Merry Christmas

Unless the sync fairies have other plans, this will likely be my last post until after Epiphany. I wish all my readers a merry Christmas.

He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.

He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us -- and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father -- full of grace and truth.

-- John 1:10-14

RIP Rob Reiner

I refuse to say anything bad about this man. Let's remember him as he was at his best and pass over the rest in charitable silence.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,

Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways

Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our dark spirits.

Enter Sandman

Yesterday afternoon, I was sitting in a restaurant enjoying some after-lunch reading with a cup of coffee. Des Howell (Brian Wilson) is arguing with his mother over whether or not he needs psychiatric treatment, foreshadowing the "Garuda" scene I quoted in my last post.

"I have no need for [Dr.] Tockette," I respond. "I've made great strides. Why, just yesterday I almost went to bed. I almost got into my nappies, pulled down the covers and waited for Mr. Sandman."

"He says you won’t let him in the house."

The moment I read that, a new song came on in the restaurant's background music. I soon recognized it as "Enter Sandman" by Metallica.

Due to contextual ambiguity as to the antecedent of he and him, we could misread Des's mother as saying Des won't let Mr. Sandman into the house -- won't, that is, say, "Enter, Sandman!"

The Metallica song is about nightmares, which is fitting since, though I very rarely have nightmares these days, I did have one the night before. As recounted in "Flight of the Gargoyle," it was a nightmare to which I had to consent first, just as Des's mother says of Dr. Tockette (or, it could be, of Mr. Sandman), "He says it's necessary for your treatment that you open the door and invite him in." Like a vampire, or Mephistopheles. But also like Jesus.

I suppose when a Beach Boy grows up, he becomes a Sand Man.

Flight of the Gargoyle

Have you ever had a nightmare so horrific that the dream-producers weren't allowed to show it to you without your written consent and photo identification proving you to be at least 21 years of age?

I exaggerate. Slightly.

Last night I was meditating on Nephi's High Mountain Vision (1 Ne. 11-14) and had the idea that the dreams I would soon have might shed some light on it. I was thinking particularly about the Man Among the Gentiles and the question of whether he is Christopher Columbus, some future spacefarer, or someone else entirely. My dream chose to focus on a different aspect, though. Shortly after I entered the dreaming state, a voice spoke like a preacher reading the text on which he is about to sermonize ("Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah"):

And it came to pass that I beheld this great and abominable church; and I saw the devil that he was the founder of it (1 Ne. 13:6).

Before me on a table, I saw 21 rectangular pieces of iridescent metallic material, the size and shape of Tarot cards, laid out in a triangular pattern (a hexactys). These glowed and shimmered with kaleidoscopic rainbow-colored scintillations and were very hard to look at clearly. My attention was drawn to one of them -- bottom row, fourth from the left -- and I knew intuitively, just as in real life I often know intuitively what a card will be before I turn it over -- that it corresponded to the Devil. I started to reach out my hand to turn it face up.

I was stopped by the voice: "It is evil.  Are you sure you want to see it?"

I felt that I should.

"Do you understand the full meaning of the word abominable? You must choose whether you prioritize knowledge or peace of mind. Take as much time as you need."

I woke up, about two hours before my alarm. I understood that the dream was not over but had been paused. The voice was serious. I was  required to consent, in a state of full and unimpaired consciousness, to see whatever it was I was about to see. I went to the bathroom, splashed some water on my face, and returned to bed. It didn't take me long to make  my decision. "Peace of mind?" I said to myself -- thinking of the Boston song which, ironically given the situation, ends with the lines "Take a look ahead / Take a look ahead / Look ahead" -- "My peace of mind comes from God. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. No true knowledge can change that. I'm in."

I went back to sleep and, after a brief hypnagogic prelude in which I felt as if my head were physically expanding, the dream picked up where it had left off. I picked up the shimmering rectangle, and it became in my hand a DVD case. The title of the film was Flight of the Gargoyle. I understood that it was originally a German movie but that this was the English version. It had been banned all over the world. I was told that once I pressed play, I would experience the movie as if it were reality, and there would be no way to stop or pause or fast-forward.

I pressed play.

It was horrific. Beyond horrific. Levels of horrific I hadn't previously been able to conceive of. I think I'm considerably closer than I was yesterday to understanding "the full meaning of the word abominable." Though the dream can have lasted no more than two hours by the clock, I subjectively experienced it as much longer -- eight hours minimum,  maybe closer to twelve. Several times I thought that it had reached the end -- that the entire world had been profaned and destroyed, and there couldn't be any more story after that -- only to discover that, no, the world was still limping along and had plenty more degradation in it.

With the exception of one detail I must note for sync purposes, I will not describe the specific content of Flight of the Gargoyle at all. Upon waking, I found myself unwilling to commit any of it to writing even in my private notebooks, let alone on a public blog. I did take some notes; however, they were not about the dream's specific content but about what I felt it had taught me about the nature of evil:

I must resist the temptation to describe it is "absolute" or "total" evil, since the whole production seems designed to demonstrate the truth that there can be no such thing. Evil is a process, not a state. It is not the absence of Good or the opposite of Good, but rather the process of the destruction, corruption, and perversion of Good, and specifically of Love -- and as such it is totally parasitic and dependent on the continued existence of Love. A world without Love would not be hell; it would only be meaningless chaos. Dante's antechamber at most. That is the fundamental reason evil can never fully triumph -- not because "Good is more powerful," but because it is strictly, logically impossible for it to do so.

The "gargoyle" of the title -- I will give the bare minimum description to make the sync that follows intelligible -- was a gigantic bird-like monster artificially created from, among other things, human body parts. At one point in the dream, I thought to myself, "Why do they call it the gargoyle? Roc would be a more natural name."

