Nikes, red books, and short-vowel Levites

Last night's dreams were divided into two parts. The first part was quite long, but I remember relatively little detail. The central premise was that all sorts of things all over the world were being secretly controlled and orchestrated by a hidden mastermind: the Hollywood actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Much of the dream was just a plotless dwelling-on this fact. When there was a plot, it was about me uncovering more and more things that could be traced back to the secret machinations of Gordon-Levitt.

In the second dream segment, I walked into a department store intending to buy a pair of red shoes. I winced when I saw a pair of garish all-red high-top basketball shoes, thinking they were in extremely poor taste, but I reminded myself, "The important thing is just to get a pair of red shoes. Any red shoes. Even Nikes if it's all they have. It's okay. I won't wear them to work or anything."

Later, I was in the book section of the store, scanning the shelves for anything with a red cover, but all I could find was a few copies of Time magazine with its distinctive red frame. I also noticed a few copies of National Geographic with its trademark yellow frame.

The selection of books was small and mostly what I thought of dismissively as "bestseller schlock." I did eventually find one very old-looking hardcover, and I sat down to page through it. I didn't really process any of the text (reading in dreams is often a bit of a challenge), but I noticed a half-page illustration which was a simple woodcut of a sailing ship.

While I was looking at the book, a teenage girl called Ava came up and stood in front of me, making an annoying repetitive sound that sounded sort of like a cross between a Beavis and Butt-Head laugh and someone burping again and again. I understood that this was supposed to get my attention, and that I was supposed to think it was funny. Without looking up from the book, I said, "Ava, do you understand what a library is?" -- meaning that she should be quiet. Of course it wasn't actually a library but the book section of a department store. Ava told me that some other specific person had arrived and would be with us shortly, but I can't remember who that person was.

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In the morning, I finished Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox (well-written and clever, despite my metaphysical objections). Since I'm currently reading several other books, I had to think for a minute about which of them I'd turn to next. I decided on Gary Lachman's Dark Star Rising, of which I had only read a few pages. I picked up where I had left off, on page 10. On page 11, I found this:

[Ronald Reagan's motto] "It CAN be done" is a perhaps more cautious affirmation than "Just Do It," Nike's tempting mantra to help us purchase more sportswear, but it is of the same ilk. And "Just Do It" is not that far removed from Aleister Crowley's indulgent maxim "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," . . .

This is a bit of a sync, since in my dream I had considering buying a pair of Nikes and had to remind myself to just do it despite any aesthetic objections. Then I noticed that, although I am reading an electronic edition of Lachman's book, it was published with a red cover.

In the early afternoon, I tried to play an audio version of the Book of Jeremiah using the CJCLDS's Gospel Library app, but for some reason it was unable to play the recorded version and said it had to use text-to-speech software instead. This was pretty terrible, and I shut it off without even finishing a full chapter. As it happens, it was Chapter 33, which uses the word Levites three times -- a word that does not appear anywhere else in Jeremiah. One of the quirks of the text-to-speech software was that it pronounced this word with short vowels, so that it sounded like Levitts.

Levitt can be an Anglo-Norman surname but in the case of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whom Wikipedia quotes as saying that he is of "100% Ashkenazi Jewish descent," I suspect it is etymologically a form of Levite.