So I wouldn't be alone"), typified by the rose tattoo itself and by other things we see in the video, such as the playing cards (Ace of Hearts front and center, I notice now) and the sign that says "If you're lucky enough to be Irish, you're lucky enough."

Yesterday, for some reason, the thought of "Rose Tattoo" triggered a vivid fantasy based on the other meaning of the word tattoo. I saw a fanciful scene from an over-literal version of "the Wars of the Roses," in which the soldiers -- each with a bobbing red or white flower for a head -- were marching to the beat of the Rose Tattoo. The music accompanying this martial scene was, rather improbably, this song from my childhood:

In my pretty garden the flowers are nodding

How do you do? they say

How do you do today?

In my pretty garden the flowers are nodding

This fantasy made me curious about the etymology of tattoo and how it came to mean two such entirely different things. Just a coincidence, it turns out. The military meaning comes from tap-to and originally indicated that it was time for taverns to shut off the taps. The skin-marking meaning is of Polynesian origin -- Wiktionary suggests as one possibility "e.g. Samoan tatau ('tattoo; to tap, to strike')." That "to tap" is an additional coincidence, given that the other etymology is "tap-to." The Etymonline entry for the military meaning of tattoo ends thus (emphasis in the original):

In English, the transferred sense of "drumbeat" is recorded from 1755. Hence, Devil's tattoo "action of idly drumming fingers in irritation or impatience" (1803).

I had never heard the expression "devil's tattoo" before. It caught my attention because in the Dropkick Murphys video that kicked off this whole tattoo investigation includes several shots of the band members drumming on the table with their fingers.

This morning I read a little in Phantasia over breakfast. One of the major plotlines in the novel is that certain of the "great devils" (Beings corresponding to the seven deadly sins), disgruntled with changes in the administration of hell, have decided to incarnate on Earth, where they struggle to find their way -- a theme obviously suggestive of my personal interpretation of "Rose Tattoo." Today I read this passage, describing the dissatisfaction in hell of the great devil Sloth [correction: actually a demon, not a great devil] leading up to his decision to incarnate:

He was restless, but he tried to focus on his task, typing up a statement of intent or something like it in the machine and then leave it at the desk of his superior, only for him to take it to some other department of hell, he wasn't even sure which one, but the clacking of sound of the typewriter is annoying and then distracting, he starts to press the keys merely for the sounds they are producing, amusing himself with the basic rhythms he can drum with his fingers, and then he has a page full of gibberish.

So here is the devil's tattoo -- "action of idly drumming fingers in irritation or impatience" -- performed by a literal devil in hell. And because it is on the keys of a typewriter that he is drumming, the action produces markings in ink, thus tying it to the other meaning of tattoo.

Crystal balls and snake eyes

The recent "Blue Green Crystal Ball" syncs reminded me that the Background Brethren had also spoken of using crystal balls, so I revisited that post:

After bringing us from the 1940s to the present, the Brethren got quiet, and then one of them said, "Now, I want you to know we been up all night with our crystal balls to bring you this next bit" -- meaning that this next part of the song was about the future. The melody changed at this point, too. I can't remember the new melody, but I'm confident I got the "future" lyrics verbatim:

Snake eyes, paradise

Something moving in the ice

Malcolm X, Genghis Khan

Pray for Satan's salvation

The first two words of their "crystal ball" prophecy were "snake eyes."

While rereading that post, I noticed a link on my blogroll to a new post by Laura Wood: "Strange Connections: 1998 Film 'Snake Eyes'." It's about a Nicolas Cage movie called Snake Eyes in which -- in a scene that obviously appears "prophetic" in retrospect -- an American politician named Charles Kirkland is shot in the neck on September 10 at a public event featuring Tyler "the Executioner."

The Brethren's prophecy also references Malcolm X, another political activist who was assassinated. Just yesterday The Atlantic ran a piece comparing Kirk to Malcolm X.

Yaffa Beauty

In my September 22 post "A turquoise stone; and suns, moons, and armies with banners," I compared these two lines from the Song of Solomon:

beautiful . . . as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners (6:4)

fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners (6:10)

I noted that "beautiful" in v. 4 and "fair" in v. 6 are translations of the same Hebrew word. This can be transliterated in various ways, and in fact the Bible Hub Interlinear Bible from which I got the information renders it yāp̄āh, but in the post I spelled it yafah, which is my understanding of how it is pronounced. A p with a macron seemed unnecessarily pedantic (not that there's anything wrong with that!). I'm not sure why I didn't go with ph, which would have been more in keeping with King James spelling (Ephraim, seraphim, etc.). I hadn't known the word before looking it up; the Tirza dream led me to those two verses, and I wanted to see how closely they paralleled each other.

