The first, which I didn't both posting about at the time but have in my dream notes, barely even qualifies as a dream. It was simply a still image that persisted for 15 seconds or so before fading to black: the face of a mandrill. Later, when a comment by WanderingGondola connected the Britbong Dolphin with the Byford Dolphin, it crossed my mind that there was a sort of punning link there -- drill being both a kind of monkey and the business of the Dolphin Drilling company -- but the connection seemed too minor to be worth noting on the blog.
Then, on March 11, came the syncs documented in "A non-Hindu interpretation of Vishnu crossing the water": An earthquake drill (a third sense of the word!) was connected with a picture of monkeys with a dolphin in the background. The mandrill connects semantically with the monkeys and phonetically with the earthquake drill, with the dolphin hinting at the third meaning of drilling for oil.
The monkeys in the Hindu picture are building a bridge, and each is shown holding a large rock over its head.
This morning, one of my students asked me to read her a story: The Billy Goats Gruff. The story (which is Norwegian) is of course about a troll and a bridge, and it made me think of this bit in The Fellowship of the Ring, just before the Balrog makes its appearance:
Two great trolls appeared; they bore great slabs of stone, and flung them down to serve as gangways over the fire.
These trolls, like the monkeys in the Ramayana, carry large rocks which they use to create a bridge.
Thinking again about the mandrill dream-image, I remembered a poem that was in an anthology my family owned. It's just a bit of lightweight comic verse, but it really used to give me the willies as a child. After a bit of searching, I found it on the Internet, with the illustration that was in the anthology:
"And that odd name / The Mandrill -- can / it be he hopes / to BE a man?" -- that stuck in my memory, in condensed form as "The Mandrill hopes to be a Man," and I found it very frightening. I often used to think about a man who was secretly a mandrill, or a mandrill that was secretly a man, and it gave me goosebumps.
The feeling was complicated by the fact that the Mandrill was inextricably associated in my mind with the Hobgoblin. This was thanks to an illustration in one of my D&D manuals, in which a hobgoblin was made to look rather mandrill-like, but Shakespeare's Hobgoblin -- that shrewd and knavish sprite called Robin Goodfellow -- was also in the mix.
I tracked down the D&D illustration that was responsible for this association. Here it is:
The picture itself is not particularly interesting, but where I found it was in a blog post called "Deep Dive - The Hobgoblin." This is apparently one in a series of "deep dives" into the history of various D&D monsters, and it begins with an apology for the fact that this particular dive isn't actually all that deep:
So why did this Deep Dive almost not happen? One might think it would be easy to find a plethora of information on this creature, and it was. The problem was that all the information remained basically the same. . . . A Deep Dive should demand that we drill down just a little further than everyone else and find those little nuggets of information that people never knew about.
Do deep dives involve drilling? Apparently they do. Again, this links back to Dolphin Drilling and the worst diving accident in history.
Curious about the Conrad Aiken who had written "The Mandrill," I looked up the original in his book Cats and Bats and Things with Wings. Here is the original illustration, which has more than a little of the Hobgoblin in it:
What is on the page immediately before the Mandrill illustration? We have returned, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, to the Billy Goats Gruff:
"What kind of heaven / will it be? / A hill, and on the hill a tree."
I was caught away in the Spirit of the Lord, yea, into an exceedingly high mountain, which I never had before seen, and upon which I never had before set my foot. . . . And it came to pass that the Spirit said unto me: Look! And I looked and beheld a tree; and it was like unto the tree which my father had seen; and the beauty thereof was far beyond, yea, exceeding of all beauty; and the whiteness thereof did exceed the whiteness of the driven snow (1 Ne. 11:1, 8).
Robin is in the tree? Is it really Robin Redbreast, or could it perhaps be Robin Rednose, yclept Goodfellow?
The thing the Billy goats most want to eat is a book. As Bill (no relation) recently reminded us, "Joseph Smith indicated that people eating books, at least in some cases, signifies them taking on a responsibility or job, as the case was with John."
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