Roman literature and the Cow Tools dancers

I dreamt that I needed to look something up in the Aeneid but was at someone else’s house, away from my library. (The Internet did not even come up as an option. It was taken for granted that a physical book was needed.)

One of the people I was with was a young man of college age, which gave me an idea: “Hey, what about your Roman literature textbook? It must have the Aeneid in it, or at least substantial excerpts.”

He fetched his textbook, and I started paging through it. I found one of the minor works of Virgil but no Aeneid. Perhaps it was deemed too long to anthologize. (“All cannot be written, and a part would not suffice.”) I found lots of works by other authors, though, almost all of which looked interesting and important. “I should buy me one of these,” I thought to myself. “This thing is a goldmine!”

(Upon waking, I wondered if the “textbook” might actually have been my well-worn one-volume Spenser, which includes Virgils Gnat.)

In a second brief dream, I was trying to play some music on my phone. I think what I wanted was “Hit That” by the Offspring, but I tapped something wrong and got a Taylor Swift music video. I was about to close it but found the video itself intriguing enough that I kept watching. There were lots of male dancers, mostly Black, all of whom were dressed like the guy from the live-action “Cow Tools” meme:

Tay was wearing a bright red dress. The Cow Tools dancers were competing to attract her attention with their dance moves, like lekking prairie chickens, and she was ignoring them all. In one scene, there was a wall covered with protruding wires and things — it looked “high-tech” in a way that didn’t make any sense, like a modern update of the original Cow Tools concept. Several Cow Tools dancers were fiddling with the wires, the overall vibe being something like Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Then Tay walked in, and they all forgot about their “work” and started lekking.

The lyrics of the song were just “It’s Xavier, it’s Xavier” repeated again and again. She pronounced the name the way some people do, with an extra vowel at the beginning (“Ex-avier”), and I thought that this was intentional, so that the line could also be heard as “It’s Sex Savior.”

Then the song started to sound more and more like my alarm clock, and I woke up.

Upon waking, I ran a search for taylor swift xavier just to see what would come up. Almost all the results were about a football player called Xavier Worthy describing his experience of meeting the singer. In yet another example of the kind of coincidence I’ve come to take for granted, it turns out that today, April 27, the date of the dream, is Xavier Worthy’s 22nd birthday.

It’s also the 441st anniversary of Dee and Kelley’s whale vision. In their synchronistic context, the Cow Tools dancers likely have to do with the underwater Cowtown, so that’s another marine-mammal link, the cow being the mammal (milk-producing animal) par excellence.

Coming back to the earlier dream, this is the second time I’ve dreamt about a textbook on ancient literature. In the first dream, "A bathtub full of books," I assumed the textbook would be rubbish. In the second, I recognized it as “a goldmine.” That particular choice of words calls to mind the gold-mining ants and digging for the heart of gold. The last time that theme came up was in “There’s treasure waiting for a dandy lion.” Who exactly is the treasure waiting for, though?

Yeah I think there’s a treasure

Waiting for someone

To prove himself worthy and true

After the dream about the literary “goldmine,” a dream calculated by its content and timing to draw my attention to a man named Worthy. Given the literary nature of the treasure, this reminds me of Revelation 5, where John "wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon." Finally, someone is found who is worthy, though. Although this personage appears in the form of a Lamb, he is initially introduced as "the Lion of the tribe of Juda." The treasure was waiting for a dandy Lion. The news that a worthy reader has been found causes widespread rejoicing, even among "such as are in the sea."

Note added: Three and a quarter hours after posting this, with its emphasis on “worthy and true,” I ran across this while out walking:

That detailing can also mean “removing the tail” is perhaps relevant.