I had a dream that was set on a college campus in the 1960s. The atmosphere was that of a zany sex comedy of that era, but anytime anything sexual was about to occur, a flat opaque gray circle would appear in front of it, hiding it from my view. This happened again and again.
"Where do those gray circles come from?" I said, not expecting anyone to reply.
I was answered by a disembodied voice: "It's for your own protection. It might be illegal for you to view some of this material."
"Illegal? How?"
"Come on. This is the sixties. You just know half of those girls are going to be underage."
"But this is a dream! How can it be illegal to see something in a dream?"
Saying this made me realize it was true: It was a dream. I was dreaming. Everything, including the gray circles, was coming from my own mind and was subject to my control. I could just will the circles away if I wanted to.
"So do it," said the voice, "if you're so sure all of this is coming from your own mind."
I found myself unwilling to do so. A sexual dream that just happens spontaneously is one thing, but . . .
"That would be degenerate," I said.
"It's the sixties," said the voice, meaning that degenerate behavior would hardly be out of place. "And weren't you just kvetching about the gray circles a second ago?"
"I'm not going to use my first lucid dream to create some lame-ass peep show!"
"You only think it's a lucid dream," said the voice. "The slave who never tests his chains believes himself to be free."
And then I woke up. I guess I'll never know whether or not I really had the power to override the censorship.
When the surname Nelson is used without further qualification, it typically refers to "Britannia's god of war," Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, whose birthday is tomorrow and who died in 1805 at the Battle of Trafalgar, depicted in this painting by William Lionel Wyllie (1851-1931).
Note Wyllie's unusual choice, in this painting depicting the death of Nelson, to portray the sea as yellowish-orange in color. A similar choice was made by Pixie Smith (1878-1951) in her design of the Three of Wands card for the classic Rider-Waite Tarot deck. Both pictures also show a yellowish sky and depict ships sailing from the right side of the picture to the left.
As WanderingGondola has noted, this is the only card in the suit of Wands to depict the wands planted in the earth as if they were trees -- young oaks, perhaps. The man's arm, extended to the right, makes a horizontal bar between two of these "trees," forming a capital letter H.
So, if you wanted to choose a single Tarot card to represent the death of Russell M. Nelson and the anticipated accession of Dallin H. Oaks to the Apricot Throne, you could do a lot worse than the Three of Wands.
Hours after the death of Russell Nelson, but hours before it had been reported by the press, I took two short naps with the above Tarot card under my pillow. I did not know which card it was, and my intention was to try to guess the card's identity by analyzing the dreams I had while it was under my pillow. I have, for complex psychological reasons, decided that this is a paranormal ability I ought to have and need to develop.
After analyzing my dreams, I came up with a ranked list of nine guesses as to the identity of the card. None of the nine was even the right suit. I declared the experiment a "complete failure."
My first guess had been the Hierophant -- a character who, much like the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is a pope in all but name. My second guess had been Death, with particular reference to the fact that the card shows Death coming for a mitered church leader.
One of my dreams had shown a pope dropping and breaking a pair of scissors, which one of the other characters in the dream called "death scissors." Prior to his ecclesiastical career, Russell Nelson was a heart surgeon, and surgical scissors were among the tools of his trade.
Another dream had a newly elected pope announcing a campaign to plant more trees -- including, implicitly, oaks.
The details of my dreams and predictions, all published before I knew of Nelson's death, may be read in my post "Nineteen years inside the sphere."
I did another reading with my eyes shut experiment, sleeping for 45 minutes with an unknown Tarot card under my pillow and trying to identify the card using clues from my dreams.
I didn't get much dream content this time. The first hypnagogic imagery to appear was a vague glimpse of two figures, viewed from behind, with their hands raised as if in worship of something in front of them. I was still semi-conscious at this point, and my first thought was that this indicated the card was likely the Devil -- or, this second thought rapidly following the first, the Hierophant.
