Communion and an ancient phoenix carving

I dreamt that we had just organized the bookcases in the family home (an amalgam of the home I grew up in and the one I live in now) a day or two ago, but then I found two paperbacks behind the television. Both were in English, but by authors with Russian-looking names. (One author, I think, was called Lyubov, which just means "love" in Russian.) One was titled After Kant, and the other had a title of the same form, but with a less obviously epoch-making name -- something like After Braque or After Piaget or something like that. I was going around showing the two books to various family members and asking if anyone knew how they could have ended up behind the television, especially just after we had organized all the books.

Finally, I just decided to put the books back where they belonged. That was on a high shelf, and so I had to get a large aluminum stepladder. While up there, I noticed what I thought at first was "a coffee-table edition of Communion" by Whitley Strieber. Only part of the cover was visible, but the title began with Com-, and there was what looked like part of a slanted almond shape suggesting a gray-alien eye as seen in the iconic Ted Jacobs painting on the cover of the first edition of Communion.

I soon found that I had been mistaken. The title of the book was actually Communication or Computation or something, and the shape was part of a larger illustration of something entirely different, resembling an alien eye only by coincidence.

Then I noticed that shelved just above this Communion impostor was a book on the subject of birds in the sacred iconography of all religions. Now this was a really extraordinary coincidence, and I decided I'd better take a photo. Fortunately, I had a small digital camera in my hip pocket (not a smartphone, as I would have had in real life). Unfortunately, as I was trying to get it out of my pocket, not-Communion and some other books on that shelf slipped out of position, ruining the shot. I couldn't reach them from where I was. Rather, I would have to take the ladder outside and get at them from the opposite direction. (Dream logic for you.)

The reason I thought this such a remarkable coincidence was that (in the dream) Whitley Strieber had written extensively about a certain bas-relief carving that was thought to be the oldest surviving depiction of a phoenix. In my own research on this carving, I had discovered that it was housed in a museum, and that just below it in the museum display was another book that might be mistaken at first glance for a coffee-table edition of Communion. I had a theory -- I should probably post about it on my Strieber blog, I thought -- that this was what had drawn Strieber's attention to that particular carving in the first place. Yes, the post would be called "What made Strieber notice that ancient phoenix carving?"

Since I was up there already, I decided to page through the bird iconography book and see if it had a photo of the carving in question. It did, though the caption identified it not as a phoenix but as "an early Tibetan dhier" or something like that -- some exotic spelling that looked as if it would be pronounced deer. The facing page was a plate with several pictures showing various cartoon characters that were birds. I didn't recognize any of them. One of the pictures showed a group of four anthropomorphic animal characters: a cat, a fox, a bird, and what the caption called "a voidoid." I guessed this must be some sort of mascot invented by the punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids, which was later picked up by whoever made the cartoon.

When I went outside with the ladder, I somehow ended up inside a museum, where I got completely lost. One of the exhibits was a series of "moving paintings" (as in Harry Potter) depicting great alchemists smoking, surrounded by big clouds of smoke. I gathered that what they were smoking was the elixir of life, the great secret being that it was something you smoked rather than drank. I also passed a scientific exhibit with a big sign that said "Is Mars like heaven?"

I woke up before I had managed to find my way out of the museum.