Upon waking, I found Flight of the Gargoyle so convincing as the title of a movie that I wanted to do a Google search to see if there was by any chance a real movie with that title. (Not the first time I have had this reaction to a dream title; cf. "How can these books not exist?"). When I typed in flight of the ga, autocomplete gave me garuda. Apparently it's the title of a Tibetan Buddhist book:

Garuda is the king of birds, the Hindu equivalent of the roc, so that seemed like a bit of a coincidence.

Just before writing this post, I was reading Whale Music. The eccentric Desmond Howell (Brian Wilson) is trying to get rid of a psychiatrist who has been sent to his house by his mother.

"Desmond! Let me in."

"If you're really Dr. Tockette, use the secret password!"

"Desmond. For your treatment to be successful, it's imperative that you allow me to enter without this password nonsense."

Desmond keeps insisting, and finally the doctor caves.

"This once then, and never again. Garuda."

"Garuda?"

"Open the door."

"No. You've alarmed me. You conjure in my mind this terrifying image of some mythical beast, half-bird, half-human, and then you ask that I open the door?"

Any mention of Garuda at all -- in a novel about the Beach Boys, of all places! -- would have been a sync. But Desmond specifically describes it as a "terrifying image" that is "half-bird, half-human." Garuda is depicted in religious art sometimes as a huge bird and sometimes as a man with wings and other bird features. The "gargoyle" in my dream, which is what led me to Garuda, was "half-human" in a rather different sense.

440 hertz

This is just a little sync with no apparent meaning, but it's so very specific that I have to record it.

On Friday, the day before yesterday, I read Alien Invasion: Reptilians, Cetaceans, and Frequency Wars on Planet Earth, a very short book of bargain-basement channeled material attributed to Wuono, a Cetacean alien currently occupying a human body on Earth.

The titular frequency wars have to do with the evil Reptilians and the good Cetaceans preferring different musical pitches. The Reptilians are reportedly "trying to lower the frequency of Earth" from its optimal range of "between 544 and 550 hertz" to "a level that suits them, namely to the 440 hertz range."

Another successful method to lower frequency was setting the standard tuning for musical instruments at 440 hertz, which was done in 1953. This refers to setting the musical note A above middle C to 440 hertz. This frequency was chosen by forces in the human population that had aligned themselves with demonic entities. By making all music resonate at the optimal frequency for demons, it was hoped that the average frequency of Earth could be lowered more quickly. Indeed, their idea has lowered the average frequency frequency noticeably.

Among its other supplies deleterious effects, we are told, "A=440 hertz music . . . can lead to mental and physical illness."

After finishing that book, I started Whale Music, Paul Quarrington's novel based on the life of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Today I read the scene in which Des and Danny Howell (Brian and Dennis Wilson) play their first tape for a record company. Des is the narrator.

Every time my harmonies fell off pitch -- singing in the studio is a knack that takes time to acquire -- it stung and made me feel ill. [Record-company rep] Kenny Sexstone winced as though someone were banging him over the head with a ball-peen. I didn’t know then that Kenneth was saddled with perfect pitch, a sense of hearing so acute that he could tell an A 441 from an A 440.

Whale Music has been synchy in other ways, too. One of the main characters is named Claire. She comes from Toronto, which Des affects to believe is a distant planet. He mentally refers to her as "the alien Claire." When she unexpectedly loves the Whale Music Des has been composing and recording, he says:

I'm glad you liked the music, because you are the farthest thing from a whale I could imagine. I was a little worried that it would appeal only to whales.

So Claire, though appearing to be human, is an "alien" who apparently has something of a "cetacean" soul.

Whales and reptilians

I downloaded and read the book that came up in "If reptilian aliens are real . . .," Alien Invasion: Reptilians, Cetaceans, and Frequency Wars on Planet Earth by "Wuono" (channeled by Cynthia Hodges). I don't recommend it; it's just a run-of-the-mill New Age channeled text, with nothing very original to say. Reptilians are after your soul, but you can repel them by eating a healthy diet, wearing silver jewelry, burning incense, and listening to the Beatles (and particularly "Om Hare Om (Gopala Kirshna)" by George Harrison). That's the tl;dr. Bill had mentioned in a comment how similar the book's cover art is to a symbol from the movie Stargate. This is acknowledged in the afterword:

The symbol chosen to adorn the cover of this book is meant to invoke the symbol for Earth used in the Hollywood movie, Stargate. This movie and the TV series it engendered -- Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe -- revealed much Truth in a fictionalized scenario. The reader is encouraged to revisit all of the information presented in the movie and the TV series, keeping in kind that Stargate  was a vehicle for revealing information.

Following the afterword, there are some reader reviews, one of which compares the premise of the book to that of the movie Avatar, another theme from my post.

I finished Alien Invasion this morning and clicked for a random /x/ thread. I got this very short thread about cannibalism. The first reply after the original post contained this link: www.whale.to/b/reptilian_h.html. A page about reptilians on website called Whale is obviously a link to what I had just been reading. Wondering why the site -- which seems to be about all kinds of conspiracy theories -- was called "Whale," I went to the about page and found this explanation:

Whale came from John Lilly, the Cetacean researcher and spiritual pioneer (I met him in West Berlin, c.1984).  'To' is Tonga domain.  The name Whale was already taken in all the main domains at the time, and Tonga had just become available.  Of course, a big aim of mine is to end Whale and Dolphin killing (something Greenpeace will never achieve, only the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is on the right path), and for wider acceptance of the fact they are intelligent beings as John Lilly discovered.  I am sure it is no coincidence this website came to be called Whale.  There are no Coincidences.  I could be an agent of the Whales and Whale may be a Whale harpoon for the entity behind Whaling, as it does feel sometimes like I have created a weapon.

Cetacean with a capital C, just as in the book. John Lilly has appeared once before on this blog, in "The firehose of syncs relating to Dee's whale continues."