The imagery here doesn't really match what I saw in any direct way. The two figures in the foreground of the Devil card have their backs to the devil and are not raising their hands. The two monks on the Hierophant card have their backs to us and appear to be kneeling before the pope, but the pope is the one who has his arms raised. Anyway, these two cards came immediately to mind while I was still in the hypnagogic state, so I note them.
Later, in a deeper sleep state, I was looking at a floor plan.
"Where's the cage where they lie down?" I asked. "I can't see any place for it."
"It's inside the sphere," I was told.
The central room on the floor plan was circular, and in the center of it was a large sphere on a pedestal. Although the floor plan was just a simple line drawing without color, I understood that this sphere was made of some kind of black stone.
"Inside the sphere?" I said. "Isn't that bit excessive?"
"It's for sensory deprivation," the voice said. "They stay there for 19 years, getting used to it."
"Nineteen years? Who would volunteer to spend 19 years of their life in a state of sensory deprivation? Maybe you meant to say 19 days, or 19 hours?"
Before I could get an answer to that question, I woke up.
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Based on that rather meager dream content, here are my ranked guesses as to the card under the pillow:
1. Judgement: People raising their hands as if in worship after emerging from tombs in which they have slept for years.
2. The Devil: My first hunch. It has a black background, and the chained captives are conceptually similar to the idea of people lying down in a "cage."
3. The Hierophant: Again, a hypnagogic hunch seems worth trusting.
4. Nine of Swords: A person who has just been lying down, with a black background that could be the inside of the black sphere. Even now, awake, she is covering her eyes, suggesting "sensory deprivation."
5. Four of Swords: A person lying down. A "worship" image in the background.
6. Ten of Cups: Two figures viewed from behind, with their arms raised.
7. The Sun: The number 19 was emphasized.
The card is still under the pillow. As soon as I've published this, I'm going back dans les bras de Morphée for another 45 minutes to see if I can get any more data, after which I'll update my predictions if necessary and then check the card.
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Update: Here is the content from my second sleep session with the same (still unknown) card under the pillow.
First, there was a scene of a pope -- I think it was the pope played by John Malkovich in the video clip with Marilyn Manson on "A mistake about Pius XIII, a circle-lemniscate logo, and a lost city found in 2012" -- attempting to use a very small pair of scissors. The rings were too small for him to fit his fingers into. Finally he dropped the scissors on the floor, the handles popped off, and lots of tiny nails or screws that had been inside spilled out onto the floor. A young man knelt on the floor to look and said, "What are these? Death scissors?" I thought the idea was that the scissors must have been some sort of miniature pipe bomb, with the tiny nails and screws intended as shrapnel.
This brief scene was followed by a couple of non-visual dream segments, each consisting only of a spoken sentence. The first was, "A wife but no house. Period." The second was, "Let's get naked, and let's get together." I understood that this second was meant to sound sexual but that this was deliberate misdirection; the nakedness was intended to disguise the nature of some non-sexual action that was being planned.
In a final scene, the news was announcing the election of a new pope, who was taking the name Pius XIII. At the same time this was on the news, someone claiming to be the new pope (and I believed him) was posting on 4chan. I anticipated that he was going to say that he didn't want to take the name Pius XIII, that the name had been suggested by someone else and given to the press prematurely. Instead, he posted a photo of his hand holding a plastic bag containing some kind of plant material. Many posters thought this was marijuana and that it meant the new pope intended to campaign for the legalization of that drug worldwide. Later, though, it was clarified, on 4chan and the news simultaneously, that the new pope had announced a global campaign for people to plant more trees.
I then woke up.
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All this papal material obviously makes the Hierophant a stronger candidate. In particular, the scissors scene seems to suggest this part of the card:
At the pope's feet, as if on the floor, are a pair of crossed keys, suggesting the general shape of a pair of scissors, with rings into which it would be difficult or impossible to insert one's fingers. Just above these "scissors" are the pope's feet in papal slippers, the cross markings of which suggest stigmata and thus, indirectly, nails. And on either side of the crossed keys is a man who is probably kneeling.
