Leaving the library, Joseph Smith's dilapidated barn, identifying wood, and a five-year-old Jesus

My last post, “A thin man ran out of the library,” reminded me that in the original running Arnold meme, he is leaving not the Reality Temple but a Barnes & Noble bookstore, which is conceptually adjacent to a library. Arnold can by no stretch of the imagination be described as a “thin man,” of course, but it still seemed like a connection worth following up on. Here is the original meme:

While searching for the above meme, I ran across a variant in which it is actually a library rather than a bookstore, and you’ll never guess what change was made:

Reclassifying Tolkien, and particularly The Silmarillion, as nonfiction is precisely what Daymon and Bill and Leo have done, and note that the librarian in the meme is even played by an actor named Leo.

The name Barnes made me think of something I'd recently discovered: the last dream Joseph Smith had, on the night before his assassination. In the dream, he returned to his old farm in Kirtland and found his barn in ruins.

I was back in Kirtland, Ohio, and thought I would take a walk out by myself, and view my old farm, which I found grown up with weeds and brambles, and altogether bearing evidence of neglect and want of culture. I went into the barn, which I found without floor or doors, with the weather - boarding off, and was altogether in keeping with the farm. While I viewed the desolation around me, and was contemplating how it might be recovered from the curse upon it, there came rushing into the barn a company of furious men, who commenced to pick a quarrel with me.

I didn't know about that dream until a few days ago, but it is echoed in the latter of my two April 2024 dreams recorded in "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask":

I was Jim Carrey playing Joseph Smith, who had come back from the dead and was trying to sneak into his own house, which had been inherited by Martin Harris, who was played by Alan Rickman. . . . The above-ground portion of the house was in ruins, and Martin Harris and his wife lived in the basement.

The spider mask in that dream connected to something else I have been thinking about recently: the poltergeist phenomena of 2019. Though I myself had had only a vague sense that the geist was not human, my wife perceived it more specifically as an enormous spider.

Last night I was going through my old emails documenting the poltergeist in real time. I found in the thread a long dream reported by one of my correspondents, who wrote, "Intuitively this was connected with WmJas' poltergeist incident, albeit logically there was no connection." The dream, which he compared to the "HP Lovecraft genre," begins with him meeting up with an old school friend and having a few drinks. Then,

Mildly soused and feeling the need to 'walk it off' I took a stroll around the nearby city streets, encountering further signs of disorder. In general the houses were poorly maintained and it sometimes felt like people were just playing at maintaining a city. Here was a construction site with a large pile of what were apparently supposed to be squared timber logs in a neat stack, but because the logs were of uneven shape and length it was actually a crazy pileup, teetering and unsafe. One weirdly shaped piece of wood had someone's soul in it. I took a closer look -- yep, wood, with a soul that doesn't belong there. It may sound bizarre, but in the dream I merely shrugged it away as being yet another vague sign of disorder.

This syncs with Joseph Smith's dream, where he, too, takes a walk and encounters a poorly maintained building. The idea of a pile of logs in which was hidden a human "soul" -- a word most recently seen in connection with Lovecraft's "Black Man" character Nyarlathotep and the Black author of Soul on Ice -- made me think of the old expression "nigger in the woodpile."

The line "I took a closer look -- yep, wood" jumped out at me as a crazy sync. Just hours before reading this dream, which I had completely forgotten about, I had written this:

Everyone is annoyed that I'm not seeing the forest for the trees. Meanwhile, I'm like:

Another part of the dream also struck me as significant:

There were two gigantic flattish stones with a blank top that had recently come alive in a spectacular fashion. The first one now had a glowing image or icon of Jesus Christ and the Father; they appeared to be out for a stroll in the park and the Father was holding the Son by the hand. Now, one is not supposed to depict the Father in traditional iconography. The miraculous artist had got around this rather cleverly by putting a non-depiction of the Father -- you could tell that Someone was depicted there, but when you looked away you could not remember or say what He looked like except that he was rather taller than the Son, which did not say much because the Son was about five years old

A five-year-old Jesus Christ is a strong sync with a dream I reported last October in "James, Santiago, Eru, and Charles Wallace":

There was an aluminum box with a slot in it, and you could write a question on a strip of paper and put it in the slot. I wrote, "Eru, when did you become Eru?" and put it in the slot, not expecting an answer. (Eru is Tolkien's name for God.) The voice of Eru did answer, though: "Like you, I was not created but born. Like you, I have existed for all eternity, but it was at the age of five that I 'turned on' and began acting as Eru."

In Bill's understanding, Eru is not just "God" but specifically Jesus Christ.