Today, I passed this beauty salon on the street:

The fact that it's a beauty salon, and yafah is Hebrew for "beautiful," suggests that the name is not a coincidence. The Chinese characters for the salon's name have no meaning but are used to transliterate foreign names. Apparently someone decided to open a beauty salon in Taiwan and name it after the Hebrew word for "beautiful" -- but why Hebrew? Taiwan has a negligible Jewish population (a grand total of two synagogues in the whole country), and Christians (who might take an interest in Hebrew as a biblical language) are a small minority.

Yafa is also a feminine name in Arabic, cognate with the Hebrew word. Since Taiwan has about 200 times as many Muslims as Jews, that seems a likelier source of the name. The Muslims here aren't Arabs -- most are from Indonesia -- but I would assume that many of them have Arabic names, for the same reason that many Europeans have Hebrew names. Lots of nail salons are operated by Southeast Asians, so it fits. It might be the owner's name.

Searching for yaffa beauty turned up a South African company by that name, with the blurb in the search result emphasizing that they offer "more than just shampoo."

Since shampoo has recently come up ("Shampoo as food"), I clicked through. The homepage was advertising Koffee Shampoo.

Since the "Shampoo as food" post began by associating shampoo with buttered toast, this link between shampoo and coffee would seem to be continuing that theme. Some years ago I wrote something about a Danish character who began every day with "hot buttered coffee and strong black toast" (same concept as the spoonerized Swedish dishes the Babylonians eat in Yes and No; the "strong black toast" is rugbrød), so that's synchronistic precedent for swapping out toast for coffee.

Illusion turning into reality

This afternoon, I was reading Phantasia in a coffee shop and came to this passage:

When he gets out [of the water] he won't know if his thought about the woman had been, Please let me be free from this illusion, or if it was, Please let the illusion turn to reality, and who knows, maybe the two things end up being the same.

Minutes after I'd read that, a new song came on in the background music playing in the shop. It wasn't a song that I knew, but one line jumped out at me:

Illusion never changed into something real

I looked the song up later. It's called "Torn" and has been performed by lots of different singers. I think the version I heard was the one by Natalie Imbruglia.

Blue Green Crystal Ball

My recent (September 22) post "A turquoise stone; and suns, moons, and armies with banners" mentions a dream about "a large turquoise-colored crystal ball." Today I was thinking about that again and tried searching for images of one. The word turquoise in the search prompts was bringing up balls made of that stone, though, which is opaque and not really "crystal ball" material, so I changed it to blue green. What I found was a song called "Blue Green Crystal Ball" by someone called Jo Sun (Josephine Genese), published on July 4, 2025, on Apple Music and on July 17 on YouTube -- where, as of this writing, it has racked up a whopping six views.

I haven't been able to decipher most of the lyrics, but it begins like this:

The blue green crystal ball is creative magic
The blue green crystal ball is fantastic
The blue green crystal ball, so dynamic
The blue green crystal ball, so majestic

On July 4, I posted "After baptism," featuring a "blue-green crab." On July 17, I posted "Sly St(all)one," with a comment from Bill about "an 8 inch, 30 pound crystal ball." Bill's comment was about his Rose Stone, but he's mentioned before the possibility of other such stones in different colors.

Note added: I had originally posted this as a mildly interesting coincidence. Only belatedly did I realize it's actually an astonishing one. Why was I searching for blue-green crystal balls? Because of a dream that made the point again and again that such a ball was connected with phantasia, as that word is used in an exceedingly obscure Portuguese novel I'm reading. In the novel, phantasia is a form of magic that creates things out of nothing -- "creative magic" in the most literal possible sense. Our word fantastic is derived from the Latin phantasia. Now look at the first two lines of that song again.

Shampoo as food

Last Friday, one of my Taiwanese students made the strange mistake of confusing the English words butter and shampoo, and wrote a sentence about spreading shampoo on toast and eating it.

Today, I checked the Babylon Bee, where one of the new articles was "RFK Announces It's Actually Fine To Eat The Stuff In The Little Pouch That Says 'Do Not Eat'." The article ends with this sentence:

At publishing time, RFK was reportedly questioning the warnings on shampoo labels notifying users that the product was for external use only.

 

"AI-Q for Dummies" indeed!

Last month, Leo posted "Measuring AI-Q for Dummies," showing how incompetent currently available fake intelligences are at creating IQ tests. I couldn't help but think of a different meaning of his title when I saw this on AC today:

The implication is that Q somehow knew seven years in advance that there would be some big politically significant event at State Farm Stadium on September 21 of some future year. Mind-blowing, right?

The problem is that State Farm Stadium is not known as "the Q." This should be obvious from the fact that the only evidence cited is an "AI Overview" which doesn't make any freaking sense. It explains that "University of Phoenix" was abbreviated to "U-P-X" and then to "the Q." Of course! "The Q" is an abbreviation for "University of Phoenix." What could be more natural?

