The Arizonans were very large people. I don't have a good feel for how tall they were, but each time I shook hands with one, it was like shaking hands with a catcher's mitt. They were profoundly stupid and animal-like -- not in a negative or pathological way, but just like animals, like bison or something. Likable, but obviously not of the same order of consciousness as myself. I decided goyish was the mot juste.
One of the Arizonans was driving me around in an ancient Jeep. There were no roads. He drove us out to a meadow where some big aurochs-like beasts were grazing.
"Is someone trying to learn how to communicate with them?" I asked, sensing intelligence in the big oxen.
"Nope," said the Arizonan. "Just checking on 'em."
Yep, there they were. Still eating grass and what have you. He turned the Jeep around.
I saw what I thought must be a general store up ahead and asked him to let me out there. The inside of the store was huge and seemed to be a natural cave. There wasn't really any merchandise or anything.
I met the owner of the general store, another giant of a man. He spoke slowly and very softly, and I kept having to ask him to repeat himself.
He started talking about being a Presbyterian and tried to tell me (not very clearly!) how Presbyterians understood the biblical phrase "the word of wisdom."
Since I was supposed to be a Mormon missionary and all, I decided I should explain what that same expression meant to Mormons. This proved to be impossible. He had no knowledge of any of the prohibited substances and couldn't even be made to understand what it meant for something to be habit-forming or addictive. I thought of the Cyclops in Homer, who drinks only milk and is ignorant of wine. I had the oddly specific thought that the Arizonans probably lived on nothing but bread, cheese, and apples. I thought of the gorillas in This Is Spinal Tap, "mainly a bread-eating species," who "can talk but they can't swear."
I met several others at the general store, all similarly large and intellectually limited. I began to wonder if they had been sent here, if this was perhaps some sort of prison, and what they might have done to end up here. None of them seemed to know where they had come from, how long they had been there, or why. Nor did they exhibit any curiosity when such questions were raised.
This was another dice experiment, and upon waking I jotted down a precis of the dream and then added "K of P" for "King of Pentacles" -- the obvious guess, I thought.
Later in the day I was going to put together my usual list of ranked predictions, but I suddenly lost patience with the whole thing. I had bit of sunstroke and a headache and just wasn't in the mood for mentally flipping through a deck of Tarot cards. "Forget it," I said to myself. "King of Pentacles, take it or leave it. If it's not the King of Pentacles, it can be the seven of bobolinks for all I care." I had become bored with the dream, too, and wasn't even going to bother posting it.
Then I checked the dice. I'd rolled 15, which is, you guessed it, the King of Pentacles.
Finally, a hit! Of course a hit is to be expected sooner or later by chance alone, so it remains to be seen whether I'm finally getting the hang of this trick or whether I just got lucky this once. We'll see if my rate of accuracy increases going forward.
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Note added: Here are some details of the dream I forgot to include in the post, which I wrote without consulting my notes.
At one point, the general-store guy with the quiet voice asked me why Hasidic Jews did a particular gesture, which he mimed for me -- something similar to putting one's arms out like airplane wings. I said I'd never known any observant Jews -- "I knew a lot of Jews in the city, but they were just" -- thinking how to express "ethnic" so that he would understand -- "they were only Jews because of what they were, not because of what they did. But I think any kind of" -- how to express "ritual"? -- "any kind of favorite action like that is going to have a meaning, even if we other people don't always know what it is."
At another point, this same guy asked me if I had seen a particular female giant -- some short, simple name along the lines of Amy or Tina -- and I said I hadn't. "Well, that's a hell of a way to say goodbye," he said. "Well, we don't know if she's said goodbye," I said. "I just haven't seen her."
2 comments:
This would have been a public synch for both of us, if I had had time to publish my incubating post on the fairy story of Jack the Giant Killer - which is yet unwritten but was slated for this morning.
I went back on my posts to see where Arizona had come up before - I remembered it had, though not how. Your mention here of Giants and people in prison was already giving me Numenorean vibes (with Numenoreans both known for being very tall and many of them shut away in a prison), so I was curious as to any tie that I could find.
I brought it up in September of last year, in a dream of a hockey game. In the dream, a team with the initials "AZ" was playing, and a man exclaimed "This is a Phoenix team!" AZ is the abbreviation for Arizona, and through that word play, and the letters themselves, arrived at a reference to Alpha and Omega, who in my story is also symbolized by the Phoenix.
This seemed to further solidify the Numenorean vibes I was getting from your dream. The Numenoreans, starting with their first king Elros, I've guessed became part of what Joseph Smith called "The Holy Priesthood, after the Order of the Son of God". This order was instituted among them by Fionwe, who was that Son of God, and the Phoenix/ AZ.
Thus associated "Arizona" with Numenor, or Numenoreans, makes some sense - the ultimately adopted and then sinned against the order they had received. In your earlier post, you had mentioned that Arizona bordered both Utah and Minnesota, and given current geography, would seem to indicate that Arizona was placed in between those two states. Numenor of old, as the Terrestrial Kingdom, was also a place that stood between our Earth and Aman/ Heaven. Utah is a name that comes from the Utes meaning "People of the Mountain/ High Place", which could be a good stand in for Aman, and in other instances, including a dream Leo had some time ago, Minnesota has been symbolically associated with our Earth.
Further strengthening some of these connections is the Arizonan's remark about being a "Pentecostal". Pentecostal references Pentecost, or the event of the Holy Ghost descending upon the disciples. I've guessed Fionwe is one incarnation of the Holy Ghost, and he gave gifts, and started his order, among those first Numenoreans - making them Pentecostal.
Lastly, there is the King of Pentacles, and the association with the bison-like Beings in your dream. Joseph of Egypt ties into this story, and directly with Fionwe, and his symbol is the wild ox/ unicorn/ bull, as well as a garden and a vineyard (whose vines run over a wall), and thus could be one meaning or tie in to that King of Pentacles card, which prominently features bulls and grapevines. After all, as you likely noted in formulating your rolling guess, Pentacles and Pentecost have that same root word of Pente/ Five, and thus both tie to the Holy Ghost.
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