The very next night, I had another dream that took that theme to another level. I was in a church with my wife and a lot of other people when representatives of the Taiwanese government came in and distributed a questionnaire that they said everyone had to fill out. While Elon's worksheet had been a single page, this one was a War and Peace-sized tome which would obviously take a very long time to complete.
"Excuse me," I said. "Are we required by law to complete this?"
"This is for everyone to take. It's to determine who is qualified to become a pharmacist and so on."
"But if I don't do it, what will happen?"
"Someone will be sent to your house to discuss it with you."
"And?"
"And torture you."
As the dream progressed, I grew increasingly angry about being forced to do this questionnaire, and in the end decided that, torture or no torture, I just wasn't going to do it. I did finish a few of the questions, though, on the first page.
There was a simple line drawing of a bungalow and a short paragraph that said something like: "Imagine yourself in this situation. You live in this house in Yilan. You wake up one morning, look outside, and see that the weather is very nice."
There followed three questions. Here they are with the answers I gave. I was deliberately giving the simplest, stupidest answers I could think of as a form of passive resistance.
- What would you say in this situation? It's a nice day.
- Where would you say it? At home.
- Why would you say it? Because it's a nice day.
Those are the only questions I actually finished. After that, I just flipped through the book to see what else was in it. Here's what I remember:
One page had drawings of several different species of cicada and said, "Write the scientific names of these cicadas."
Another page said "Classify these Silmarils." It had drawings of several gems that all looked the same to me, and there was a table with different categories in which to put them. One of these categories was Isilmarils, and I don't remember the others, but I know the form of the names reminded me of the those used in the USDA soil taxonomy system. (In Tolkien, of course, there are only three Silmarils, so it would make no sense to "classify" them.)
Another question was, "Which would you rather watch -- a movie about humans killing and eating humans, or a movie about zombies killing and eating zombies?" Then, apparently concerned that this question wasn't clear enough, it added, "For example, these Aegeans?" -- under which was a very graphic picture of ancient Greek soldiers slaughtering one another -- "Or these zombies?" -- under which was a cartoony, AI-looking picture of a zombie biting another zombie's arm.
The page I spent the most time looking at said, "Complete these famous quotations," and then had a list of quotations with most of the content words blanked out. For example, it would give you "The _______ of _____ is not ________," and you would have to fill in "The quality of mercy is not strain'd." It was my impression that most of the quotations came from Shakespeare or the Bible.
One of these began, "Jesus, pondering the seven gospels, saith" -- followed by a series of blanks interspersed with prepositions and conjunctions and such. I didn't know what Jesus was supposed to have said as he pondered the seven gospels, but the whole thing struck me as ridiculous. Everyone knows there are four gospels, not seven, and that none of them had yet been written in the time of Jesus.
The next page had an illustration of Jesus pondering the seven gospels. Jesus was sitting cross-legged like a Buddha, and spread out in front of him, placed neatly side by side, were seven closed books. I thought this was very strange -- what's the point of having the books in front of you as you ponder them if they aren't open? A caption under the picture said, "From Christ to Cartomancy." I understood this to be suggesting that the cartomancer's practice of laying out a "spread" of cards side by side, face down, before turning them over one at a time somehow developed out of this story of Jesus contemplating a "spread" of closed books. I thought of my own habit of trying to perceive the face of a face-down card psychically before I turn it over, and I figured that if I could do that, maybe Jesus could read a closed book.
⁂
The morning after this dream, I read a few more pages in Ian Stewart's Why Beauty Is Truth -- which I've been reading very slowly on account of reading lots of other things concurrently. On p. 216 (the second page I read today), I found this:
In 1926, [Wigner] was contacted by a crystallographer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute who wanted a research assistant. . . . The first major application of group theory to physics had been the classification of all 230 possible crystal structures.
The Silmarils were crystalline jewels, so this reference to classifying crystal structures seemed to tie right in with the "Classify these Silmarils" exercise in the dream. On a hunch that the date might also be relevant, I ran a search for tolkien 1926 and found that, according to Wikipedia,
The first complete version of The Silmarillion was the "Sketch of the Mythology" written in 1926.
Having had that dream brought back to mind in this way, I decided to search for "seven gospels" just to see what would come up. I was expecting something about non-canonical gospels maybe, or perhaps some New-Agey stuff. Instead, I found that most of the search results were for this book:
I had no idea that such a book existed prior to my dream. What are the odds that it would be about the Book of Mormon? I've read the BoM a time or two, and it doesn't contain seven or any other number of gospels. Not having read the book, I can only assumes Seven Gospels refers to some of the BoM's brief descriptions of the life and work of Jesus, most of which (in Nephi's vision, for example) would be prophecies, written before Christ and thus in principle available for Jesus to ponder.
[Update: A preview on Amazon shows that the "seven gospels" are found in 1 Nephi 11, Mosiah 3 and 15, Alma 7 and 19, Helaman 14, and Ether 3 -- all before Christ.]
The authors are Adam S. Miller and Rosalynde F. Welch. The first thing I noticed about these names, due to the dream's juxtaposition of "seven gospels" with Shakespeare, was that Rosalind is a Shakespearean name, the main character in As You Like It, and that that play also includes a character named Adam. Then I realized that the name Rosalynde Welch was vaguely familiar. Wasn't she someone from the early "Bloggernacle" Mormon blogs back when those were a thing? Which one was she with? Times and Seasons? Is Times and Seasons even still around?
I checked and found that not only is it still around, but it's most recent post is quite synchronistically interesting:
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