Scissors also suggest the Two of Swords, which shows a blindfolded woman and thus ties in with the earlier "sensory deprivation" theme. Out of curiosity, I googled which tarot card shows scissors and found this. Interestingly, the first two results both, in different ways, referenced death:
The first is, no surprise, the Two of Swords -- but from the Santa Muerte Tarot. That's Spanish for "Saint Death." The second is the Death card itself in "Madame Dulora de la Haye's Tarot" (Tarot hiéroglyphique égyptien). The name is interesting in connection with my recent "Ether genius Michael Hayes" dream. So both of these link to the "death scissors" reference. Here are the two cards in question:
The Rider-Waite Death card is also relevant, since it features a bishop, the Roman numeral XIII, and of course the word Death -- all of which also featured in this last round of dreams.
In the John Malkovich scene with Marilyn Manson, we learn that Pope Pius XIII is still alive but is in an extended coma, which fits with the dream about someone staying in a sensory deprivation chamber for years.
Here are my updated ranked predictions:
The Hierophant
Death
Judgement
The Devil
Two of Swords
Nine of Swords
Four of Swords
Ten of Cups
The Sun
And now I'm going to go check the card.
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Final update: It's the Three of Wands. Another complete failure. Interesting that card should turn up again, though.
When I searched for Lake Tirza just to see what would come up, the results were all about the very similarly named Lake Tisza, the largest artificial lake in Hungary. Since one of the bloggers I follow is Francis Berger, who lives in Hungary, I wondered if he might have mentioned that lake on his blog at one point, and if a subconscious memory of that might have been the source for Lake Tirza in my dream. All I found was a 2019 post called "Mednyansk - Hungary's Best Landscape Painter," which highlights his 1880 painting Fishing on the Tisza.
This is the Tisza River, though, and the post makes no mention of the lake. The idea of rivers in that part of the world reminded me of something else, though. This past Thursday (September 25, a week after the Tirza dream), I was teaching a group of young children. Their textbook has this photo of a tiny house on a tiny island in the Drina River in Serbia:
One of the boys commented, in Chinese, that living in that house would be very scary because there might be sharks. I said, in English, "No, there can't be any sharks, because that isn't the ocean. It's a river."
"What about octopuses?" said another boy.
"No, octopuses live in the ocean, too. Does anyone know what kinds of animals live in a river?"
Finally the children began proposing more plausible animals -- fish, frogs, turtles, water rats, and so on. The first two animals they had thought of, though, were sharks and octopuses, in that order.
This is a fairly major sync because in "Further notes on the Tirza dream," I had connected the Tirza dream with an earlier dream I had had in 2023. I quoted this paragraph from my account of that earlier dream:
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."
This map of the Danube basin shows both the Tisza and the Drina. The Tisza flows directly into the Danube. The Drina flows into the Sava, which flows in to the Danube. All three of these confluences are located in a fairly small region of Serbia (Novi Sad is an hour's drive from Belgrade).
The Drina, according to Wikipedia, "originates from the confluence of the rivers Tara and Piva." That name Tara has also come up in connection with Tirza. In a September 24 comment on "Blue Green Crystal Ball," I wrote:
Another of Jo Sun's songs is the Green Tara mantra in Sanskrit. Possibly relevant in connection with Tirza/Terra and other mantras that have come up before.
According to this page from the Tourist Organization Republic of Srpska, the similarity between the Serbian river name and the Sanskrit mantra may not be a coincidence:
The word Tara has a double origin. Based on one interpretation, the name is old Indian i.e. Sanskrit and means speed and impetuousness or a fast-flowing river, while the other meaning of the word is the name of an Ilyrian tribe which lived on river banks and whose name was Autariatae.