A lady in a lake, a strange curriculum, and the poltergeist's return

These dreams are from Tuesday night. I took extensive notes upon waking, but I wasn't able to type them up in a publishable form due to being out of commission all day yesterday with a migraine.

⁂

I was at a large lake with several other people. It looked something like a caldera lake, with steep rocky banks, but its shape was more rectangular than circular. Its shape made it seem artificial, and I was unsure whether I should think of it as a lake or a swimming pool. Inside the lake there were several submerged rock walls, reaching almost to the surface, and it was possible to get from one part of the lake to another on foot by walking along these walls, being careful to keep one's balance. From a distance, it would look as if one was walking on water, like Jesus.

We were there because we had reason to believe there was a body somewhere in the lake, and we had to find it. I had a hunch as to where it would be, and I started walking in that direction, balancing on one of the submerged walls. I reached a very shallow part of the lake, and there, lying face up in a water barely deep enough to cover her, was the pallid body of a woman. I discovered that a rectangular glass "lid" had been placed over the body, which was what prevented it from floating to the surface.

I removed the lid, and the body floated up to the surface. Then I realized that it wasn't just floating; the woman was still alive, despite her deathly pallor, and was trying to get up. I helped her out of the water and held her in a bear-hug, looking at the steep rocky bank and wondering how I was going to traverse it while carrying her. She recovered her strength very quickly, though, and was soon able to stand and walk on her own. In fact, she seemed to be completely normal; one would never guess that moments ago she had been mostly drowned.

She told me that the person who had put her in the water was also after her sister. I turned to the other people I was with and said, "Where are the police? Why aren't they here yet? They should have been called the moment we found the body, I mean the person."

⁂

I was teaching two young men, but not in my usual capacity as an English teacher. Rather, I was "responsible for their education" in a more general way. The curriculum I had chosen for them was mainly symbolic logic, theoretical geography, and the universal principles of architecture. I told them that in addition to studying these disciplines, it would be essential for them to maintain inspiration, and that historically this would be tied to what I called the "pre-Romantic notion" of the four components of the Cherubim and would involve choosing one of these with which to ally oneself. I thought, but did not say, that this would also mean identifying with one of the four Jacks in a deck of cards.

One of the logical exercises we did involved using a modified form of predicate logic to express the proposition "Most people are able to answer questions put to them by their parents."

One of the books I was teaching from was a thick volume bound in red leather, with gold lettering on the cover. I accidentally left that book in the trunk of my car and had to go downstairs to the basement-level parking garage to get it.

⁂

I was woken up in the middle of the night by my wife calling from downstairs, saying, "Come down for a minute. I got some paste for you."

As I got out of bed, put on a shirt, and walked to the door, I found that it was unusually difficult to move, as if I were walking through water. After a moment, I realized that I must actually be sleepwalking, and that my wife wasn't actually calling me. After all, she was visiting family overseas and wouldn't be home for weeks -- and even if she did come home early for some reason, "Come down for a minute. I got some paste for you" would be a pretty strange way of announcing herself. Having convinced myself that I was dreaming, I went back to bed.

Then I heard my wife's voice again and, sure it was real this time, went downstairs. This time I was able to move normally but found that I had lost my voice. It was all I could do to rasp out a very hoarse whisper. She explained that she had come home early because she was sick. Noticing my voice, she said, "So you're sick, too?"

Most of the furniture in the living room was gone, and some of it had been moved. I asked my wife if she had moved it. When she said she hadn't, I said, "Then we've been robbed! . . . But wait, why is the television still here? Why would a burglar take the furniture but leave the electronics?"

Then I saw something in the dining room, behind my wife: a small table hovering in the air.

"Look over there!" I said. "There's a table levitating. That poltergeist is back!"

She didn't turn her head. "Don't -- expect -- me -- to -- look," she said, forcing out the words as if paralyzed with fear.

I turned back to the living room. Most of the furniture had reappeared, though most of it was out of place.

"I can't believe that poltergeist is back," I said again. I began calling to mind the Latin prayers that had banished it last time.

"I saw something before but didn't want to tell you," my wife said. "It -- killed everything."

I knew that she meant our cats. "Where are they?"

"Out back."

Although she was saying that all the cats were dead, and their bodies out back, several of the cats were walking around the living room at that very moment, looking perfectly normal.

When I finally woke up for real, I was sufficiently disoriented that I had to go downstairs to make sure that my wife hadn't come home early, that the cats were okay, and that there had been no  poltergeist activity.

⁂

I had shaken the dice before going to bed. I no longer try to predict from dream content what the roll will be, since that doesn't seem to work, but I still note any connections. I had rolled 18, which is the Ace of Swords. My immediate thought was to connect that to my first dream, in which we had found a woman in a lake, with the Lady of the Lake giving Excalibur to Arthur.

The second dream was interesting because just before going to bed I had been thinking about what the focus of my current studies and thinking should be. Various long-term projects -- my work on the Fourth Gospel, the Book of Mormon, Dunne's theory of time, etc. -- have all kind of stalled out, and I find myself treading water, reporting syncs as they come but not really making much intellectual progress. Then, the night after those ruminations, I dreamt about a special "curriculum" I had designed, focusing on some rather unlikely subjects. Is that supposed to be a hint? It's hard to take literally. Symbolic logic, I think I've already got a pretty good handle on, having taught it at the university level many years ago. I know absolutely nothing about architecture, and I wasn't even sure "theoretical geography" was a real discipline until I looked it up after the dream. "Universal principles of architecture" sounds closely related to "speculative masonry" -- that is Freemasonry as a symbolic and ritual system, divorced from the work of actual stonemasons. Taken together, the subjects on the curriculum suggest a high level of abstraction rather than a focus on facts or practical matters.

