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. 

Eb(b)ert sync

Just noticed this in my blogroll:

Leo, whose last name differs by a doubled letter from Ebert, posts for the first time in a month, "A Tale From Numenor." Approximately one hour before that (can't say precisely, as Leo's posts don't have timestamps), Maolsheachlann just happens to post "Ebert's Most Hated." I suppose a further link is that Maolsheachlann calls himself a "Papist," while Leo has joked that the RCC could have called him if they wanted a real Pope Leo.

I haven't read either post yet. We'll see if they have anything else in common.

Update: Having now read Leo‘a post, I can say it’s also “Ebbert’s most hated.” That is, of all the things he’s ever posted, I hated it the most. (Don’t take it personally, Leo. I know you disclaim authorship, and understandably so!)

To Tirza

I dreamt that I was going up a narrow street in a wheeled office chair, sitting in the chair and pushing myself along with my feet. It felt like I was going up the long (quarter-mile) driveway at my old home near Kirtland, Ohio, and that I was going to turn right on Brockway Road to go to Hell Hollow Wilderness Area (of which that old home is now a part, my parents having sold it to the county). It felt like that in terms of muscle memory, but the scenery was that of rural Taiwan, with a few single-story houses with white stucco walls and terracotta roofing.

I passed a young woman in a tube top who was out walking her dog, and I took this as a sign that I was on the right road. Someone had used her as a landmark in giving directions: "You'll see a girl in a tube top walking her dog and then another girl eating a piece of cheese." I didn't see this second girl, but I had a mental image of someone taking a single slice of American cheese out of its plastic sleeve, folding it in half, and eating it. I wondered why people ate stuff like that.

When I got to the somewhat larger road (corresponding to Brockway) and turned right, I tried turning my desk chair around and sitting in it backwards, thinking that having the chair back in front of me rather than behind me would make it feel more like riding a motorcycle and thus more normal. I quickly found that the chair wasn't very well balanced in this orientation, though, so I turned it back the other way.

Later, no longer in the swivel chair but on foot, I was in a forest that again corresponded to Hell Hollow but looked more Taiwanese in terms of the flora. Some young people (not clearly defined) were there, and I asked, "Excuse me, where's Tirza?"

"Ken's sister" was the reply. I thought of a student of mine called Ken who has two big sisters, also my students, called Anna and Jenna. I wasn't sure if Tirza was the name of Ken's sister or the place where she lived. The Tirza I was looking for was a place.

"I mean I want to go to Tirza," I clarified.

"It's a lake," they said.

"I know," I said. I had a mental image of a familiar scene from past dreams: the rocky coastline at which I would go whale-watching from the shore. That was where I wanted to go. "How do I get there?"

"Just follow the river north." This river was quite narrow, scarcely meriting the name, and corresponded to Paine Creek. (Yes, Paine Creek runs through Hell Hollow. Sounds like a lovely place, doesn't it? It's beautiful.) Paine Creek flows into the Grand River and then into Lake Erie in the north, so I guess Tirza corresponds to Erie.

"Should I follow the east side of the river or the west side?"

"The east side. The west side is closed, or you can't really get to the west side from here."

So I started hiking north, with the river to my left. I couldn't see the river through the trees, but I knew it was there. I was now accompanied by a young woman. Back in the summer of 2004, I had been hiking alone in Hell Hollow and had fallen in with a strange otherworldly girl called Désirée, whom I had never met before or since, and we had hiked together for a few hours, looking for some hidden tunnels she said could be found somewhere in the shale cliffs and which were rumored to be paranormal "portals" of some kind. She had offered me marijuana for the first time but, still being extremely Mormon in terms of my code of conduct despite several years of atheism, I had turned it down. This girl in the dream, though Taiwanese, corresponded to Désirée.

We were following a wooden walkway but weren't on it. Rather, to the right of the walkway was something like a long balance beam that was somehow suspended from above. I decided to get down from the balance beam and use the walkway, but when I did so, the beam, without my weight on it, rose a couple of feet higher, so that it was about level with my head. I was worried that the girl, still on the beam, would now find it difficult to get down, but she said not to worry about it. A few minutes later she, too, jumped down and followed me on the walkway.

"Look at that," I said, pointing off to the right. The walls of some ancient stone building were just visible through the trees. A large eye, somewhat like an Egyptian wedjat-eye but simpler and more symmetrical, was painted in black on the side of the wall. Looking at the wall, I could see that three such eyes were visible, at intervals of about 20 feet.

"What does that one-eye symbol mean?" I asked. "Or I guess it's three eyes."

Before she could answer, I woke up, with the Tori Amos song "Bliss" in my head.

Shortly after waking, I had a sentence pop into my head: "The cedars are hewn down, but we will build with sycamores." This is an inversion of a line from Isaiah, attributed to "the people of Samaria":

The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones: the sycomores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars (Isa. 9:10).

In the Bible, the city of Tirzah was for a time the capital of Samaria, from which some of the kings of the Northern Kingdom reigned. Given the juxtaposition with Tori Amos, I connected the sycomore reference with Amos, "a gatherer of sycomore fruit" (Amos 7:14), the first of what Walter Kaufmann punningly dubbed the "Amosaic" (as opposed to Mosaic) prophets. Moses and Elijah, I thought, were the cedars; the literary prophets who succeeded them, the sycomores.

I have a lot of thoughts on this dream but don't have time to type them out now. I want to get the dream itself published first.

The girls in the pictures

The other day I ran across a reference to napalm somewhere, realized you never really heard about napalm these days, and wondered if it was still around. (It’s not.) A few clicks later, I was looking at the Wikipedia article on the person “referred to informally as the girl in the picture and the napalm girl” (boldface is Wikipedia’s).

When I came home tonight, the TV was on but paused, with the title of a movie on the screen: 照片中的女孩, literally “the girl in the photo.” Looking it up, I found that it was an American movie and the original title was Girl in the Picture. It’s a documentary about a kidnapping victim, no connection to the napalm girl.