By the way, I mentioned Green Tara in the comments on "Blue Green Crystal Ball" without knowing that her name can be otherwise translated. According to Wikipedia:
The Green Tara (or "blue-green", Skt. Samayatara or śyāmatārā) remains the most important form of the deity in Tibetan Buddhism.
The Serbian tourism site says Tara means "speed" in Sanskrit. Wikipedia disagrees:
Tārā (Devanagari: तारा) is a feminine noun derived from the root √tṝ, "to cross". It is causative, and as such means "to cause to cross", i.e., "to rescue".
However, the Green Tara mantra -- the one chanted by Jo Sun on her album The Blue Green Crystal Ball, which was my occasion for mentioning Tara in the first place -- does include a reference to swiftness. Wikipedia again:
The main Tārā mantra is the same for Buddhists and Hindus alike: oṃ tāre tuttāre ture svāhā. It is pronounced by Tibetans and Buddhists who follow the Tibetan culture as oṃ tāre tu tāre ture soha. The literal translation would be "Oṃ O Tārā, I pray O Tārā, O Swift One, So Be It!"
Here's Jo Sun's version of the mantra, which follows the Tibetan pronunciation:
Jo Sun's real name is apparently Josephine Genese -- strongly suggesting "Joseph in Genesis," a character Bill has brought up repeatedly.
I dreamt that I was reading what looked, from the appearance of the paper, to be a mass-market paperback printed in the 1980s or thereabouts. I read a reference to "ether genius Michael Hayes." I understood that this brief descriptor was intended to help the reader mentally categorize the person referred to, as one might write "ant expert Edward O. Wilson" or "jazz trumpeter Miles Davis." It also somehow reminded me of a crossword clue, the kind meant to elicit a surname with a prompt like "medical pioneer Sir William."
There are lots of people called Michael Hayes, none of which is of any obvious relevance, and I have no real idea of what an "ether genius" might be. Diethyl ether? Luminiferous ether? Quintessence? The Thirty Aethyrs? The Book of Ether?
Haze "opaqueness of atmosphere" contrasts with aether "pure, bright upper air."
The name Hayes appeared in a dream I had when I was 11 or 12 years old, in which I heard this rhyme:
I have shorn many sheep in my lifetime
I have shorn many sheep in my days
I have shorn many sheep that are pretty to me
But none is as pretty as Hayes
All in all, the meaning of this dream is quite hazy. It would take an ether genius to clear it up.
In "Illusion turning into reality" I mention hearing the Natalie Imbruglia song "Torn" at a synchronistically opportune moment in a coffee shop on September 25. The reason I had even been paying attention to the background music was what had played just before "Torn."
The instrumental intro had started, and I recognized it as a song I knew and liked: "Dirty Paws" by Of Monsters and Men. Then the singing started, and it was something totally different. The lyrics name-dropped "pumpkin pie," which is a sync-fairy calling card these days, but mainly I was listening to the lyrics so that I could look the song up and see who had so shamelessly ripped off OMAM's instrumentals.
Then, finally, a verse of "Dirty Paws" was sung, and I realized that this was not a ripoff but a mashup. I found it online: "Home/Dirty Paws" by the Gardiner Sisters:
The other half of the mashup, a song called "Home," was credited to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, a group I'd never heard of. I looked them up and found that the lead singer's name is Alex Ebert -- a nod to the recent "Eb(b)ert sync."
The next day (yesterday), I had the Gardiner Sisters mashup in my head and realized that the non-OMAM parts of the melody were reminding me of yet another song. After a long tip-of-the-tongue moment, I pinpointed it: "Rose Tattoo" by the Dropkick Murphys.
I'm a big fan of that song and the video, and my longstanding private interpretation of it is rather improbably mystical. A Being wakes up on Earth, disoriented, and realizes he's incarnated again, his memory wiped clean. He's an old hand at this, though, and knows how to deal with that situation: take a drag of last night's cigarette that smoldered in its tray, down a little something and then be on his way. He's confident he can feel his way through this life and accomplish his mission, guided by a combination of instinct ("I was guided by a compass / I saw beauty to the north") and externalized memories in the form of signs he and others have arranged for him to encounter ("I had these memories all around me / So I wouldn't be alone"), typified by the rose tattoo itself and by other things we see in the video, such as the playing cards (Ace of Hearts front and center, I notice now) and the sign that says "If you're lucky enough to be Irish, you're lucky enough."