The idea of receiving inspiration by associating oneself with one of the four components of the Cherubim ties in with old traditions regarding the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Traditional iconography shows Matthew being inspired by the human aspect of the Cherubim, Mark by the lion, Luke by the bull, and John by the eagle. As far as I know, there has never been any suggestion that anyone other than those four should or could receive inspiration in such a manner. The idea that inspiration requires intermediaries, rather than being received directly from God, is what I think made me characterize this concept as "pre-Romantic." The connection to the four Jacks was interesting. I've mapped the four Jacks to lots of other foursomes (see "Flour Boy symbolism roundup"), but not to the Cherubim.

The last dream segment was unnerving, with its suggestion that the poltergeist of 2019 might come back. It felt seriously malevolent in the dream.

Transdermal stimulant sync

I'm preparing to do another round of experiments with dreaming under the influence of nicotine. I was just getting ready to take a shower, apply the patch, and go to bed, but I decided to read a bit in the Shaul Behr novel first. I read this:

Howard sighed. "Okay. Caffo is basically a patch that you stick on your skin, and it gives you a slow release of caffeine over a period of about eight hours. It’s very popular among tech workers who like their caffeine fix without the bother of having to break their flow to go to the bathroom to return used coffee. It also found a big market in the Jewish community for fast days. Not to mention the Muslims who buy it in industrial quantities during Ramadan."

"That’s amazing!" said Ari. "I want a supply of these! How come I’ve never heard of them before?"

"Because they’re only going to be invented in about seven years’ time."

The fasting reference is a further sync. I was going to start the nicotine experiments several days ago but decided to postpone them because I was in the middle of a multi-day fast and didn't want to use nicotine on an empty stomach.

Given the established link between nicotine and Mars, it's a further sync that the passage quoted above comes from a book called Red Warrior's Gift.

Note added: Besides the Mars connection, Red Warrior's Gift would make perfect sense as the title of a history of tobacco.

If reptilian aliens are real . . .

I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got this one, from June 30, 2021. The original post just says "What would you do if they're real?" with this image:

I immediately clicked for another random /x/ thread and got this one, from August 12, 2020. Despite having been posted nearly a year before the first random thread I got, the original post seems to be answering its question. It reads:

if reptilians are real, I wanna meet one honestly. Fuck it, have them stop shape-shifting and just show that natural body.

In the pic that reptilian seems to be just vibing

Here's the image accompanying the second post:

This is almost identical to the reptilian alien in the other thread. Here they are side by side:

They're not the same image, but the correspondence is so exact that one must be a copied from the other, or else both must have been copied from the same original.

Is this just a very common way of portraying reptilian aliens, then? No, not really. I ran a search for reptilian alien on Google Images and found nothing like the above until the 90th result (below left). I didn't find a second such image until the 185th result (below right).

Getting those two /x/ threads one right after the other just seems astronomically improbable. It's not just that they use essentially the same reptilian image. The first asks, "What would you do if they're real?" -- meaning aliens, including a reptilian -- and the second begins, "if reptilians are real, I . . . ."

I calculated the number of days between the two posts, assuming it would turn out to be a significant number. It's 322, which I guess qualifies.

I searched for 322 aliens just to see what would come up. The first image result was this:

The reason I got that result seems to be that image's original filename is "22322.jpg" -- obviously just a meaningless serial number. The fact that it features a human skull, when I had just associated the number 322 with the Skull and Bones logo, is a coincidence.

The "What would you do if they're real?" post was published on June 30, 2021. On that same date, I posted "Orkish synchronicity," linking to an article called "When Orcs Were Real." Orcs aren't reptilians, but the idea of monstrous humanoids being "real" is still a sync. The linked article also includes "skull and bones" imagery:

This "orcs were real" theme reminded me that the first thing I ever read by Bill Wright, three months before I became aware of his blog and our syncs got entangled, was his 2023 guest post on Bruce's blog, "Could Tolkien’s orcs be incarnated demonic spirits?", so I revisited that. The first comment on that post, by Inklings scholar David Llewellyn Dodds, begins thus:

Thanks for this! What a lot of fruit-of-thought that is food for further thought!

Immediately before clicking for the random /x/ threads that occasioned the present post, I checked the comments on this blog. The most recent was from Debbie, on "Cucurbits and pomegranates." Debbie usually leaves very long comments, but this one was short. It reads, in its entirety:

I forgot to add.

Yet again another 'food (fruit) for thought sync, no?

Note added: I decided to look up that Alien Invasion book I found while searching for reptilian-in-a-red-hood images. Here's the back cover:

The summary begins thus:

In the distant past, Reptilian star-travelers conquered humanity. These demon-possessed body-forms cruelly exploited the subjugated humans.

That's a pretty direct link to Bill's post proposing that orcs are "incarnated demon spirits."

Second note added: That Alien Invasion book also features "Cetacean" aliens. Just yesterday I was in an electronics store, and all the televisions were playing the trailer for the latest Avatar movie, which is called Avatar: Fire and Ash (cf. Alien: Fire and Stone above). The trailer has a few shots of whale-like alien creatures.

The word avatar refers to a physical manifestation of a spiritual being, so that syncs with the "demon-possessed body forms" and "incarnated demon spirits."

Something familiar about this facial expression:

Third note added (December 9): Here is the alternate cover for Alien Invasion, mentioned in the comments by Bill, side by side with what is apparently the "earth glyph" from the movie Stargate (1994):

That's not just a general thematic similarity; it's an exact match, right down to the relative thickness of the lines.

Cucurbits and pomegranates

My last post, "Cucurbits for Miriam," and the dream that occasioned it had to do with members of the gourd family -- the pumpkin, the squash, the wax gourd, and the watermelon -- and with the sister of Moses.

This evening I ate a pomegranate for only the second time in my life, the first having been some 30 years ago.