A mistake about Pius XIII, a circle-lemniscate logo, and a lost city found in 2012

I've been reading Joe McMoneagle's 1998 book The Ultimate Time Machine: A Remote Viewer's Perception of Time, and Predictions for the New Millennium. I have a lot of respect for Mr. McMoneagle and appreciate his willingness to stick his neck out and make a lot of very specific predictions, many of which could be (and have been) shown to be true or false in his lifetime. Unfortunately, to coin a phrase, "whether there be prophecies, they shall fail." Mr. McMoneagle has a very good track record as a remote viewer in general, but trying to view the future is apparently a different ball game. The only sort-of hit in the material on the first quarter of the present century is the prediction that there would be a second war in Iraq starting sometime between 1998 and 2003. All of the further details he gives about that war are wrong, though. There are lots of other very specific predictions, and they all fail. For example, Pope John Paul II (1920-2005) was supposed to have died in late 1999 and been replaced by a Pius XIII. So far, the winner in the How Wrong Can You Possibly Be category is the prediction that by 2005 "use of the phone as a communication device will be nearly eliminated." To the author's credit, he hasn't tried to memory-hole this book but actually had the integrity to have it republished as recently as 2018.

Prophecies fail, but sync abides. I read the failed Pius XIII prophecy shortly after posting "She's afraid of the light in the dark." Since that post involved Marilyn Manson's version of the song "God's Gonna Cut You Down," I linked to my earlier (2020) post on that song, "Go tell that long-tongued liar." In the first comment on that old post, Francis Berger had linked to a Marilyn Manson cameo on the HBO series The New Pope, which I know nothing about. In the clip, Manson (playing himself) meets the new pope (John Malkovich), who he mistakenly thinks is Pope Pius XIII. In fact, Pius XIII is in a coma; his successor, Francis II, has died; and Malkovich is the new pope, John Paul III. Manson has missed all this, having been holed up in his studio and not following the news. So the sync isn't just the name Pius XIII -- it's McMoneagle and Manson both thinking the new pope is Pius XIII and both being wrong.

Another of McMoneagle's failed prophecies is that a new religion would be founded between 2002 and 2005, using as its sign "the Infinity Symbol, superimposed on a circle." He even included an illustration of what this new religious symbol would look like:

Shortly after reading about that, I was on the road and saw a building with a very similar logo on it:

I looked up the company and couldn't fund out much about it, but I did note that their Facebook page has a banner at the top mentioning the company's 20th anniversary. Twenty years ago would be 2005, in McMoneagle's date range for the introduction of that logo. However, the most recent post on the Facebook page is dated 2017, so I don't think the 20th anniversary thing is current. Still a bit of a coincidence.

On Tuesday night, at around 9:00 p.m., I taught an adult English class in which we read an article called "Finding the World's Lost Cities":

The article says of the White City of Honduras that "scientists were unable to find it until 2012."

At 12:07 a.m. this morning, approximately three hours after teaching that "Lost Cities" article, I read and screencapped this in McMoneagle's book:

He uses the same language as the article, calling Atlantis a "lost city" that will be "found" -- even though Atlantis is more typically referred to as an island than as a city -- and gives the date 2012.

Atlantis wasn't found in 2012 -- but apparently neither was the White City of Honduras. Rather like Atlantis itself, it has been "discovered" lots of times, but none of these discoveries is recognized by mainstream archaeology. According to Wikipedia:

There have been multiple claims of the discovery of Ciudad Blanca. "Every ten years or so, somebody finds it," says Begley, who documented this history of claims in a 2016 article for the book Lost City, Found Pyramid. Most professional archaeologists remain skeptical that the various legends surrounding Ciudad Blanca refer to a specific site.

The sync fairies have tricked me into posting about the Current Thing

I thought I had nothing to say about the recent assassination, but I can't resist pointing out improbable coincidences.

George Floyd, an American with a Scottish surname whose neck-related death was caught on camera and caused an improbably extreme emotional reaction among the general public, was born on October 14, 1973.

Charlie Kirk, an American with a Scottish surname whose neck-related death was caught on camera and caused an improbably extreme emotional reaction among the general public, was born on October 14, 1993.

Some on /pol/ are saying that the alleged killers of the two men also share a birthday, but I haven't been able to confirm that.

She's afraid of the light in the dark

As I was drifting off to sleep last night, I had a sort of hypnagogic dream or fantasy in which I heard Johnny Cash doing a dramatic recitation of the Sheb Wooley novelty song "The Purple People Eater." Halfway through the second verse, though, it changed to a different song:

Well he came down to earth and he hid in a tree

I said, Mr. Purple People Eater, don't eat me

He called my name, and my heart stood still

When he said, John, go do my will!

With that line, the voice changed to Marilyn Manson's, and the song was now "God's Gonna Cut You Down." I'm not sure how much of the song he sang, but I know it included these lines:

As sure as God made black and white

What's done in the dark will be brought to the light

What's done in the dark will be brought to the light

That last line was repeated -- or, rather, sounded as if it was echoing -- several times as I entered the fully sleeping state.

This was a conflation of two different things I had heard in the past. In January 2024 I watched the Jordan Peele film NOPE, which includes a dramatic recitation of part of "The Purple People Eater" in a gravelly voice somewhat suggestive of Cash's.

Searching my blog to find out when I had watched that movie, I found that I had actually posted about that very scene, in "I wouldn't eat you 'cause you're too tough." That post's title is a line from the original version of the song -- what the People Eater says in response to the request not to be eaten. In last night's version, it instead says, "John, go do my will!"

Back in February of 2020, I discovered and posted about Marilyn Manson's version of "God's Gonna Cut You Down." The post, "Go tell that long-tongued liar," included both the Manson and Cash versions, as well as one by Elvis Presley. Sometime later, I found a version that was a mashup of the Man in Black and the Man in Black Lipstick. Just as in last night's fantasy, it begins in Cash's voice and switches to Manson's with the line "When he said, John, go do my will!"