Yesterday, for some reason, the thought of "Rose Tattoo" triggered a vivid fantasy based on the other meaning of the word tattoo. I saw a fanciful scene from an over-literal version of "the Wars of the Roses," in which the soldiers -- each with a bobbing red or white flower for a head -- were marching to the beat of the Rose Tattoo. The music accompanying this martial scene was, rather improbably, this song from my childhood:
In my pretty garden the flowers are nodding
How do you do? they say
How do you do today?
In my pretty garden the flowers are nodding
This fantasy made me curious about the etymology of tattoo and how it came to mean two such entirely different things. Just a coincidence, it turns out. The military meaning comes from tap-to and originally indicated that it was time for taverns to shut off the taps. The skin-marking meaning is of Polynesian origin -- Wiktionary suggests as one possibility "e.g. Samoan tatau ('tattoo; to tap, to strike')." That "to tap" is an additional coincidence, given that the other etymology is "tap-to." The Etymonline entry for the military meaning of tattoo ends thus (emphasis in the original):
In English, the transferred sense of "drumbeat" is recorded from 1755. Hence, Devil's tattoo "action of idly drumming fingers in irritation or impatience" (1803).
I had never heard the expression "devil's tattoo" before. It caught my attention because in the Dropkick Murphys video that kicked off this whole tattoo investigation includes several shots of the band members drumming on the table with their fingers.
This morning I read a little in Phantasia over breakfast. One of the major plotlines in the novel is that certain of the "great devils" (Beings corresponding to the seven deadly sins), disgruntled with changes in the administration of hell, have decided to incarnate on Earth, where they struggle to find their way -- a theme obviously suggestive of my personal interpretation of "Rose Tattoo." Today I read this passage, describing the dissatisfaction in hell of the great devil Sloth [correction: actually a demon, not a great devil] leading up to his decision to incarnate:
He was restless, but he tried to focus on his task, typing up a statement of intent or something like it in the machine and then leave it at the desk of his superior, only for him to take it to some other department of hell, he wasn't even sure which one, but the clacking of sound of the typewriter is annoying and then distracting, he starts to press the keys merely for the sounds they are producing, amusing himself with the basic rhythms he can drum with his fingers, and then he has a page full of gibberish.
So here is the devil's tattoo -- "action of idly drumming fingers in irritation or impatience" -- performed by a literal devil in hell. And because it is on the keys of a typewriter that he is drumming, the action produces markings in ink, thus tying it to the other meaning of tattoo.
After bringing us from the 1940s to the present, the Brethren got quiet, and then one of them said, "Now, I want you to know we been up all night with our crystal balls to bring you this next bit" -- meaning that this next part of the song was about the future. The melody changed at this point, too. I can't remember the new melody, but I'm confident I got the "future" lyrics verbatim:
Snake eyes, paradise
Something moving in the ice
Malcolm X, Genghis Khan
Pray for Satan's salvation
The first two words of their "crystal ball" prophecy were "snake eyes."
While rereading that post, I noticed a link on my blogroll to a new post by Laura Wood: "Strange Connections: 1998 Film 'Snake Eyes'." It's about a Nicolas Cage movie called Snake Eyes in which -- in a scene that obviously appears "prophetic" in retrospect -- an American politician named Charles Kirkland is shot in the neck on September 10 at a public event featuring Tyler "the Executioner."