I then sat down to read Red Warrior's Gift, the second of Rabbi Shaul Behr's religious time-travel novels. (Mormons of my generation may think of it as the Jewish version of Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites.) The Red Warrior of the title is Esau, and so far most of the action has taken place in his time, long before Moses.

Tonight I read a scene in which a Canaanite attempts to assassinate Esau, only to find that his sword has, as if by magic, been replaced with a cucumber.

A few chapters later, the setting has changed to Mosaic times, and the first person we meet in this new setting, one of the spies accompanying Joshua and Caleb, is carrying a "gigantic pomegranate" under his arm.

Cucurbits for Miriam

I dreamt that I was getting foodstuffs down from high cupboards for a very short woman whom I understood to be Miriam, the sister of Moses. The cupboards were so high up that even I had to stand on a chair to reach them. Miriam addressed me as Angelo Gustav, a hybrid Italian-German name which I took to be an expansion of Angus.

I first took down a very large pumpkin. It seemed too soft to the touch, and I was afraid that it was overripe. Miriam was unconcerned and said that most of it was probably still good and that we could just remove any parts that weren't. When we cut the pumpkin open, it was indeed very ripe, but all of it appeared to be still good to eat.

I then went to a different cupboard and took down a large whitish cucurbit which Miriam called a squash but which looked more like a wax gourd, called a "winter melon" in Chinese. ("Winter" is a homophone of "east." The pumpkin or squash is called by contrast a "south melon." The "west melon" is the watermelon. The "north melon," mentioned in Ming dynasty literature as a sort of pun, is mythical.)

This white cucurbit, though large, was very light, almost like a luffa. Miriam didn't want it and had me put it back in the cupboard. This cupboard contained mostly folded winter coats, which I had to move out of the way to put the gourd back. I first moved the coats to the right and put the gourd on the left, but Miriam had me move it to the right and put the coats on the left. I then woke up.

The whole dream seemed symbolic, though I don't yet understand the symbolism. My immediate thought upon waking was that the differently colored cucurbits represented the golden and silver apples from The Song of Wandering Aengus (I had been listening to Donovan's musical setting of that poem) and that Miriam was an alter ego of Claire.

The name Gustav has the appropriately Mosaic meaning "God-staff" and may also be related to the recent dream appearance of Gustav Mahler.

Angelo obviously means "angel." I remember that in Calibrated Gematria the three canonical archangels, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, map to three of the cardinal directions (I'll have to check later which is which), but there is no angel of the north, just as there is no "north melon" in Chinese.

Note added (minutes later):

Michael = 0 = west (watermelon)

Gabriel = -40 = south (pumpkin/squash)

Raphael = -5 = east (wax gourd)

Second note added (9:00 p.m.):

This happened shortly after I published the original post, but I've been away from my electronic devices most of the day and haven't had a chance to publish the note until now. When I woke from my dream, I had the Metric song "Paths in the Sky" in my head and wanted to listen to it. Searching YouTube for it, I found that the top result was a fan-made music video, which I played:

The channel is called "Indie Club (AJ De La Cruz)." There are only five comments, of which this is one:

Translating, that says, "Angelo, what a great video edit! Do you remember who I am?" So apparently that's what the first initial in AJ De La Cruz stands for. Of course it would be pronounced differently from the Italian Angelo in my dream, but it still seems like quite a coincidence.

Corbin, imagination becoming real, and teenage boys startled by a cracking branch

Last night I listened to a video in which a pseudonymous ex-Mormon podcaster relates some seemingly demonic encounters he experienced in 1978 and 1979. Due to his sometimes linking to older apologetic articles he wrote under his real name, I know and must mention for sync purposes that this podcaster's first name is a somewhat unusual one: Corbin.

Here's the video, which is much more serious than the flippant title and thumbnail would suggest:

In one of the stories he tells, what he thinks at first is mere imagination begins to become more and more real:

I had heard these things [missionary tales of evil spirits] during the day when it really didn't bother me very much. But that night, it was to return to haunt me by playing upon my imagination and filling me with childhood fears. Imagination -- at least I thought it was my imagination at first. . . . I experienced intense feelings of dread and sensed the presence of evil entities swirling invisibly about me in the air. I attributed this too to an overactive imagination. I question now whether these feelings were purely imaginative.

As the story continues, what began as imagined fears induced by hearing a scary story eventually manifests as physically audible scratching sounds at his bedroom door. As many people know from experience, talking about and imagining such things can cause them to appear. (Caveat lector!)

This morning, I finished Gary Lachman's book Dark Star Rising. In the last chapter, "The Politics of Chaos," the name Corbin suddenly appears, never having been mentioned in the rest of the book, and is repeated seven times. This Corbin is a philosopher who wrote about how imagination can manifest in reality:

The French philosopher and scholar of mysticism Henry Corbin wrote extensively on the imagination and what he called the Imaginal World, a kind of realm in between the physical world and that of pure thought. It is the realm in which dreams take place and hypnagogic visions, and in which the "picturizing" that leads to the "actualizing" of our prayers goes on. . . . The Imaginal is real, Corbin argued, but it's a different reality from what we are used to.

The name Corbin, incidentally, means "raven." In Corbin the podcaster's story, he thinks at first that the scratching might be the family dog scratching on the door "for admittance." Poe's famous poem "The Raven" concerns  itself with a mysterious sound which the narrator at first thinks is "some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door." He then reports, "I opened wide the door;-- / Darkness there and nothing more." Corbin, too, opens the door and finds only a dark hallway.

One of the stories Corbin tells features the sound of a branch cracking. He and a high-school friend hear this while they are up on the roof talking about the pre-existence and the war in heaven, and they associate it with the demonic manifestation that preceded Joseph Smith's First Vision.

