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.