The combination in the fantasy was a strange one, seeming to put the Purple People Eater in the role of God himself. I think it ties in with "June, July, 19th, 21st," though. (Note: NOPE was released on July 22, one day after one of those dates, which also happens to be Bill Wright's birthday.) In that dream, I ran a long distance down a straight path in the desert and then walked down a corridor, but I knew that in the end I would have to face Rosie, a giant dog who I was afraid would eat me. Dog as a cipher for God is obvious, almost a cliche. (See "God and dog at the Panama canal.") In my published post, I described Rosie as a "spotted mastiff," but my own notes were more specific about the nature of the spots: "tri-color merle." Merle dogs are usually classified as "red merle" if they have brown spots and "blue merle" if they have black spots. Rosie had both, making her conceptually "purple."

You can run on for a long time

Run on for a long time

Run on for a long time

Sooner or later, God'll cut you down

Sooner or later, God'll cut you down

In the dream, I ran on for a long time, on a perfectly straight path in the desert. After waking, I connected this with Isaiah's line "make straight in the desert a highway for our God" (Isa. 40:3) -- which could just as easily be a highway leading to God as a highway for God to use. I have made Bob Dylan's line "The highway is for gamblers" a sort of personal motto, so this is another link to the Cash/Manson song:

Tell the rambler, the gambler, the backbiter

Tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down

Tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down

Does all this imply that God's gonna cut me down? Well, it is the Lord: let him do what seemeth him good. Perfect love casteth out all fear. There are hints of another interpretation, though. In last night's fantasy, the People Eater unexpectedly sends the person on a mission instead of eating him. Bill has also suggested that the warning about Rosie may have been misinterpreted:

It does make you wonder though, if Rosie is as bad as the warning seemed to indicate. You could interpret the remark that a black, brown, or white person wouldn't be that color anymore after Rosie was done with them as their mortal bodies and the associated various skin color as not being relevant anymore, as in via resurrection or restoration to new bodies.

Anyway, after that pre-sleep fantasy, I don't remember much of last night's dreams proper. Just as I was waking up, though, I heard a woman's voice sing a single line:

She's afraid of the light in the dark

I recognized this as coming from the Tori Amos song "Spark," which I hadn't listened to in a very long time. I only knew the first few lines:

She's addicted to nicotine patches

She's addicted to nicotine patches

She's afraid of a light in the dark

This past winter, I experimented with wearing nicotine patches while sleeping in order to induce vivid dreams. In one of these, described in "Nicotime, Mars, and the Secret Dojo," "I ran for hours and hours, never stopping or slowing or hesitating. . . . I ran along a desert road under a bright tan sky." This is clearly similar to the Rosie dream, so that's what may have put a song about nicotine patches in my head.

Making a mental note to look up "Spark" later, I checked my blog comments and found this one from Bill:

Just thinking more on Iris' issue with your sofas in the fifth floor classroom.

The fact that you actually have a sofa in that fifth floor room, even if it is your chapel and not a classroom, seems like it could be relevant. As does the fact that that sofa is where you conduct your experiments.

One possibility is that her meaning was actually expressing concern with the experiments you were conducting conducting on the sofa. She referenced the sofas specifically, but it was what was being done on it that she didn't like or was making the students uncomfortable.

This might make sense given her suggestion on what to do with the sofa. Your current experiment relies on you lying down on the couch with the card under the pillow. If you were to rotate the sofa 90 degrees so the the back was on the ground and legs in the air, it would be impossible to lie on the sofa with the card under the pillow (let alone use the sofa really at all, experiment or not). Thus, you wouldn't be able to carry out the experiment, at least in the same way you had been doing it.

Even if that is a reasonable interpretation - not sure it is - it does leave the question open as to whether you should listen to Iris or not on the matter.

I was already operating under the assumption that "Iris" in my dream -- who takes her name from the deceptive goddess who leads the too-trusting Turnus to his doom in the Aeneid -- was not too be trusted, so I immediately connected this comment of Bill's with "She's afraid of the light in the dark." Iris doesn't like me to experiment with extrasensory perception because she's afraid I might shine a light on things that she would prefer to remain in the dark. Well, tough beans, Iris. One way or another, "What's done in the dark will be brought to the light."

Later, when I got around to looking up "Spark," what got my attention was not so much the lyrics as this little sidebar on the search page:

"Purple People"! What are the odds?

June, July, 19th, 21st

Last night I dreamt that I was running along a straight path through a desert. I was loping on all fours like a gorilla, and gravity seemed to be slightly weaker than normal, which resulted in my going extremely fast. Sometimes I would pass people walking on the path. They all seemed impressed by how fast I was going but didn't seem to perceive me as a gorilla or anything.

In the final stretch of my journey I was no longer running through a desert but was walking down a long corridor. When I reached the end of the corridor, I knew I would somehow have to get past Rosie, a gigantic spotted mastiff. I had been warned by someone in advance, "I don't care if you're black, brown, or white. You won't be any of those colors by the time Rosie gets done with you!"

My plan for getting past Rosie was to gross her out with vomit so that she wouldn't want to eat me. I was carrying a large bucket of vomit for this purpose. (Whose vomit? I don't know. You can't really dust for vomit.) I was splashing vomit all over the corridor as I went. When I saw someone else coming down the corridor, I realized that throwing vomit out of a bucket would look strange and that I'd better start vomiting for real. Fortunately I was able to produce enormous quantities of vomit at will. I decided my cover story would be that I was disgusted by the aesthetics of the modern world. "Modern art -- yechhhh! Buildings -- yechhhh!" The bloke in the corridor seemed to find this convincing.

Whether I succeeded in getting past Rosie I'll never know, because at this point the scene shifted.

I was reading a new book that had just been published by Bruce Charlton. It was quite thick, but I found that I was able to read it very quickly (I attributed this to the very wide margins and to my familiarity with Bruce's ideas), and before I knew it I was on page 415. This page said "Afterword: Changing YOU!" After the "YOU!" was a little arrow that curved around counterclockwise until it came almost full circle. I understood that Bruce had wanted the arrow to point straight out of the page at the reader but couldn't figure out how to make that work. Thus he kept changing the direction of the arrow but of course never found the direction he wanted because he was drawing on a two-dimensional surface. Lower down on the page was a much larger attempt at the same thing, with the arrow curving all over the page but never succeeding in pointing at the reader. The rest of the afterword consisted of a bulleted list of things you could do to change YOU, such as "Don't be afraid to take photos of the homeland" and "Re-educate yourself about Mormon history." (Obviously Bruce's real books are nothing like this.) Even though this was a paper book, it somehow ended with a video clip, a graphically violent one that I thought must have come from a war movie by Quentin Tarantino. It began with a voice saying something like, "You've been told that these people want to kill you. Think about what it really means to kill another human being," and then there was a series of closeups of people being shot, with blood splattering everywhere.

In a final dream scene, my wife shouted to me from another room, "Can you check these dates? June, July, 19th, 21st!" What did she mean? June 19th and July 21st? The entire months of June and July plus the 19th and 21st of some other month? I kept asking for clarification, but she just kept repeating, "June, July, 19th, 21st!" This became a sort of chant that got louder and louder until I woke up.

I don't know if this dream sequence will turn out to have any meaning or if it's just noise. Anyway, I'm posting it here just because it's so strange. Some elements of it seem to reprise "Nicotine, Mars, and the Secret Dojo."

Note added: I decided to run an image search for "june july 19 21" because why not, right? This result made me think of Bill.

If you could be any animal . . .

I dreamt that I had returned to Earth after a long absence and was weaving through the crowds at a busy spaceport. As I had not had Internet access while away, I was scrolling through some kind of social media feed as I walked, trying to catch up. (In real life, this is something I have not done in many years.)

I found a message someone had posted for me. The bottom half of the image was black, and the top half was a dark-yellow sky with the shape of a large opossum silhouetted against it. Written in white Times New Roman letters against the black background was the message: “Remember, Peter was not told that he could be all animals, only that he could be any animal.”

And he chose to be a pig, I thought. And, apparently, an opossum. My dreaming mind connected these: Choosing to live as a pig, when one’s inner nature is quite different, is a form of “playing possum.”

Note added: Here's a quick MS Paint approximation of what the image looked like. The main difference was that the background was more of a naturalistic-looking sky (except for the color) rather than a flat field of color.

Thrashing the mighty and strong with a Flynn-bar

In a recent comment, Bill relates a dream in which he heard this said:

That the weak things of the world shall go forth and thrash the mighty and strong.

One of the meanings of thrash is "beat (someone) with (or as if with) a flail." This made me think of these lines from "The more, the merrier" (an expansion of "With?" using names not in Ulysses but following the same pattern):

Flinbad the Flailer was a sort

Of Gnoll, quite strong but rather short.

(That couplet was the only choice.

Old Gary Gygax knew his Joyce.)

Frinbad the Frailer isn't stronger

Than the others any longer.

The first two couplets quoted refer to a D&D monster called a flind. It uses a special weapon called a flindbar, which is essentially an iron threshing flail.

The combination of Flin(d) and Flail is what made me say that the D&D reference "was the only choice" for this particular Inbad.

It's not Flindbad, though, but Flinbad -- with the first syllable pronounced as Flynn. I realized that a Flynn-bar could be a close cousin to something that featured in a recent dream: the Three Musketeers bar.

The one word that I would associate with both Errol Flynn and the Three Musketeers -- the center of the Venn diagram -- is swashbuckler. This syncs with one of the D&C passages to which Bill's dream apparently alludes:

Wherefore, I call upon the weak things of the world, those who are unlearned and despised, to thresh the nations by the power of my Spirit; and their arm shall be my arm, and I will be their shield and their buckler (D&C 35:13-14).

A swashbuckler is, etymologically, not one who buckles swashes, but one who "swashes" (noisily strikes with a sword) his opponent's buckler. This makes the word, appropriately enough, a morphological scofflaw.

One problem with identifying Flinbad with his Flynn-bar with the thrashers in Bill's dream is that the latter were specified as "weak things," while Flinbad is "quite strong." This is not an insuperable objection, though, since the weak things must presumably be made strong in order to accomplish the thrashing. That they are "weak things of the world" may be a tie-in with Flinbad's characterization as "a sort of gnoll." That word gnoll -- a D&D invention, referring to a hyena-like humanoid -- suggests the word gnolaum, which appears in the Book of Abraham (3:18), where it is glossed "or eternal." This is almost certainly a misprint for gholaum, with would be Joseph Smith's transliteration (following the system he learned from Joshua Seixas) of the Hebrew word usually rendered olam today. (The initial ayin was historically a g-like sound, likely a voiced velar fricative, as evidenced by the transliteration Gomorrah.) The primary meaning of the word gholaum in biblical use is indeed "eternity," but in modern usage it mainly means "world." (A similar evolution can be seen in Greek aion, Latin saeculum, and our English world. The older meaning of the last survives in the phrase "world without end," meaning "forever.")

Frinbad, then, who "isn't stronger than the others any longer," would be those formerly "mighty and strong," but not so much anymore after taking their thrashing.

Bobdaduck on the God of the creeds

I don't think The Duckstack is on most of my readers' radar, but there's often some remarkably insightful material mixed in with the absurdism. This is from his latest, "Consume Consubstantial":

Under [the "normal Christian"] framework, most descriptions God uses for himself in the Bible aren’t true. God isn’t “really” a father (in the sense of siring genetic children), God doesn’t “really” get angry, Christ isn’t “really” human, etc. I know normal Christians would rebut me here, saying he’s “fully human and fully God”, but 100% + 100% = 200%, that’s not something human attainable and I think most congregants sense it. . . .