Our discussion was suddenly interrupted by a cracking noise, loud in the still night, which emanated from the shadow enshrouded trees just beyond the rooftop on which we were seated. Both Bruce and I jumped at the sound. We peered into the shadowy tree boughs, seeing if we could make out what had caused the sound. We saw nothing. This is just ten feet away from where we're seating, if that far. It might have been seven feet away. That's why we jumped so much. It was a loud snapping, cracking sound like a tree branch being broken. Neither could we figure out what could cause such a sound in a tree at a spot twenty feet off the ground. We both agreed that it had sounded like a dry twig snapping under a person's foot or being broken across a person's knee, but that seemed even more ridiculous. . . .

Bruce explained to me that one of the reasons the sound had startled him so much is that it was virtually identical to the sound Joseph Smith hears in the movie The First Vision, [which] the church had just created. . . . Stuart Peterson, I think, was the name of the young boy who played Joseph Smith. There is the sound of a cracking branch, which is supposed to presage the appearance of Satan. Now, why a cracking branch is supposed to presage the appearance of Satan is anybody's guess, but it does appear in that movie. So Bruce explained to me that's why he was so startled because he made the connection between the sound we heard up on the roof and the sound that Joseph Smith hears in the movie. And this happens as Joseph Smith gets down on his knees to pray in the grove just before the powers of darkness seize him. Later, when I saw the movie, I too felt that the sound we had heard on the roof that night was substantially the same as the sound heard by Joseph Smith in the Grove. I suppose one cracking branch sounds the same pretty much as another cracking branch.

I did not attach much significance to the coincidence of sounds at the time, since the use of that sound in the movie appeared to be a directorial device to dramatize the scene and nothing more. . . . But many years later, I was to discover that the use of that sound to represent the presence of dark powers in the movie came not from the director's imagination, but from a lesser known account of the first vision by Joseph Smith. . . . Joseph Smith doesn't out and out say he heard a twig or a branch snapping behind him. He says, "I heard a noise behind me like someone walking toward me." A cracking branch would definitely fit that bill, although Joseph Smith does not specify it as being such.

I've bolded so much of the above to emphasize Corbin's word choice. Though there is the odd reference to a "twig" or "snapping," his overwhelming preference is for the phrase "cracking branch" (a much less common expression than "snapping twig").

This morning, after finishing Dark Star Rising, I had several choices as to what to read next, but (possibly influenced by a recent dream featuring time travel and a Jew), I ended up deciding on Red Warrior's Gift, Shaul Behr's sequel to Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox.

I've only read a few pages, but the novel's very first scene has Ari and Howard -- two classmates of high-school age, like Corbin and Bruce -- are up on a large overhanging rock overlooking a path, just as Corbin and Bruce are up on a roof. Then this happens:

Suddenly, a branch cracked behind them. They spun around to find Thaddeus [a Greek soldier] about five meters from them, his face livid beneath the layer of dust, his sword pointed right at them.

In one of the stories Corbin tells, he is taken from his bed to a field and then finds himself back in his bed again, in a completely different position. He is unable to move, and he hurts his neck trying to move his head.

I was once again back in my bedroom, lying on my back on my bed, but now I was turned end for end so that my feet were up where my pillow was and my head was at the foot of the bed. I was lying on my back with my head hanging off the end of the bed. My eyes were still open, and I was looking down at the floor at the foot of my bed, upside down. . . .

I tried to move, but once again found that my body was paralyzed. All I could move were my eyes, so I could not vocalize my prayer. I thought it instead. Not feeling that I had the time to maneuver out of this paralysis by that slow finger-by-finger method I talked about earlier, instead, I gave a mighty frantic wrench of my head, hurting my neck in the process, so that I could sit up. . . . [A]s I sat upright, I found that my body position had once again reversed itself, so that now I was sitting up as I had originally laid down, with my head on the pillow at the head of the bed, as opposed to hanging off the foot of the bed. 

Here's what happens next to the Greek soldier in Red Warrior's Gift:

When questioned later, the bewildered Thaddeus could not recall how it had happened: one moment he was brandishing a sword at two apparently helpless Hebrew youths; the next he found himself suspended facedown from a nearby terebinth tree, a thick branch threaded through the backplate of his armor, and his sword nowhere to be found.

He and the three other soldiers who are with him then hear a voice behind them:

The three soldiers spun around. Thaddeus cricked his neck trying to see where the voice had come from.

So like Corbin, Thaddeus suddenly finds his body in a different position, with no memory of moving. Each man finds his movements severely limited in his new position, and each hurts his neck trying to move his head.

Update (1:00 a.m.): Just now I was listening to Whitley Strieber interview Dean Radin. Strieber says at one point, describing a close encounter, "There was a loud cracking noise. I couldn't move. I was in bed when it happened." This obviously syncs closely with the content of this post. I've read accounts of this particular experience in Strieber's books, and he usually describes it as a "crunching" sound like someone biting into an apple. But in this interview, the one I happened to listen to tonight, he said "cracking" instead.

Time traveling with manuscript paper

Last night I had a dream about time travel, a first for me. Time-travel stories are notoriously confusing and paradoxical, and logical coherence isn't exactly the dreaming mind's strong suit. Put the two together, and you can readily imagine what a hot mess it makes.

I can't even begin to summarize the plot, which was very long and convoluted, but it involved me visiting various points in the past (but always still in the modern era), with what seemed in the dream to be momentous consequences, mostly musical in nature, for the present.

At one point, I introduced someone from the Hershey chocolate company to Walt Disney, which somehow resulted in Walt's having the revolutionary idea that his animated features would be more popular if he put music in them.

A much more important mission involved going back to 19th-century Europe and presenting a Jewish composer of that era (no names were used, but going by his appearance I would say Gustav Mahler) with an invention from the future. The invention? Manuscript paper. You know, that paper that has pre-printed musical staves on it, handy for composing. I mean, one can only imagine how stunted Mahler's musical career would have been without this futuristic high-tech wizardry at his disposal! It seemed that even in the dream, manuscript paper was quite precious and hard to come by, and I was quite proud of myself for having successfully got my hands on some and brought it back to the 19th century.

(I haven't used manuscript paper since my twenties, but I recently found myself wishing I had some when I wanted to jot down the melody of "Cast your bread upon the waters." That may have inspired this aspect of the dream.)

After the time-traveling adventures, I returned to the present and found that I was late for work, but that it was okay because everything had been delayed for a funeral. The identity of the deceased was not clearly defined, but it was someone I knew well. The school was empty except for one man, who was one of the few who knew I was a time traveler. His grief was attenuated by the knowledge that the deceased wasn't really gone, since I could still visit him in the past.

"We've just finished the funeral," he said. "We can't see him now."

"And I can only see him not-now," I replied.

That line felt like a very satisfactory conclusion, like the end of a movie, and I woke up.

The afternoon after the dream, I went into my classroom and found that one of the students had arrived early and was sitting at a desk writing out a musical score by hand on manuscript paper. I can't remember the last time I saw someone doing that, and it made the dream feel mildly precognitive -- but not convincingly so since, as noted above, the manuscript paper in the dream could also have been inspired by a recent past event.

I don't know anything at all about Mahler's music, so I googled him. It turns out that his Sixth and Seventh Symphonies are (or were before Will Ferrell) the best known uses of the cowbell in music.

Paths in the Sky

Dark Rats Rising

I've nearly finished Gary Lachman's book Dark Star Rising. Today I spontaneously noticed that star is an anagram of rats. "Dark Rats," specifically as an anagram of something else, made me think of my 2021 post "Mr. Icthus-oress, the Dark Mice, and why I do this," which featured "Dark Mice" as an anagram/spoonerism of the name of YouTuber Mark Dice. I recently posted about two mice -- Aesop's City Mouse and Country Mouse -- in "Gators, frogs, bathroom privacy, and the Heart Sutra." Just as this recent post's title begins with "Gators," the title of the 2021 post begins with "Mr. Icthus-oress" -- i.e., Ichthyosaurus, another predatory aquatic reptile.

Tom Mouse, one of the "Dark Mice" in the 2021 post, is linked to the Egyptian god of the setting sun. The "Dark Rats" in the present post were derived from a reference to a rising star.

An electronic mystery -- any ideas?

When I turn on the desktop computer in my office, the monitor doesn't come on. I've discovered that what I have to do is, after turning on the computer, unplug the monitor and plug it back in in a different outlet.

Suppose the monitor is plugged into Outlet A when I turn on the computer; I have to unplug it and put it in Outlet B before it will work. I use the computer for a while and then turn it off. Next time I turn it on, the monitor is already plugged into Outlet B, but now it won't work until I unplug it and put it in Outlet A. So both outlets work equally well; the key point is that I need to change the outlet after turning on the computer. Changing it before turning on the computer doesn't work. Neither does unplugging the monitor and plugging it back into the same outlet again. Very occasionally, I have to move it to a third outlet before it will work -- but again, which specific outlet is the third doesn't seem to make any difference.

The monitor itself is not the problem. Other monitors used with this computer exhibit the same strange behavior. This monitor used with other computers behaves normally. All the outlets work completely normally if I plug anything other than a monitor into them.

I've had a computer technician and an electrician look at the problem. Neither of them has a clue what's going on. I'm posting this here on the off chance that any of my readers can solve the mystery.

Gators, frogs, bathroom privacy, and the Heart Sutra

This morning, I was asked to read two stories to the preschoolers. The first was Alan's Big Scary Teeth by the mononymous Jarvis. This page caught my eye:

I brought up crocodilians in the December 2 addition to the post "Dinosaur of the month, dinosaur of the year." This had to do with Suchus (the Egyptian crocodile god Sobek) rhyming with tuchus, and the sync of my having recently posted pictures of the tuchus of Pepe the Frog (associated with the Egyptian frog god Kek), in "Gary Lachman spreads dangerous misinformation about Pepe the Frog!" Yesterday's post "Public urination, and unlawful possession of a cured vehicle" takes those connections as its starting point and received a long comment from Debbie, beginning in her trademark style:

And speaking of TOP EL's and L's,  and frogs sitting on its tushie

on top of a Sookie, Sookie, and cold blooded gators and see you

laters ( Hello Goodbye) and pulled down pants  and can't do thats,

OH MY! . . .

She went on to clarify that the "Sookie, Sookie" on which the frog was resting its tushie (from tuchus) was the pad of the "lotus lily" -- the connection being that the name Sookie ultimately derives from a Hebrew word often rendered "lily" in English.

So the cold-blooded gator scaring frogs off their lily pads in the book was a bit of a sync.

More specific syncs came from the second book I read, which was this version of one of Aesop's fables:

I don't own this book and can't find any images of the contents online, so I'll just have to report what I read from memory. I'll see if I can get some photos later and add them to the post.

In this version of the story, City Mouse arrives in the country, and complaining that traveling on the dusty country road has made him "dirty, messy, and muddy," he asks if he can take a bath. Country Mouse shows him the bathtub, which is outdoors.

"Everyone can see me here!" protests City Mouse. "Don't you have a door?"

"Sorry," says Country Mouse. "We don't use doors in the country."

While the two mice are bathing, a frog surfaces in the bathtub and asks to borrow the soap. City Mouse, who has never seen a frog before, is terrified and thinks it's a monster.

This is a pretty major sync, since my Pepe post is about a frog and being seen in the bathroom, and I particularly focus on the bathroom door. Wikipedia claims that Pepe left the door open while urinating (and Gary Lachman has him "urinating in public" with no door at all!), but I point out that in fact he has closed the door but someone else opens it on him.

Debbie's comment brought up the Steppenwolf song "Sookie, Sookie" (cf. Suchi, the genitive of Suchus). I didn't know the song. My only association with the name Sookie is the nursery rhyme:

Polly put the kettle on,

Polly put the kettle on,

Polly put the kettle on,

We'll all have tea.

Sukey take it off again,

Sukey take it off again,

Sukey take it off again,

They've all gone away.

The ending of the rhyme made me think of the haunting ending of the Heart Sutra -- gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha -- "gone, gone, gone beyond, gone utterly beyond, enlightenment, hail!" By a strange coincidence, it is common to write the text of the Heart Sutra on teacups and teapots.

Of course the "lotus lily" is a central symbol in Buddhism:

Public urination, and unlawful possession of a cured vehicle

In my last post, "Gary Lachman spreads dangerous misinformation about Pepe the Frog!", I defend Pepe against Lachman's libelous charge that "in his first appearance he is urinating in public." Then, in an added note to "Dinosaur of the month, dinosaur of the year," I discussed a Facebook comment thread which rhymes Suchus (Greek name of the Egyptian god Sobek) with tuchus (Yiddish for buttocks) and also includes a rhyme that requires the word gharial to be pronounced as Gary L. I noted that, coincidentally, my Pepe post features "a book by a Gary L." and "the tuchus of a semiaquatic herptile who is closely associated with an ancient Egyptian god."

The god I meant was Kek; see "The Truth About Pepe the Frog and the Cult of Kek" for a quick rundown. This got me thinking about Top Kek, which evolved from Top Lel, which I think somehow evolved from that guy with the Top Gun baseball cap, and I ended up on Know Your Meme trying to trace that particular development.

The Top Gun cap, and its Top Lel and Top Kek variants, became memes in 2013, well before Trump's political career began. Trump would later become associated both with Kek (via Pepe) and with the baseball-cap-with-business-wear fashion statement.

While at KYM, I ran across this meme, which piqued my curiosity:

"Unlawful possession of a cured vehicle"? What, like this?

Oi, mate, you got a loicense for that hot dog car?

I searched for "unlawful possession of a cured vehicle" and got a Reddit thread as the first result. The original post associates the "Man arrested for everything" meme with some Disney character I'd never heard of. The first reply to the first comment brings up, of all things, public urination:

I tracked down the original "Man arrested for everything" article, and there's no cured vehicle. The text is in two columns. The left column shows the beginning of this sentence:

Unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon, theft, possession of stolen property, city traffic warrants, possession of marijuana, warrant for nonpayment of child support, two warrants for possession of a controlled substance, warrant for probation violation, 1500 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

The right column shows the end of this sentence:

A woman said an unknown person took the faceplate from her stereo and her purse from her unsecured vehicle.

Gary Lachman spreads dangerous misinformation about Pepe the Frog!

I'm reading Gary Lachman's 2018 book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. Having read Bruce Charlton's negative review, I was prepared for it to be politically biased and to have a lopsided and distorted view of Trump's base. So far, it's living up (or rather down) to those expectations. Trump is constantly lumped together with Hitler and Mussolini, and Lachman's view of the "alt-right" is a funhouse-mirror version apparently derived from the legacy media, one in which the central figure is -- care to guess? -- Richard Spencer. Astonishingly, for a book which has as a central theme the use of meme-magic "sigils" to bring Trump to power, there is not a single mention anywhere in the book of MAGA -- neither the hats nor the acronym nor the slogan for which it stands.

I was expecting all that sort of thing. What I was not expecting was that Lachman would get basic facts -- facts which it is trivially easy for anyone with an Internet connection to verify -- completely wrong. For example, here is his account of the origin of Pepe the Frog:

Pepe came into the world through the work of the artist Matt Furie, who put him in his 2005 comic strip Boys' Club. Furie pictured Pepe as a kind of millennial slacker, and in his first appearance he is urinating in public. When asked why he was acting so deplorably, Pepe answered, "Feels good man."

Here is the comic strip in question, which Lachman had obviously never bothered to look up:

Pepe is very clearly urinating in a toilet, with the door closed, and nowhere is it implied that he has been behaving "deplorably." It appears that Lachman's research on this point consisted of reading the Wikipedia article on Pepe the Frog, which in 2018 described the the above comic strip thus:

In the comic, Pepe is seen urinating with his pants pulled down to his ankles and the catchphrase "feels good man" was his rationale.

Based on that description alone, one might naturally conclude that Pepe was urinating in public (since he was "seen") and that he had to defend this behavior with a "rationale." But what was Lachman's rationale for not just looking up the strip? I mean, even way back in 2018 they had Google Image Search, didn't they?

Wait, they did, didn't they? Just to be sure, I checked, and got yet another reminder of why you should never trust Wikipedia:

That's right, according to Wikipedia -- and they have three footnotes to back it up! -- Google Images was introduced because everyone was looking for pictures of the dress Jennifer Lopez was going to wear almost 17 years in the future! And then in 2018, when JLo finally got around to wearing the much-anticipated dress, "image search functionality was added" to what had previously been "Google Image Search." (In fact, the dress was worn in 2000, and they meant reverse image search functionality.)

The present version of the Pepe the Frog page also contains misinformation (added on March 28, 2025, before which the description was the same as in 2018) about his debut comic:

In the comic, Pepe is seen urinating in a toilet, having left the door open; when one of his friends asks him why he lowered his pants to urinate, Pepe simply answers: "feels good man" as his rationale.

Pepe didn't leave the door open. Two whole panels of this six-panel strip are used to show someone else opening the door on him. And no one asked him why he lowered his pants; they just commented that they'd heard he did.