Duck, Green Lantern!

One of the brief dreams recorded before the main course in "Danny John Malkovich, you need to replace the watchman on your roof" was this:

In a later segment, I was in what I understood to be an "alternate timeline" parallel to our own. I was navigating a series of wooden platforms built high in the trees, accompanied by people who appeared to be standard-fantasy elves. We were menaced by a highly venomous creature with an extremely long serpentine neck and the head of a duck.

"It looks like a dinosaur!" I said, thinking of its sauropod-like size and long neck. (It was standing on the forest floor, with its head up at our level.)

"It turns out it is a dinosaur,' said one of the elves, "but for a long time we didn't know that."

"What did you think it was?"

"A duck. We called it tree-duck."

Ben Pratt had this comment:

Tree-snake stood out to me since the this weekend two consecitive General Conference speakers referred to different accounts of Jesus healing blind men: one at Bethsaida and one whom He told to wash in the Pool of Siloam. One of the men wasn't fully healed at first and reported seeing "men as trees walking." Strong's has trees here as dendra in the Greek, which comes from PIE *deru. etymonline gives this:

also *dreu-, Proto-Indo-European root meaning "be firm, solid, steadfast," with specialized senses "wood," "tree" and derivatives referring to objects made of wood.

On the other hand the Hebrew word typically translated to trees in the OT is עֵץ (`ets) "a tree (from its firmness)", which derives from עָצָה (`atsah) "(properly) to fasten (or make firm), i.e. to close (the eyes)."

This seemed important to look up yesterday but I don't understand why, so let it be fuel for the sync factory.

To which I replied:

Ben, it was a tree-duck, not a tree-snake. Regardless, the link between an animal and the Greek for "tree" (of which the singular is dendron) made me think of this classic limerick:

A major, with wonderful force,

Called out in Hyde Park for a horse.

All the flowers looked round,

But no horse could be found;

So he just rhododendron, of course.

When I searched for that limerick to make sure I'd got the wording right, I found it with this other:

There were three young women of Birmingham,

And I know a sad story concerning 'em:

They stuck needles and pins

In the reverend shins

Of the Bishop engaged in confirming 'em.

Three young ladies (the three sisters named Amber), needles and pins (shpilkes), and shins (the repeated typo "Shinning" for the movie The Shining) have all been in the sync stream.

Ben added:

Tree-duck! I knew that. I had searched for "duck" in biblical concordances. Very interesting goof.

The idea of looking up trees and ducks in a dictionary-like reference book made me think of this classic entry from The Super Dictionary, the book best known today for giving us the "Lex Luthor took forty cakes" meme.

I think it was specifically Ben's "Tree-duck!" with an exclamation point that made me think of this. A less verbose Green Arrow, instead of saying, "Lower your head and bend down quickly," might have opted for "Tree! Duck!"

Green Arrow, the vigilante archer who dresses in green, was obviously inspired by Robin Hood. These lines from "Oo-De-Lally" are suggestive of the duck entry:

Robin Hood and Little John, running through the forest

Jumping fences, dodging trees and trying to get away

This morning, with "Duck, Green Lantern!" still on my mind, I noticed a book belonging to another teacher that was part of a series called Duck Green School Stories. Looking on the back, I saw that one of the other books in the series is called Dinosaur Danger! -- a clear link to the duck-headed "dinosaur" in the dream which had "menaced" us.

I haven't been able to find Dinosaur Danger! on Anna's or anywhere else, unfortunately.

Coming back to the limerick about the major who "just rhododendron" -- punning on the verb rode -- one of the shortest but most famous stories in the Scarlet Notebook, written by my brother Luther at a very young age, is about riding a dinosaur with a duck-like head. Here it is in its entirety:

If I Rode a Trachodon

If I rode a Trachodon, I would ride him standing up or sometimes in his beak-like mouth. And when he went in the water I would go in his mouth and pop out at the ducks and the people.

Trachodon is a dinosaur name that has since fallen out of favor, but it once referred to something that looked like this: