Among the giants

This dream of Tuesday night continued the storyline (from "Cold Brother") in which I was serving for one month as a Mormon missionary in "Arizona" -- though it looked more like Montana in terms of scenery.

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."