If Christ is 200% human (something unachievable by normal people) then its actually sinful to try to emulate him. Christ “taught with authority, and not as the scribes”, but you as a mortal need to restrict yourself to teaching like scribes (deferring to scripture). Christ could judge people but you can’t. Christ could keep the commandments perfectly, but its not actually reasonable to expect regular people to. (How this is usually expressed to me is “the point of the commandments is just to show you how impossible keeping commandments is.”) Christ could have people look up to him but you shouldn’t. Christ could be prideful but you can’t. Christ could forgive sins but you can’t. Christ could do miracles but you can’t. Christ can be a God but you can’t, to name a few common ones. (Christians indeed constantly say this was the sin of Adam and Eve- not disobedience, but wanting to be like God.) In this framework Christ becomes not a role model, but a mythic parable like Hercules and similar. You can see how restrictive this is, if I’m right. Instead of a theology aimed at expanding the soul of man and reaching new heights, the doctrine trends instead to “put man in his place.” There’s a time and place for putting you in your place, but I don’t think its always. I do not believe mankind is innately loathsome, only that mankind can be. Christ could be free from original guilt, but you can’t. You have to be guilty about yourself, innately.

Extrapolating, I think it is difficult for many Christians to believe such a being “actually” cares, either. Its more like he super-cares. His love is so loving it doesn’t even look like love, its the pure boundless adoration at a level we can’t even comprehend. So why bother. In my opinion you might as well not call it love at that point, it just dilutes the word. Pragmatically speaking, people are going to pair out meaningless variables. Similar with other attributes described in the creeds of Christendom, its all poetry for how incomprehensible and beyond us he is and none of these words mean anything concrete. . . .

What we’re left with is a sterile God enacting a sterile plan that we are mere cogs in. You can argue against all of this of course -- you can say, ‘but the bible says God is love!’ and so on, but I’m not sure there’s actually a way around these implications with the doctrines of noncontingence and the unmoved mover and so forth. This might be why Catholics have saints to pray to instead- more human. All of these “proofs” for God rely on calculating a sort of necessary basis for existence, and really only work if you treat God more as a variable than a sentience. Or a meta-sentience, if you prefer. So sentient the concept of sentience doesn’t even make sense.

Read the whole thing.

The Golden Age

How few now know! In days of old,

The sun was blue, the sky was gold,

And Homer’s fabled “wine-dark sea”

In truth was more like Pinot gris,

A shade of yellow full as fair

As blond Poseidon’s flaxen hair.

But men forget, and Homer’s heirs

Supposed his sky and sun were theirs,

And so outlandish did they find

His vision that they called him blind.

How quick we judge they err or lie

Who knew a different sun and sky!

But Homer spoke the words of God,

And never once did Homer nod,

And not one word that Homer spoke

Was error, fantasy, or joke,

And Homer’s sun will yet arise

And light again his golden skies.

I Am the Most Thinking Religious Beast

This dream had the feel of a nature documentary, with a voice-over narrating what I was seeing.

An old bobcat had long commanded a large hill, successfully defending this much-coveted territory from predators much larger than himself by sheer ferocity and indomitable spirit. The bobcat was getting old, though, and constantly going up and down the hill was starting to wear him out. I saw the bobcat sweating profusely (which cats do not do in real life), and his wet fur clung to his body, making him look considerably smaller than he had before. A young cougar saw his chance. He leapt up at the old bobcat, and (I remember this part of the narration verbatim) "a fan of claws came out like a tray of knives," and then --

Just before the shockingly explicit scene of the old bobcat meeting his bloody end, I closed the book from which I had been reading -- for, it was revealed, the voice had been my own, and the imagery had been that called forth by the words.

"This author doesn't flinch," I said. "That scene really traumatized me as a child. I was probably much too young to be reading" -- I held up the book so that the title and author's name on the cover were clearly visible -- "I Am the Most Thinking Religious Beast by Daufin Rose."

The Pig at the Parade of Newts

Great title for an album, right? Or possibly an autobiography. This is going to be a pretty random chain of associations, even for me.

I looked at The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and, switching on my anagram vision, saw The Pig at the Parade of Newts. I liked that image -- a tusked and shaggy boar among the harmless little newts -- and thought it was conceptually similar to the sudden appearance of the great god Pan in the middle of a charming tale of toads and moles and rats.

A more straightforward anagram is dawn/wand -- The Piper at the Gates of Wand. In a recent comment, Debbie identified the wands in the Three and Four of Wands as forming a "portal":

In both of the Tarot cards that you posted (Four of Wands and the Three of Wands) the image shows the initiate  on the other side of the portal. Recall my many comments about 11:11 being the doorway.

Back on August 5, Debbie sent me a photo of an area on her property, framed by two sycamore trees, which she thinks of as "the portal," so that informs her interpretation of the Wands cards:

Coming back to The Pig at the Parade of Newts, this made me think of my past posts about the H and N pages of Animalia (featuring hogs and newts, respectively) and also for some reason about the Strumbellas song "Spirits." I guess the connection is the music video, which features a funeral that turns into a parade.

Watching that video again, I noticed the line about "how the good die young," and that -- I did warn you this was going to be a pretty random chain of associations -- made me think of this Eat Poop You Cat sequence from Wikipedia, in which "Only the good die young" -- depicted as a dead baby with a halo and three sinful graybeards with devil horns -- turns into "The three vikings visit Christ":

This replaces the three Wise Men with three Vikings. In "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Resurrectionists, and merchant ships," I noted that the sea on that card looks like a desert, and I connected the three ships with a Christmas carol in which (according to an unsourced claim on Wikipedia) three ships may represent the camels carrying the three Wise Men. I also linked the ships to the Dawn Treader, which has a dragon head on its prow like a Viking ship.

