Reading with my eyes shut

Taking a page from Edgar Cayce's playbook, and partly inspired by Debbie's recent mention of the Dr. Seuss book I Can Read With my Eyes Shut!, I decided to try the experiment of "reading" something by sleeping with it under my pillow. After the usual preliminaries, I shuffled my Rider-Waite deck, drew a single card, placed it face down under my pillow without looking at it, and lay down for a 45-minute nap.

Upon waking, I couldn't remember any dream imagery, just two couplets. The first was a new version of the Jinbad couplet from "With?" In spoken form, which is how I received it, it is ambiguous and could be written in either of the following ways:

Jinbad the Jailer holds the keys.

He locks up some; and others, frees.

Jinbad the Jailer holds the keys.

He locks up some, and others freeze.

The second was from the Chip Taylor song "Angel of the Morning" as performed by Juice Newton. (I prefer the Merrillee Rush version, but the voice in the dream sounded like Juice Newton.)

Just call me angel of the morning, angel

Just touch my cheek before you leave me, baby

I thought that this was also meant to be ambiguous, that it could also be heard as "angel of the mourning."

I left the card under my pillow and took some time to think about this material without checking it. First, I noticed a connection between the two couplets. In last month's post "Tinbad and Jinbad revisited," I had focused on two couplets from "With?" -- Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer. Here, in the dream material, I had a new Jinbad the Jailer couplet juxtaposed with a couplet from someone named Taylor.

The ambiguity of the new Jinbad couplet made me think of the question, discussed here from time to time, of whether Pharazon was locked up in the Caves of the Forgotten, as in Tolkien, or was frozen in ice, which is Bill's version of the fate of most of the Numenoreans.

In the first version of the couplet, those who are locked up are being punished, and those who are freed are being shown mercy. This could be reversed in the second version. Bill's assumption is that the Flood of Noah refers to the same event as the Fall of Numenor, and that after the Flood the waters turned to ice. In the biblical version of the story, it is said of Noah in the ark that "the Lord shut him in" (Gen. 7:16) -- so Noah, by being "locked up," escaped the fate of the others, who froze.

The Chip Taylor line "Just touch my cheek before you leave me, baby" immediately made me think of Cheek Holder, one of the Flour Boys. As summarized in the post "Flour Boy symbolism roundup," Cheek Holder is identified with the Child card ("baby"), with "John" (a conflation of the Baptist, the Apostle, and the Revelator), with Jupiter, and with the first horseman, who bears the bow.

The "angel of the mourning" variant made me think of the Rolling Stones song "Saint of Me," where a weeping angel is immediately followed by a verse about John the Baptist:

I thought I heard a angel cry

I thought I saw a teardrop falling from his eye

Come on now

John the Baptist was a martyr

But he stirred up Herod's hate

And Salome got her wish

To have him served up on a plate

I said yes, yes, yeah

At this point I turned over the Tarot card that had been under my pillow. It was our old friend Temperance.

This is one of only two cards in the deck to show an angel (the other is Judgement), so that's a hit. The radiance low on the horizon in the background also suggests dawn or morning. In the Golden Dawn system associated with this deck, Temperance corresponds to the sign of Sagittarius, which is the Archer and is ruled by the planet Jupiter. Both the Archer (first horseman) and Jupiter have been linked to Cheek Holder.

So this little experiment wasn't a success in any straightforward sense -- I didn't perceive the Temperance card itself or anything that would have allowed to identify that particular card before turning it over -- but the connections are there.