The Brethren's prophecy also references Malcolm X, another political activist who was assassinated. Just yesterday The Atlantic ran a piece comparing Kirk to Malcolm X.
beautiful . . . as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners (6:4)
fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners (6:10)
I noted that "beautiful" in v. 4 and "fair" in v. 6 are translations of the same Hebrew word. This can be transliterated in various ways, and in fact the Bible Hub Interlinear Bible from which I got the information renders it yāp̄āh, but in the post I spelled it yafah, which is my understanding of how it is pronounced. A p with a macron seemed unnecessarily pedantic (not that there's anything wrong with that!). I'm not sure why I didn't go with ph, which would have been more in keeping with King James spelling (Ephraim, seraphim, etc.). I hadn't known the word before looking it up; the Tirza dream led me to those two verses, and I wanted to see how closely they paralleled each other.
Today, I passed this beauty salon on the street:
The fact that it's a beauty salon, and yafah is Hebrew for "beautiful," suggests that the name is not a coincidence. The Chinese characters for the salon's name have no meaning but are used to transliterate foreign names. Apparently someone decided to open a beauty salon in Taiwan and name it after the Hebrew word for "beautiful" -- but why Hebrew? Taiwan has a negligible Jewish population (a grand total of two synagogues in the whole country), and Christians (who might take an interest in Hebrew as a biblical language) are a small minority.
Yafa is also a feminine name in Arabic, cognate with the Hebrew word. Since Taiwan has about 200 times as many Muslims as Jews, that seems a likelier source of the name. The Muslims here aren't Arabs -- most are from Indonesia -- but I would assume that many of them have Arabic names, for the same reason that many Europeans have Hebrew names. Lots of nail salons are operated by Southeast Asians, so it fits. It might be the owner's name.
Searching for yaffa beauty turned up a South African company by that name, with the blurb in the search result emphasizing that they offer "more than just shampoo."
Since shampoo has recently come up ("Shampoo as food"), I clicked through. The homepage was advertising Koffee Shampoo.
Since the "Shampoo as food" post began by associating shampoo with buttered toast, this link between shampoo and coffee would seem to be continuing that theme. Some years ago I wrote something about a Danish character who began every day with "hot buttered coffee and strong black toast" (same concept as the spoonerized Swedish dishes the Babylonians eat in Yes and No; the "strong black toast" is rugbrød), so that's synchronistic precedent for swapping out toast for coffee.
This afternoon, I was reading Phantasia in a coffee shop and came to this passage:
When he gets out [of the water] he won't know if his thought about the woman had been, Please let me be free from this illusion, or if it was, Please let the illusion turn to reality, and who knows, maybe the two things end up being the same.
Minutes after I'd read that, a new song came on in the background music playing in the shop. It wasn't a song that I knew, but one line jumped out at me:
Illusion never changed into something real
I looked the song up later. It's called "Torn" and has been performed by lots of different singers. I think the version I heard was the one by Natalie Imbruglia.
My recent (September 22) post "A turquoise stone; and suns, moons, and armies with banners" mentions a dream about "a large turquoise-colored crystal ball." Today I was thinking about that again and tried searching for images of one. The word turquoise in the search prompts was bringing up balls made of that stone, though, which is opaque and not really "crystal ball" material, so I changed it to blue green. What I found was a song called "Blue Green Crystal Ball" by someone called Jo Sun (Josephine Genese), published on July 4, 2025, on Apple Music and on July 17 on YouTube -- where, as of this writing, it has racked up a whopping six views.
I haven't been able to decipher most of the lyrics, but it begins like this:
The blue green crystal ball is creative magic The blue green crystal ball is fantastic The blue green crystal ball, so dynamic The blue green crystal ball, so majestic
On July 4, I posted "After baptism," featuring a "blue-green crab." On July 17, I posted "Sly St(all)one," with a comment from Bill about "an 8 inch, 30 pound crystal ball." Bill's comment was about his Rose Stone, but he's mentioned before the possibility of other such stones in different colors.