This ambiguity between sailing across the sea and riding across the desert also appeared in my posts on the Animalia newts and pigs. In "Nautical Newts," I connected Animalia's "nine nautical newts navigating near Norway" (so another Viking link) with the salamanders on the outer garment of the Knight of Wands -- and then proceeded to connect that Knight with a pig. Here, for ease of reference, are the three images in question:

All three images show someone traveling to the left, holding aloft a stick (oar, wand, flagpole). The newts are specified as nine, but only six are fully visible. The garment of the Knight of Wands also has six fully visible salamanders and parts of others. The Knight's hounskull visor would, when closed, resemble a pig's snout. Both the newts and the Hog Knight are juxtaposed with an ostrich.

In the newts post, I write, "The newts are navigating the open sea, while the Knight and his salamanders are traveling through the deserts of Egypt," but I nevertheless go on to equate the two.

The Knight of Wands, with his pig-snout visor, and accompanied by a group of salamanders, is in a pretty straightforward sense the Pig at the Parade of Newts.

The idea of newts on parade also made me think of my 2022 dream post "The coypu assembles a new zodiac." The animals selected for the new zodiac were marching around the coypu as if on parade, and leading the parade was "a black and yellow newt." Black and yellow is also the color scheme of the salamander garment on the Knight of Wands. The newt is described as "coltish" and "prancing," connecting it to the equestrian imagery of the Tarot card.

Coming back to the Three of Wands, its yellow desert-looking sea is apparently a narrow strait, since we can see right across it to the other side. This makes it a potential tie-in with the "narrow desert" of this blog's title, which comes from a poem in George MacDonald's novel Phantastes:

From the narrow desert, O man of pride,

Come into the house so high and wide.

When I selected this as the title for my blog, my understanding was that pride keeps the man in the "narrow desert" deracinated nihilism, and that coming "into the house" represented a sort of submission to the collective experience and wisdom of Man. As I explained in my 2023 post "Still 'From the Narrow Desert'" (which also has a Wise Men link!):

I started the blog in 2018, when I was circling around Christianity like a moth but had not yet made the plunge. It expressed my aspiration to find my way out of the narrow desert of know-nothing materialism and into the "house" of a coherent Christian worldview.

That post explored some possibly negative implications of "coming into the house," but somehow I failed until just now to make the obvious connection: Lehi's Tree of Life vision (1 Ne. 8). The vision is set in a "waste," or desert, and there is a "strait and narrow path" leading to the Tree -- but some leave the narrow path and go instead to a "great and spacious building," later identified by Nephi as "the pride of the world" (1 Ne. 11:36). "And great was the multitude that did enter into that strange building" (1 Ne. 8:33). So in another possible reading of MacDonald's couplet, the narrow desert is the strait and narrow path, and the "house so high and wide" is the "great and spacious building . . . high above the earth" (v. 26), to which the "man of pride" is called not as a way of renouncing that pride but rather because it is where men of pride belong.

In my July 3 post "Baptism," I associated the Taiwan Strait, in which I had "baptized" myself, with the strait and narrow path -- creating the same land-sea ambiguity seen in the Three of Wands and the voyage of the Nautical Newts. My description of the Strait even seems to foreshadow what I would later call the "desert-looking sea" of the Three:

I parked, walked down a long stretch of wet sand and barnacled rocks, and waded out into the warm olive-colored waters of the Taiwan Strait. The place was completely deserted, except for a few little egrets in the shallows and some terns or something overhead.

I mention the sand, the warmth, and the yellowish tint of the water, and I even describe the place as "completely deserted" -- that is, in King James parlance, "a desert place." We even have an account of Jesus and his apostles departing "into a desert place by ship" (Mark 6:32).

The yellow waters of the Three of Wands are also a link to the yellow waters of "The Pot of Yellow Stew, aka Lake of Golden Dreams," which are a "portal" (that word again) to another world. (Its sister lake in that other world, Dune Freak Lake, again combines desert and water imagery.) In Beyond the Golden Stair, a golden-looking pool, also compared to a pot, serves as another such portal:

The blue flamingo's pool lay just outside the light and he saw it as through yellow glass, its waters spangled with the uprush of aureate bubbles, a cauldron of molten gold. One movement more and he would leave the light for a drab world of vanity, avarice, and deceit . . . .

The image of the Hog Knight riding across the narrow desert with his banner makes me think of lines from a Mormon hymn:

They raised his banner triumphant

Over the desert sod

And we hear the desert singing

Carry on, carry on, carry on!

And that leads us to another funereal "parade" song:

As you Americans say, "The train is late."

I dreamt that I was waiting on the platform at a train station in Taiwan with some British expats (no one specific I know in real life).

One of the Brits said, "As you Americans say, 'The train is late.'"

Was that an Americanism? I'd never noticed. "But what do you British say?" I asked.

"The train is on time."

"What? You say 'the train is on time' to mean the train is late?"

"No, to mean it isn't late."

"But that's what we say in America, too."

"Yes, but when we say 'on time,' we mean the train is arriving at the scheduled time."

"That's what we mean, too. At the scheduled time."

"See! There's the difference."

"But that's just a difference in how we pronounce scheduled. It doesn't affect the meaning of 'on time.'"

"But the train isn't on time, is it?"

"No, it's late."

"As you Americans say."

One of the other Brits abruptly changed the subject. "Say, you lads have got to check out Changhua Station. There's a shop there, and get this, it sells Three Musketeers bars! You can buy whole sackloads of them."

This caused a great deal of excitement, with all the Brits talking about how long it had been since they'd had a proper Three Musketeers bar and gushing about how great they are. I found this confusing -- all Brits are required as a matter of national honour to hate American chocolate bars -- but I guessed maybe they thought Three Musketeers was French, like the book.

Second star to the right, and straight on till morning

In a comment on "The Menelmacar mudra resurfaces," Bill brings up a book called Turn Left at Orion. The title -- street directions in form, interstellar in content -- made me think of the line "second star to the right and straight on till morning."

