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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.