Note added: I had originally posted this as a mildly interesting coincidence. Only belatedly did I realize it's actually an astonishing one. Why was I searching for blue-green crystal balls? Because of a dream that made the point again and again that such a ball was connected with phantasia, as that word is used in an exceedingly obscure Portuguese novel I'm reading. In the novel, phantasia is a form of magic that creates things out of nothing -- "creative magic" in the most literal possible sense. Our word fantastic is derived from the Latin phantasia. Now look at the first two lines of that song again.
Last Friday, one of my Taiwanese students made the strange mistake of confusing the English words butter and shampoo, and wrote a sentence about spreading shampoo on toast and eating it.
Last month, Leo posted "Measuring AI-Q for Dummies," showing how incompetent currently available fake intelligences are at creating IQ tests. I couldn't help but think of a different meaning of his title when I saw this on AC today:
The implication is that Q somehow knew seven years in advance that there would be some big politically significant event at State Farm Stadium on September 21 of some future year. Mind-blowing, right?
The problem is that State Farm Stadium is not known as "the Q." This should be obvious from the fact that the only evidence cited is an "AI Overview" which doesn't make any freaking sense. It explains that "University of Phoenix" was abbreviated to "U-P-X" and then to "the Q." Of course! "The Q" is an abbreviation for "University of Phoenix." What could be more natural?
Although this is very obviously an idiotic fake-intelligence hallucination, I went ahead and did my due diligence. You will search the Web in vain for any reference to University of Phoenix Stadium or State Farm Stadium as "the Q," except for very recent references to the above Rip Cord tweet. The stadium known as "the Q" was San Diego Stadium, formerly Qualcomm Stadium -- you know, because Qualcomm, unlike University of Phoenix, actually begins with the letter Q!
I've been reading Laeth's novel Phantasia, the title of which refers to an ability to "manifest" objects by visualizing them clearly while one's head is immersed in a bowl of water. All last night I had a long dream in which some female Beings -- possibly including Claire, I'm not sure, but at any rate Beings of her general type -- were showing me a large turquoise-colored crystal ball and making the point, again and again as if they wanted to make sure I would remember it, that this "Stone" was related to Laeth's concept of phantasia in three different ways. First, I would have to manifest the Stone by visualizing it. Second, the function of the Stone was to induce preternaturally clear mental images. Third -- but I'm afraid that, despite their having taken the trouble to spend all night repeating themselves to pound it into my head, I've forgotten the third connection.
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For some reason, my post "Further notes on the Tirza dream" is getting tons of views -- about seven times as many as "To Tirza," even though the "further notes" wouldn't make much sense if you hadn't read the dream itself. Maybe it's just because it spent a few days as my most recent post and was thus the one that appeared on blogrolls and such. Or maybe it's just Google stats being bonkers again.
Anyway, the dream had me thinking about Tirzah in the Bible, including this line from the Song of Solomon:
Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners (6:4).
This is echoed a few verses later, with beautiful [yafah] Tirzah and comely Jerusalem corresponding to the fair [yafah] Moon and the clear Sun, respectively:
Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners? (6:10)
Although Joseph Smith declared to Song of Solomon "not inspired," he, or those who spoke through him, really liked that line, which is quoted or paraphrased three times in the Doctrine and Covenants.
And to none else will I grant this power, to receive this same testimony among this generation, in this the beginning of the rising up and the coming forth of my church out of the wilderness -- clear as the moon, and fair as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners (D&C 5:14).
But first let my army become very great, and let it be sanctified before me, that it may become fair as the sun, and clear as the moon, and that her banners may be terrible unto all nations (D&C 105:31).
That thy church may come forth out of the wilderness of darkness, and shine forth fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners (D&C 109:73).
Each of the three renders the key line differently, with only the last following the Song of Solomon exactly. In the other two, it is the moon that is clear and the sun that is fair. A clear moon and a fair sun make me think of Claire Delune and Juliet, respectively. (Juliet, you will remember, recently appeared in "The blue flamingo and the golden stair.")
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.
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!)
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 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.
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.
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.
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:
