Reading with my eyes shut, Take 2

I tried the "Reading with my eyes shut" experiment again, again with suggestive but unsatisfying results. As before, I put a Rider-Waite Tarot card under my pillow without looking at it and then took a nap. This time I got plenty of dream imagery. I first fell asleep for just a few minutes, then woke up, and then slept again for a about 40 minutes -- so the dream material is divided into two segments.

In the first period of sleep, I saw someone using tools that resembled those of a locksmith. He was sticking these into a water dispenser at odd angles and jiggling them around, and I thought he was "trying to jimmy hot water out of it" -- meaning trying to force hot water out of a machine designed to dispense only cold. In fact, though, this dispenser had both hot and cold taps, and all he had to do was press the little red lever to get what he wanted; no "jimmying" was required. He was going through a lot of unnecessary trouble and ignoring the easy way.

After this scene, I heard a woman's voice speak the single word eucalypsis -- the Australian tree genus, so modified as to sound more like some sort of medical condition.

At this point I woke up, wrote "cups" on my bedside notepad, thinking the water theme probably indicated that suit, and went back to sleep.

In the next dream, I was entering a very large Mormon-style chapel while sitting on a wheeled office chair. I used my feet to walk the chair forward while remaining seated, and thus moved through the aisle between pews as if I were in a wheelchair. At first I was moving pretty fast, but then I decided it would be more respectful to slow down. I was holding a cordless microphone. I wheeled myself up to one of the pews, under which was a little shelf in which to stow hymnals. I put the microphone in there, with the head sticking out.

At that point, I realized that wheeling around the chapel in a swivel chair was actually disrespectful at any speed, so I picked up the chair and started to carry it out of the chapel. At first I held it in my hands in front of me, but then I realized that this chair was actually designed to be carried on one's head, leaving the hands free. You just turned the chair upside down and placed the seat on your head, with the chair back going down your own back. It was molded to fit the body in this position. I thought it made me look rather like one of those Mesopotamian fish-men, with the seat corresponding to the fish's head and the chair back to the rest of the fish.

I came to a harbor where a large sailing ship was moored, and I decided to put the office chair on the ship. I had to climb up a ladder on the side of the ship to reach the deck, and I found this somewhat difficult with the chair on my head. This chair is designed to be carried on your head, I thought, but this ladder is designed to be climbed without carrying anything on your head!

After considerable struggle, I got up the ladder and onto the deck, where I left the swivel chair. A cast net was lying on the deck, and I threw it down onto the shore. Then instead of climbing back down the ladder, I decided to swing down on a rope "like a pirate."

When I reached the shore, I found one of my students, a high school girl.

"Look," I said, "I've got a cast net."

"Yeah, but nobody fishes here," she said. "I've never even seen a fishing license around here. Hey, can you save those shrimp?"

She indicated some large shrimp that were walking around in the grass near the shore. Each was about the size of a cat, with coloration similar to that of a Maryland blue crab, and had very long legs. Around the base of the cephalothorax was a frilly feathery "beard" that could be extended as a display.

"They don't need saving," I said. "Look, they're only semi-aquatic. They're just fine on dry land."

As we watched the shrimp, they began to take on a stranger and stranger appearance, until eventually they appeared as little "shrimp-centaurs," with a human-like torso rising up from the cephalothorax, with arms and a head. The faces were not at all human, but each was recognizably male or female, and the shrimp had started to pair off, dancing together in male-female couples.

"What are they doing?" the girl asked.

"They're mating," I said, "or rather, they're doing a mating dance. See, they're pairing up."

I woke up, with much more material to record than I had anticipated and not much time to do it before I had to go to work. I hurriedly scribbled everything down, with no real time to analyze or think about it, and then took the card out from under my pillow. It was the Six of Cups.

So I correctly called it as Cups, but that's not particularly impressive, as that suit comprises a full 18% of the deck. Could I have narrowed it down to the Six if I'd given it some more thought? Well, we'll never know now. I kicked myself for being in such a hurry to turn the card over, when really there's no reason I couldn't have just left it there under the pillow for as long as necessary -- all day if need be -- and only checked it after I had thoroughly analyzed the dream content and made a specific prediction.

The Six would have been a reasonable guess. It shows a diminutive male-female pair, like the shrimp, and in the past I've associated them with arthropods (see "The White Saint Valentine, pi, 11, and the bees of Thérèse"). On balance, though, I think I probably would have put my money on the King:

He's sitting on a chair, and his short scepter looks a bit like a microphone. His headdress could, with a bit of imagination, bear some resemblance to an upside-down chair. There's a sailing ship in the background. Maybe this would have been my guess -- but, as I've said, I can't be sure now, because my analysis is contaminated by knowledge of the correct answer.

Next time I do this, I'm going to write out my analysis and prediction and publish it here before turning over the card.