Although this is very obviously an idiotic fake-intelligence hallucination, I went ahead and did my due diligence. You will search the Web in vain for any reference to University of Phoenix Stadium or State Farm Stadium as "the Q," except for very recent references to the above Rip Cord tweet. The stadium known as "the Q" was San Diego Stadium, formerly Qualcomm Stadium -- you know, because Qualcomm, unlike University of Phoenix, actually begins with the letter Q!

A turquoise stone; and suns, moons, and armies with banners

I've been reading Laeth's novel Phantasia, the title of which refers to an ability to "manifest" objects by visualizing them clearly while one's head is immersed in a bowl of water. All last night I had a long dream in which some female Beings -- possibly including Claire, I'm not sure, but at any rate Beings of her general type -- were showing me a large turquoise-colored crystal ball and making the point, again and again as if they wanted to make sure I would remember it, that this "Stone" was related to Laeth's concept of phantasia in three different ways. First, I would have to manifest the Stone by visualizing it. Second, the function of the Stone was to induce preternaturally clear mental images. Third -- but I'm afraid that, despite their having taken the trouble to spend all night repeating themselves to pound it into my head, I've forgotten the third connection.

⁂

For some reason, my post  "Further notes on the Tirza dream" is getting tons of views -- about seven times as many as "To Tirza," even though the "further notes" wouldn't make much sense if you hadn't read the dream itself. Maybe it's just because it spent a few days as my most recent post and was thus the one that appeared on blogrolls and such. Or maybe it's just Google stats being bonkers again.

Anyway, the dream had me thinking about Tirzah in the Bible, including this line from the Song of Solomon:

Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners (6:4).

This is echoed a few verses later, with beautiful [yafah] Tirzah and comely Jerusalem corresponding to the fair [yafah] Moon and the clear Sun, respectively:

Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners? (6:10)

Although Joseph Smith declared to Song of Solomon "not inspired," he, or those who spoke through him, really liked that line, which is quoted or paraphrased three times in the Doctrine and Covenants.

And to none else will I grant this power, to receive this same testimony among this generation, in this the beginning of the rising up and the coming forth of my church out of the wilderness -- clear as the moon, and fair as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners (D&C 5:14).

But first let my army become very great, and let it be sanctified before me, that it may become fair as the sun, and clear as the moon, and that her banners may be terrible unto all nations (D&C 105:31).

That thy church may come forth out of the wilderness of darkness, and shine forth fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners (D&C 109:73).

Each of the three renders the key line differently, with only the last following the Song of Solomon exactly. In the other two, it is the moon that is clear and the sun that is fair. A clear moon and a fair sun make me think of Claire Delune and Juliet, respectively. (Juliet, you will remember, recently appeared in "The blue flamingo and the golden stair.")

Further notes on the Tirza dream

This post is about the dream recounted in "To Tirza," which you should read first if you haven't yet.

The dream ended with my seeing a large eye painted on a wall in three places and asking, "What does that one-eye symbol mean? Or I guess it's three eyes." Immediately after waking, I opened the drawer in my nightstand, where I keep various toiletries, and this caught my eye (uh, so to speak):

A single eye, with the Chinese character for "three" right next to it -- a one-eye symbol, or I guess it's three eyes. It's from the Sanmin Road Ophthalmology Clinic. Sanmin is literally "three the people" ("the" inserted to show it's not "three people" as in three individuals) and is short for the Three Principles of the People, the founding political philosophy of the Republic of China. Most towns in Taiwan have a Sanmin Road.

I've actually sync-posted a photo of a bag from that clinic before, in "Eye drops on 113/3/20," and at first I thought it was the very same bag -- but no, it's dated 103.4.9 -- that is, April 9, 2014. Why I still have eye medicine from 11 years ago, and why I never noticed it until today, I have no idea. Funnily, the post about getting eye drops on March 20, 2024, said, "I almost never have problems with my eyes and hadn't seen an ophthalmologist in well over a decade." I stand corrected: not quite a decade.

Besides the eye sync, the main thing that got me about the dream was its parallels to other dreams. It begins with me going down a street in a wheeled office chair -- a most singular means of transportation, but one I've dreamed about before. Just a few weeks ago, in "Reading with my eyes shut, Take 2," I reported a dream in which I was going down the aisle of a church in a wheeled office chair. In that earlier dream, I ended up picking the chair up, turning it upside down, and carrying it on my head. In the Tirza dream, the chair was turned backwards rather than upside down. This theme of putting chairs in strange orientations is also, I think, a link to the dream in "If you could be any animal . . ." (a detail added in a comment), in which it was suggested that I improve the feng shui of my classroom by turning two sofas on their backs, with the legs sticking out in the front. I don't really understand the symbolism of this, but it seems to be a recurring theme.

In the dream, the "Tirza" I wanted to go to was a lake, but I anticipated seeing whales there. As already noted, this is a link to my recurring "Whale-watching from the shore" dreams. It's also a link to a dream recorded in "N'EGO: The Negation of the Ego":

Last night, I had a dream in which I did not appear as a character but simply observed the story as if watching a movie. It was about a man who had decided he wanted to visit a place "where the ocean empties into a river" (sic) because of all the amazing things you could see there -- "Imagine, you could see sharks, octopuses, all kinds of things -- in a river!" So he was walking off to a place like that, with a female friend tagging along rather unenthusiastically. She asked if they were going to Africa, and he said, "No, Michigan. It's a bit north of Africa, but the ocean empties into a river there, too, so it's just as good."

The man in the dream was accompanied by a woman, as I was in the Tirza dream, and they were going on foot to a body of freshwater in the north in which he expected to see marine animals. Michigan, like Ohio, borders Lake Erie.

Looking up that old whale-watching post, as well as the lyrics of the post-dream song "Bliss," turned up another odd sync: the repeated used of the word terra. In my post on the Tirza dream, I noted the "terracotta roofing" on the houses in the area where I was walking. The whale-watching post mentioned wanting to see whales "without the trouble of actually leaving terra firma." The Tori Amos song, it turns out, includes the line "Take it, take it with your terra, terracide."

In the William Alizio story, there's also a scene in which Alizio -- and, again, a female companion -- find themselves in a lake ("I was right," said William Alizio. "We are in a lake.") and encounter a gigantic whale-like fish. Some of this was quoted in "Little Skinny Planet," but I looked up the original manuscript to see if they had walked to the lake or if it was in the north or something. (No. They roll down a hill into the lake, and no compass points are mentioned.) While skimming the manuscript, I found yet another terra reference. Here is William Alizio after having read some of Jessica Nolin's poetry:

"This part about 'a star named Alice shining like a cross in Gomorrah, little and thin in the roof of Tellus.' Who's Alice?"

"Oh, that's the Little Skinny Planet."

"Why did you call it Alice?"

"Oh, I thought I would -- sort of an Alice in Wonderland kind of thing."

"Oh. And what's this part about 'a terra-cotta Cupid staring down on Noriega's moored cab'? Is that part about Noriega?"

"That part's kind of hard to explain. I mean, when you read it you sort of know what it means, but you can't really explain it."

"Oh."

"So what do you think of it? Tim and Patrick say it doesn't make sense."

"Oh, I like it," said William Alizio. "Especially that part about Noriega."

Later, when Alizio tells Tim and Patrick that he likes the poems, Patrick singles out the terra-cotta line for ridicule:

"Now you don't make sense," said Patrick. "You really like that part about Noriega and the terra-cotta Cupid?"

Besides the terra-cotta, there's also a reference to Tellus -- which, like terra, is a Latin name for Earth. This was enough to get me curious about the etymology of terra. Here it is:

From Proto-Italic *terzā, from Proto-Indo-European *ters-eh₂, from *ters- (“dry”).

Cognate with torreō, Ancient Greek τέρσομαι (térsomai), Old Irish tír, Sanskrit तृषा (tṛ́ṣā), Old English þurst (English thirst). Compare the semantics of Ancient Greek χέρσος (khérsos). 

The Proto-Italic and the Sanskrit are awfully close to Tirza. It's looking like the terra theme is not an accident. Terra is of course also the root of terrestrial, which has a special meaning in Mormonism and which Bill has associated with Numenor. (Earth itself is not considered to be terrestrial but rather "telestial" -- Tellus-tial?)

If Tirza is Terra, then wanting to go to Tirza means wanting to go to Earth. The dream which had the sofa rotation recommendation was set in a spaceport, where I had just returned to Earth after an extended absence.

The association of the terra-cotta Cupid with Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega is also potentially interesting. Panama has come up more often than you might expect on this blog, with the most recent mention being in "She's afraid of the light in the dark."

Update: Somehow I forgot to include this, but "To Tirzah" turns out to be the title of a poem by William Blake.

Whate’re is born of mortal birth

Must be consumèd with the earth,

To rise from generation free:

Then what have I to do with thee?

The sexes sprung from shame and pride,

Blow’d in the morn; in evening died;

But Mercy chang’d death into sleep;

The sexes rose to work and weep.

Thou, Mother of my mortal part,

With cruelty didst mould my heart,

And with false self-deceiving tears

Didst bind my nostrils, eyes, and ears;

Didst close my tongue in senseless clay,

And me to mortal life betray:

The death of Jesus set me free:

Then what have I to do with thee?

Reading Tirzah as Terra here makes a lot of sense.