"The Ballad of Jed Clampett" came up on "The King of Pop." When I was a missionary, one of my associates used to sing "If You Could Hie to Kolob" to the tune of "The Ballad of Jed Clampett." When he got to the spoken part -- "Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea" -- he replaced it with "Kolob, that is, second star to the right and straight on till morning." I knew that as a line spoken by Kirk near the end of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I didn't realize until I looked it up today that Kirk was also quoting. The line, it turns out, was originally spoken by Peter Pan, giving directions to Neverland. (I must have known that before but forgotten it, since "Working out with Bones, and Colonel West" links to a post by Bill that makes the Pan-Trek link.)

Neverland is of course also name of the former home of Michael Jackson, so the link to a post called "The King of Pop" is interesting. (The other meaning of pop is also potentially relevant; one of Bill's old posts linked Coca-Cola to Kokob-Kolob.)

When I looked up Michael Jackson's Neverland on Wikipedia just now, I found this comparison:

Following Jackson's death, press reports during June 28–29, 2009, claimed that his family intended to bury him at the Neverland Ranch, eventually turning it into a place of pilgrimage for his fans, similar to how Graceland has become a destination for fans of Elvis Presley.

Paul Simon's song "Graceland," about a pilgrimage to that site, recently came up in the comments on "Fourth experiment ruined by haste."

The video about The Wind in the Willows discussed in "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Resurrectionists, and merchant ships" mentions Peter Pan:

Writers from C. S. Lewis to J. M. Barrie echoed Pan's goat-legged form in their creations, from fauns and satyrs to the very name Peter Pan itself.

The play also appears in "With?" just after the Hinbad and Rinbad couplets:

Hinbad the Hailer traveled far

By riding in a yellow car.

Rinbad the Railer, in a sleeper,

Traveled just as far, and cheaper.

Dinbad the Kailer was the man

Who wrote the script for Peter Pan.

I had Barrie as "Dinbad the Kailer" because of his association with Edinburgh (Din Eidyn) and with the Kailyard school of Scottish literature.

On the road yesterday I passed a breakfast shop with a sign that, presumably due to a misprint, synched with the star-morning connection in the Peter Pan line.

Dinbad Kailer (J. M. Barrie) is juxtaposed in "With?" with Rinbad, who traveled by train "in a sleeper" but went just as far as Hinbad (Elijah) in his yellow car (chariot of fire). This, together with the idea of "morning" as a destination ("straight on till morning"), put me in mind of the song "Morningtown Ride."

I strongly associate that song with a dream of Whitley Strieber's, reported in his book Transformation, in which he sings it to his wife and son as the world is ending:

I looked up at the sky and saw gigantic boulders sailing in perfect silence off the edge of the moon. A realization came over me: The moon is exploding. Then I thought, Oh, this is the end of the world. . . .

In my dream I took Anne and Andrew to a certain place I know in the forest. We hugged each other as the crashes got louder and the flashes of moon-generated meteors got brighter, and I sang the Malvina Reynolds song "Morningtown Ride" For us this was how the world ended. And so did the vision.

In a comment on my "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" post, Bill mentioned dreaming the phrase "Everton Aim." He interpreted Everton as Ever-ton, "the Eternal City." That name obviously bears a certain similarity to Neverland and Morningtown. (Morning and eternity are often associated, as in the Spanish expresion ¡Siempre mañana! or Blake's "eternity's sunrise.")

In another comment on the same post, Bill associates the three ships on the Three of Wands card with a dream he had of small groups of people walking (in a similar staggered formation to that of the ships), going forth, he was told, to "thrash the mighty and strong." Thrash is a variant of thresh, of which the original sense was "men or oxen treading out wheat." This "treading" link, together with the "straight on till morning" concept made me think of the title of the C. S. Lewis book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. One problem with any such link is that Bill specifically thought of the people in his dream as going west, and thus not toward the morning.

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Resurrectionists, and merchant ships

The other day I spontaneously thought of the scene in The Wind in the Willows where Rat and Mole encounter Pan, and of the line, "And yet -- and yet -- O Mole, I am afraid." I've never actually read The Wind in the Willows and really only know of that one scene, from quotations and commentary in other books. I've read and enjoyed several other books by Kenneth Grahame -- Pagan Papers, Dream Days, The Golden Age -- so I made a mental note that I should probably get around to reading his acknowledged masterpiece one of these days.

This afternoon I was browsing a used bookstore and flipped though a strange book called The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black, which was full of anatomical diagrams showing the musculature of a winged angel, a three-headed dog, and other such fantastic creatures. The book had caught my eye because of the title; recently I've been watching YouTube videos from a channel called The Resurrectionists, most of which deal with the historical and mythical backstory behind fairy tales.

Later in the afternoon, I did another experiment napping with a Tarot card under my pillow, but I could remember no dream content whatsoever. The card turned out to be the Three of Wands, which depicts a man looking down from a cliff at ships on the sea. As I contemplated the image, I thought of what Waite says of the ships in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot: "those are his ships, bearing his merchandise, which are sailing over the sea."

In the evening, I checked YouTube, and it recommended a new video from The Resurrectionists, called "The Chapter Too Dark for 'Wind in the Willows'." It's about, you guessed it, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," the scene with Pan. The video talks about how the chapter has been removed from many editions of the book, so that many people who think they have read The Wind in the Willows in its entirety are unaware that any such chapter exists. I found that funny, since I had recently been reflecting on the fact that that chapter is actually the only part of The Wind in the Willows that I know.

After the video about The Wind in the Willows had finished, it cued up the next video: one from the same channel called "Was Beauty and the Beast Based on a Real Couple?" It begins by telling the story, and there is a scene where it shows a ship on the sea, as if viewed from above, and identifies it as belonging to a merchant, thus synching with the Three of Wands. It's even sailing in the same direction as the ships on the cards.

Note added: Posting this made me think about the Three of Wands image again. I thought about what an odd choice it was to show the sea as yellow, making it look more like a desert. The fact that three ships are shown on the card made me think of the Christmas carol "I Saw Three Ships," which has always seemed strange to me, particularly these lines:

And what was in those ships all three,

⁠On Christmas day, on Christmas day?

And what was in those ships all three,

⁠On Christmas day in the morning?

Our Saviour, Christ, and His Lady,

⁠On Christmas day, on Christmas day;

Our Saviour, Christ, and His Lady,

⁠On Christmas day in the morning.

How can two people be in three ships? Were "Our Saviour" and "Christ" somehow originally thought of as two separate individuals? Curiosity about the history of the carol led me to Wikipedia, which noted the strangeness of ships sailing to Bethlehem (20 miles from the nearest sea) and noted, with no citation, "Another suggestion is that the ships are actually the camels used by the Magi, as camels are frequently referred to as 'ships of the desert'." This obviously syncs with the desert-looking sea on which the three ships sail on the card.

Fake ice

I dreamt that there was a very large cooler full of ice, and I kept reaching in, taking some ice, and chewing it.

After a while I noticed that the ice was kind of strange. It seemed gummy and kept getting stuck in my teeth. I read the fine print on the side of the cooler and found that it referred not to ice but to “compound.” What had I been eating? I had already eaten quite a lot of it. Water is technically a compound, right?

After waking, I had the thought that the cooler should have had a warning label: “NOTICE: NOT ICE.”

The Menelmacar mudra resurfaces

A new post from Galahad Eridanus, "How to Find the Center of the Universe," lays out a rather complicated system for locating any constellation in the sky at any time anywhere in the world, using only a watch and a compass.

The first section is titled "Picking the Celestial Lock," but the first sentence in that section reads, "My primary aim with this present piece is to give you a key to the stars." This is a little odd, since picking a lock means opening it without a key. If he's giving us a key, why pick the lock? This reminded me of the dream documented in "Reading with my eyes shut, Take 2," in which I saw someone using lockpick-like tools to try to "jimmy" hot water out of a water dispenser even though he could have simply pressed the red lever designed for that purpose. I wrote that he "was going through a lot of unnecessary trouble and ignoring the easy way" -- much like someone who picks a lock even though he has a key.

Eridanus's method, while certainly creative, doesn't exactly make for compelling reading unless you actually plan to use it yourself, which I don't, so I just skimmed most of the post. This illustration arrested my attention, though:

The captions reads:

When locating Orion using this method, one can sometimes end up mirroring the constellation itself. (Concerning the angle: while the ecliptic is ~65° from Polaris, Orion's belt is just over 90° from Polaris. So to find Orion himself, you would angle your second arm like this if he happened to be in this direction.)

The idea of a person's pose corresponding to that of Orion is one that came up on Bill's now-deleted blog in May 2024, in a post called "Orion and his most excellent pose." The post itself is no longer available, but I reproduced one of the illustrations in my May 2024 post "The Menelmacar mudra; the hot bee of Fatima; and spiritual experiences on Monday, July 22":

That post recounts a dream in which I was worried that I might have swallowed a "nanosnake," and a woman's voice was telling me urgently to do a mudra. She eventually specified that she meant the Menelmacar mudra (from an Elvish name for Orion), but before that

I tentatively raised my right hand in a half-assed "fear not" abhaya mudra. Nataraja (dancing Shiva) makes that mudra with the arm that has a snake wrapped around it, which I guess is what made me think it might be relevant to my "nanosnake" problem.

Nataraja dancing with a snake? Scrolling down from Eridanus's Orion pose picture, we soon find this one, in which Ophiuchus almost looks as if he is dancing:

The Menelmacar mudra -- a.k.a. Orion's most excellent pose -- also came up in my September 2024 post "Love pop, baby, love pop." I had randomly happened upon a picture of the mudra on /x/ and then found a rather similar image when I was searching for the B-52s song "Love Shack":

Revisiting that old post now, I found the name B-52s interesting. In my last post, "Fourth experiment ruined by haste," the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber was an important symbol. The band is named after the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, which is obviously pretty similar. My B-17 post was about a card which I had thought was going to be the Tower but turned out to be the Four of Wands. In the B-52s post, I note that I found the umbrella Orion image at precisely 4:44. Looking at the image now, I see that it was posted at 16:41:16. Sixteen is the number of the Tower, and "four one" sounds a lot like "four wands." The Four of Wands has the same bright yellow background as the two images above.

Speaking of Hindu gods and snakes (as I was a few paragraphs back), I recently revisited my January 26 post "Year of the Snake," in which I took the poem "The Snake," which Trump likes to recite, and rewrote it to tell the story of Krishna and Aghasura as told in the Bhagavata Purana.

My reason for rereading that poem was some strange hypnopompic imagery I experienced a few days ago: Instead of cowherds, it was cows marching into the mouth of the serpent. Krishna was standing in front of the mouth smoking a very long pipe. As each cow approached, he would blow a smoke-ring that would encircle the beast's neck like a wreath, and this would protect it as it entered Aghasura's gullet. Upon waking more fully, I associated this imagery with Joseph Smith's statement that tobacco was "an herb for . . . all sick cattle" and also with these lines of Dylan:

And take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind

Down the foggy ruins of time

Far past the frozen leaves

The haunted frightened trees

Out to the windy beach

Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky

With one hand waving free

Silhouetted by the sea

Circled by the circus sands

With all memory and fate

Driven deep beneath the waves

Let me forget about today until tomorrow

That phrase "beneath the waves" has been associated with cows before, in "Underwater Cowtown."

Note added: In Trump's poem, the woman takes in the snake. In my version, the snake "takes in" (swallows) Krishna. The Menelmacar mudra dream had to do with my possibly swallowing a snake.