Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger

In the dream reported in my last post, "Communion and an ancient phoenix carving," one of the exhibits I saw in a museum was a series of "moving paintings," painted on the covers of large books, depicting eminent alchemists smoking.

Less than 24 hours after that dream, I read the following in Dreaming Ahead of Time by Gary Lachman:

I [Lachman] dream that I am looking at a book, one of my own, and am surprised to see that there are pictures in it. When I look more closely I see that they move, like images on an old B&W television set. After I record this in my dream journal, I open Havelock Ellis' The World Of Dreams, which I am rereading. The first sentence I read is 'the commonest kind of dream is mainly a picture, but it is always a living and moving picture...' So in a dream I see moving pictures in a book, and in a book I read that pictures in a dream move.

In a comment I left on my own post, I called this "a very meta bit of dream precognition." I dreamed about moving pictures on books, and then I read, in a book about dreams, of Lachman's experience where he dreamed about moving pictures in a book and then read about moving pictures in a book about dreams. My dream seemed to show the precognitive influence of Lachman's account of the precognitive influence of Ellis's book on his own dream.

But the crazy syncs were just getting started. Several hours after my comment, someone who goes by St. Anselm left this comment:

I came across this video today (after first being recommended another video from the same channel):

https://youtube.com/watch?v=J0Vk6D-qOR8

(Moving pictures on the covers of books.)

Here's the linked video:

St. Anselm is a relatively new commenter here. I believe his first comment was on my October 17 post "Implied obscenity sync," where his comment prompted my reply, "True, Anselm. How meta of me." Using the prefix meta as a stand-alone word isn't something I do a whole lot, so that's a bit of a coincidence.

The video Anselm linked is titled "Free Will Paradox (Ari Barak theme song)." Near the beginning of Dreaming Ahead of Time, Lachman warns the reader that the book will be full of paradoxes:

Let me point out that I am aware of the paradox of being 'consciously unconscious' . . . But I should warn readers that if paradoxes put you off, you may well want to find another book. As we go along, we will run into more than a few of them here.

One of these paradoxes has to do with free will:

How can we have knowledge of an event that has not yet happened? Or, if, in some way we are not yet able to explain, it has already happened, what does this say about our sense of having free will?

This is what the cover of Dreaming Ahead of Time looks like:

The same basic design -- blue and black, with concentric circles and radial lines -- appears on the cover of a book at the beginning of the "Free Will Paradox" video:

On the cover of the Lachman book, the circles and lines are those of a sundial. The "Free Will Paradox" video has a scene where all we can see are lots of clock faces.

In the "Free Will Paradox" video, the two young Jewish men on the cover of the book start to dance -- thus becoming moving pictures on the cover of a book, as in my dream. In Gary Lachman's dream, the moving pictures were inside the book and were black and white. The video more closely matches my own dream, in which the moving pictures were full color and were on the covers of books.

In the video, the dancing Jews on the book cover begin as two-dimensional moving pictures but them emerge from the book cover and become three-dimensional "real" people. Nothing like that happened in my dream, nor in Lachman's, but it syncs with another precognitive dream Lachman writes about in his book (brackets in the original):

On 15 March 1990, I recorded in my dream journal that in a dream I saw a film based on the pulp magazine character the Shadow. . . . I recorded that in the dream, in one sequence of the film [here I am quoting from my 1990 journal] 'I watch the Shadow emerge from a wall; by this I mean that he literally was a shadow, that is two dimensional, and then solidified into a three-dimensional body. It was as if he was drawn on the wall and then stepped out of the picture.'

Years later, Lachman watches a real movie based on the Shadow and sees this same scene. Note that this dream took place on my birthday, and that he says the Shadow's solidification was as if he had "stepped out of the picture," which is exactly what the two dancing Jews do in the video.

I used to browse pulpcovers.com from time to time, and I saved this Shadow cover back in 2022 because I thought it was a funny image. As you can see, the Shadow looks something like a stereotypical Jew, with a black fedora and a large hooked nose. Back in 2022, of course, the crystal ball had no particular significance for me.

It gets stranger. Prior to the "Free Will Paradox" link, St. Anselm's most recent comment here was on my post "Indicative be is in free variation with are in King James English." He said that he had been "browsing Heidegger memes" (who doesn't?) and found this one, the relevance to my post being I guess that it has to do with the verb be:

The meme is about Heidegger's book Being and Time -- and specifically about translating that book into another language.

This morning I read this in Dreaming Ahead of Time:

According to one authority, philosophers that have 'grappled with the problem of time' have 'ended up in perplexity'.

Curious as to who this anonymous "authority" might be, I checked the endnote. Here it is:

Joan Stambaugh, Introduction to her translation of Martin Heidegger On Time and Being (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. x.

Not just Heidegger, but specifically a translation of Heidegger. It turns out that Being and Time and On Time and Being are two distinct works, but that's still quite a coincidence.

Note added: One of the alchemists in the moving paintings in my dream had a long white beard, a deeply tanned face, and a large white turban. I thought it was supposed to be Hermes Trismegistus, due to the resemblance to this old picture:

Like all the other alchemists in the moving pictures, he was smoking a pipe.

This guy, who shows up in the "Free Will Paradox" video, bears a certain resemblance to the image of Hermes from my dream: