Pterodactyls, the foil game, and a fake séance

I dreamt that I was out and about in the city and was seeing small (roughly goose-sized) pterodactyls everywhere, just casually, they way you would see birds. (I saw birds, too.) I thought, How can people doubt that there are still pterodactyls around? They're right there in plain sight! I saw them clearly and in a perfectly ordinary way and was confident that I was not hallucinating or anything.

Then I woke up from this dream-within-a-dream. I was in a very large bedroom with two queen-size beds, one at each end, with a wide space between them. From the ceiling above my bed were hung, on what looked like fishing line, hundreds of little pterodactyls made of hard plastic, in all colors and representing the whole gamut of pterosaur species. The other end of the room was similarly decorated, but with white origami cranes instead of pteros.

I remembered that I was visiting my parents. They must have specially decorated the room for my visit. I understood that the bed with the paper cranes was for my brother Luther, who was not present. (Later I commented to my mother that "'Director of Birds' just has a different feel from 'Director of Flying Reptiles.'")

I got up and told my mother about my dream and about how once I woke up I realized where the dream imagery had come from. "But didn't you notice the pterodactyls when you arrived?" she asked, seeming hurt that her work had not been appreciated. "I guess not," I said. "I probably just went to bed without turning on the light." (In fact I had no memory of arriving or going to bed.)

My parents now lived in what they called a retirement community but looked more like an extremely luxurious resort. They were dressed in their Sunday best, but instead of going to church, they wanted to show me some of the entertainments the place offered. The first of these was the foil game.

We were each given what looked like a sheet of aluminum foil, about a foot square. Although it looked like foil, it was as limp and supple as silk, and I figured it must be some sort of chain mail so fine that the individual links were invisible. Each of these had an image on it in subtle relief, and somehow it stayed on the foil no matter what you did to it. You could wad it into a ball and open it again, and the relief image was still there.

My parents wanted to start playing, but no one had explained the game to me, and I had no idea what to do. They said I could just figure it out as I went, but I kept insisting on an explanation. Finally, my mother demonstrated. Her foil image was of part of a woman's face, and she found a stone statue of a woman that matched it perfectly and placed the foil on that part of the statue's face. That was the object of the game: to find something in the community that matched your foil image and place the foil on it. The community was really enormous, and I worried about getting lost, but in the end I decided to give it a go.

My foil had a Buddha's face on it, and above the face it said, in capital letters, "MR. DEE EE." After some exploring, I found in the community a very ancient stone temple, somewhat reminiscent of Angkor Wat, and up at the very top of the building I spied what I was looking for: a Buddha's face and the inscription "MR. DEE EE."

The trouble was how to get up there to place my foil. I tried various ways of climbing up the building, but the stones kept crumbling under my feet. Finally, I gave up, saying that I was doing serious damage to this ancient monument and that it just wasn't worth it. Could we maybe do something else instead?

"Okay," said my mother. "Maybe you'd like to try a fake séance."

"Is there any other kind?"

As we were walking to the fake séance place, my father said, "Now, you're going to be 'possessed' as part of this, but don't worry about it. None of it is real."

It took three people to participate in a fake séance. It was me and two other people my age, not my parents. We had to climb up some stairs to a high platform, on which was a sort of flexible rubber pedestal supporting what looked like three vertically-oriented sleeping bags made of foam rubber. Each person stood in one of these bags, with only the head protruding. This set-up, it was explained, was so that we could move and thrash about while in a trance without any danger of falling or hurting ourselves.

To begin, we three leaned in toward the center of the set-up, so that our foreheads were touching in the middle. We were told to relax. After about a minute of silence, one of the other participants murmured, "Bark, Peter." There was another silence. Was someone supposed to bark? I tentatively made a soft barking sound, like a very polite dog. Then I felt some spiritual force welling up in me from the pit of my stomach -- the promised "possession," apparently -- and I began barking in earnest. I then entered a full trance state (another altered state within an altered state). I was talking and shouting and flailing about but had no consciousness of what I was saying.

When I emerged from the trance, I was informed that I had "won" the fake séance. I had delivered a most remarkable and varied discourse, and the audience loved it. I also learned that while I was entranced, a supercomputer had been generating in real time a video to accompany what I was saying, which was displayed on a cinema-size screen for the audience. Apparently I had done impressions of several famous people, including Al Capone and Elon Musk, which together with the visuals from the computer were utterly convincing. I had also discoursed at length on the movie Flight of the Gargoyle, and now several members of the audience expressed an interest in seeing it even though (or perhaps because?) it was unspeakably evil and abominable and had been banned all over the world (cf. The King in Yellow).

After the performance, an elderly couple came up to me. They were impressed with how knowledgeable I had seemed to be about virtually everything, and they had several questions about things I had said in my trance. Unfortunately, I was unable to remember anything I had said and couldn't help them. The man then mentioned that he and his wife had been trying to learn more about the history of jazz.

"Ah, the book you want for that is --"

"What? Don't tell me you know about the history of jazz, too!"

"The book you want," I continued, "is by a Portuguese guy whose pen name is L-A-E-T-H."

"Laeth."

"Right. I can't remember the title right now. I think it might just be called The History of Jazz. Anyway --" (The book I was thinking of was Sketches of Alice, which is not in any way a history of jazz.)

"And it's a history of jazz?"

"Well, it's hard to classify. It's utterly unique, really. But I think you'll find --"

At this point I was interrupted by the guy who ran the fake séances, who presented me with a book-length transcript of what I had said during my trance, illustrated with stills from the computer-generated video. Exactly what I had wanted.

I started to flip through it. I noticed that the first line had been mistranscribed: It said "Bark Street" instead of "Bark, Peter." Most of the transcript was in English, but one section was in a language I couldn't read but which looked from the characters used to be Icelandic or something similar. I had spoken in tongues, apparently.

About a quarter of the pages were entirely black. The director explained that this was the free transcript. If I wanted the unredacted version, I would have to shell out 40 dollars. I was about to pay but then realized that I had forgotten to exchange money and only had Taiwanese currency. Both of my parents took out their wallets and began counting out an improbably large number of banknotes. I saw that this was because the American currency had been completely redesigned. It was now in Monopoly-money colors like most other countries and was in strange denominations like the 47-cent bill.

Later, I was sitting with my father, and he asked if I had tried various remedies to stop snoring. I told him I hadn't bothered. He said that he now smoked marijuana to stop snoring and that it was very effective. (This is totally out of character for my real father, a strait-laced Mormon for whom even caffeinated soda is an illicit drug.)

"And do you know why I do it?" he said, becoming animated. "Because I finally realized that our religion is more!" (cf. More More More! in "Half under the sea")

"You mean that thing about Mormon meaning 'more good'?"

"More. Just more. Further light." (a Masonic phrase also used in Mormon ritual)

"Famous last words."

"Achilles."

"Goethe."

Later, my father got up on the stage and did a routine about how some prominent fringe Mormon (Denver Snuffer maybe, or someone analogous) "isn't going anywhere" and the church needs to adapt to incorporate such people. As he spoke, the computer was generating holographic "costumes" for him which kept changing. At one point he had green hair.

And then I woke up.

Weird scenes, and a gem on a brow

I've just read Paola Harris's Conversations with Colonel Corso. I quoted it in my November 2025 post "He's got a whole new world in his hands" after searching for a source for the "new world if you can take it" line, which I knew only third-hand from Whitley and others, but I didn't get around to reading the whole thing until a couple of days ago. In that post, I commented:

The fact that the offer of "a new word" takes place "in a gold mine" is also synchronistically interesting. The title of the book I've just finished reading, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, is apparently a reference to "weird scenes inside the gold mine," a line from the Doors song "The End."

Now that I've actually read the book, I know that the gold mine in which the Colonel encountered the alien was in Red Canyon, New Mexico. So that weird scene was inside both a gold mine and a canyon.

The book also includes this drawing by the Colonel of the entity he encountered there. Notice the distinctive headband it is wearing.

In the book, it is explained that this "silver-like" headband had "a stone in the middle of it, an interface."

This put me in mind of Tolkienian imagery -- Eärendil, the spacefaring Mariner with the Silmaril "bound upon his brow" -- and sure enough, the day after I finished Conversations with Colonel Corso, I read in Words of Them Which Have Slumbered of Dior dying with "the gem yet upon his brow." I don't think either Tolkien or Daymon makes explicit how the gem was thus bound, but one readily imagines a headband of "silver-like" mithril. Many UFO writers, most notably Jacques Vallée, have taken an interest in parallels between their field and that of elf and fairy lore.

The gem on Eärendil's brow was the Morning Star, Venus, which Bill recently brought up in comments on "Island Pharaohs again, twice."

Arnor

About a week ago, I bought a new pair of shoes. I'd never heard of the brand before, but they're comfortable and seem very durable, so I'm happy with them so far.

Actually, that but should probably be an and, since lack of recognizable branding is a major selling point for me. How I abominate all those swooshes and bitten apples and those little badges on the fronts of automobiles! What kind of culture tolerates this stuff? I buy brandslop* when necessary but always give it the Cayce Pollard treatment where possible. The main reason I'll never ever buy an iPhone again is that even if you remove or cover up all the logos, kids can still recognize it from the way the camera lenses are arranged or something. Now I've got some no-name Chinese thing, fully Pollardized, and feel much more at ease with it.

My new shoes are almost completely Pollardized -- the logos were stitched on and could be easily removed -- so all that remains is ARNOR written on the back.

I've been transcribing all of Daymon Smith's "ancient words" to a blog preparatory to tackling a linguistic analysis. (The main benefit of the blog format is the sidebar links for cross-referencing where the same word is used elsewhere. Today I started the ninth set of words, where Daymon's translation twice (9:2 and 9:4) references the "Arnor Stone" in contexts where (although Stones of Arnor are a thing, too) it is pretty clearly a typo for "Anor Stone."

*

Another bird-of-prey octopus juxtaposition, in The King in Yellow

My February 23 post "Desert scenes" dealt with people in yellow clothing: the sun-man, Lehi, and of course Pharazon. This brought to my attention the fact that I have never read The King in Yellow, so I decided to rectify that omission. I got an epub from Anna's. It's in the public domain, so there have many editions by many publishers, with a wide variety of cover art. Not until I downloaded and opened my epub did I discover that I had happened to select what is apparently the only edition to feature octopus imagery on the cover:

Not only does the King's robe terminate in tentacles, but the Moon is positioned just right so that the King and Moon together approximate the shape of an octopus's whole body. Although the yellowness of the King is right there in the title, the octopus part of him is more of an orange. Directly below this orange octopus imagery is the name Robert, which means "fame-bright." This made me think of another book that recently entered the sync-stream (see "Gone with the wind from the house of leaves" and "Turn around bright, eyes"): Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. I posted the cover of the Chinese edition, because that was the form in which I first saw it. For some reason, the cover art on the Chinese edition is the mirror-image of the original English, so that the octopus is facing the same direction as the "octopus" on the cover of The King in Yellow:

I started reading The King in Yellow today. On page 35 I ran across this:

"That little cigar shaped thing is a torpedo boat," he explained; there are four more lying close together. They are the Tarpon, the Falcon, the Sea Fox, and the Octopus. . . ."

At first, only the Octopus jumped out at me, but then I noticed that the Falcon was there, too. Birds of prey juxtaposed with octopuses have been a recurring theme lately. First, in "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen" (February 13), a Donovan song mentioning a kite was interpreted by Bill as having to do with spider and octopus symbolism; then I read about a hawk wrestling an octopus in Words of the Faithful; and then I saw a kite and an octopus juxtaposed on the Duckstack. In "Mang the Bat, and the splendor of the Island Pharaohs" (February 25), I discovered a similar juxtaposition -- a Garuda-like vulture and an octopus-like "spider mask" in my 2024 dream post "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask" and also noted a somewhat related theme on the Nine of Pentacles, where a falcon appears together with a snail (snails and slugs being the closest terrestrial relatives to the octopus). Now here it is yet again, with the names of these two torpedo boats.

Island Pharaohs again, twice

Just yesterday, I posted "Mang the Bat, and the splendor of the Island Pharaohs." In that post, I took "the Island Pharaohs" (from a dream) to be a reference to the rulers of Numenor, taking it for granted that of course the real Pharaohs, who lived on the African mainland, had nothing to do with islands. In the dream, these Island Pharaohs were "desiccated mummies," and to illustrate what I imagined them looking like, I included this picture of Keith Richards and Ramesses II.

Today I had a private tutoring session with an adult student. She uses a magazine designed for students of English, with a recommended reading schedule. However, due to some recent business trips and such, we're way behind schedule, so as it happened today -- the day after I posted about Island Pharaohs, with a photo of Ramesses II -- we discussed the article for January 15-17. Here's the first page:

The first thing that caught my eye was the illustration in the upper right corner, which is a statue of none other than Ramesses II.

This same Pharaoh's name also appears in the text, in boldface, in connection with an island:

On Agilkia Island, I'd continue toward Abu Simbel, home to giant statues and temples built by Ramses II.

I'd never heard of Agilkia, but apparently it's an island in the Nile. Ramesses never built anything there; rather, according to Wikipedia, it is "the present site of the relocated ancient Egyptian temple complex of Philae."

Two paragraphs later, there is a reference to the Greek island of Paros:

The Greek islands have been on my radar primarily because I have a friend in Athens. I love the idea of skipping Santorini and Mykonos and opting for low-key Paros.

Paros is pretty close to Pharaohs, especially if you consider that the Hebrews and the Egyptians themselves pronounced that title with a hard /p/ rather than an /f/ sound. The word translated "Pharaoh" in our Bibles is transliterated as Parʿō.

Reenvisioning the Nietzschean Dialectic

Every Duckstack is perfect, of course, but the latest is extra super-duper-perfect. Maybe even pluperfect. We're talking Anglin's-Duke-of-Earl-posts levels of perfect. I've read a lot of material by and about Nietzsche, but none of it is even in the same league as the Duckstack's "The Nietzschean Dialectic." Possibly not even playing the same sport.

Note added: Speaking of Anglin's Duke of Earl posts, it has come to my attention that they are regrettably currently accessible only on the dark web, because apparently now even Indonesia has banned them. If you haven't experienced them yet, the inconvenience of having to use Tor (or a Tor window in Brave) is a small price to pay. Plus you get to stick it to the Man and show them we won't stand for anyone censoring our quality Duke of Earl content. The updated links are:

• http://stormer5v52vjsw66jmds7ndeecudq444woadhzr2plxlaayexnh6eqd.onion/snopes-confirms-that-no-one-can-stop-the-duke-of-earl/
• http://stormer5v52vjsw66jmds7ndeecudq444woadhzr2plxlaayexnh6eqd.onion/snopes-fact-checks-fake-executive-order-on-biden-surrender-to-the-duke-of-earl/
• http://stormer5v52vjsw66jmds7ndeecudq444woadhzr2plxlaayexnh6eqd.onion/biden-backtracks-pens-op-ed-in-the-new-york-times-vowing-to-stop-the-duke-of-earl-at-any-cost/

Or you can just read "Spirit Sprite," which is every bit as good, from the comfort of your favorite clearnet browser.

Mang the Bat, and the splendor of the Island Pharaohs

Last night, some links led me back to my 2024 post "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask," which recounts two seemingly unrelated dreams. In the context of my February 13 post "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen," though, they did seem to be related. In that more recent post, I note some syncs juxtaposing the hawk/kite/Garuda with the octopus/spider. In the first of the 2024 dreams, I at first thought the vulture might be Garuda:

Was it a condor, I wondered? Was it Garuda? But no, it was unmistakably an African white-backed vulture, only many times larger.

In the second dream, the legs of the "spider mask" are actually just limp strips of cloth, making them more like octopus tentacles than like the jointed legs of a spider. The mask was

a small black cloth covering the upper part of my face -- like Batman's mask -- with four long strips hanging off to either side like the legs of a spider. It looked like I was wearing some kind of Halloween mask intended to make my head look like a spider.

This connection put the kite back in my mind, and when I went to bed, I thought again of Kipling's poem, previously featured in my February 15 post "Chil the Kite and the Day of Doom":

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night

  That Mang the Bat sets free --

The poem is set in India (chil is a dated transliteration of the Hindi for "kite"), and the Kipling Society says that Mang the Bat is "a made-up name," so I don't think there can have been any intentional reference to Chinese. However, the Chinese word for "blind," 盲, is transliterated as máng, suggesting the phrase "blind as a bat."

Then a very vaguely remembered movie scene came to mind, in which a group of people were surrounding someone and taunting him or her by chanting, "You're blind! blind! blind as a bat!" but I couldn't for the life of me remember where that came from. Despite the un-Shakespearean language, my first thought was that it must be from a film adaptation of Titus Andronicus, but a word search of the script turned up nothing. "Blind as a bat" is such a common expression that searching the Web for it was useless. Duplicating the word blind only yielded the Meat Loaf song "Blind as a Bat," which isn't what I was looking for. I fell asleep still trying to figure out where the chant was from.

In the morning, I thought it might be from one of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies (which would have been appropriate, given the Batman reference in my account of the spider mask dream), but again no dice. If anyone recognizes the scene, please leave a comment.

⁂

Last night I dreamt about a wealthy but eccentric woman who maintained a private museum in her home, purporting to display "the Splendor of the Island Pharaohs." The sign outside her house gave the impression that there would be all sorts of opulent artifacts in the museum, but in fact all that was inside was a collection of desiccated mummies. I didn't go inside and didn't see these, but I imagined them looking something like this:

The public began to complain about the misleading sign, seeing it as a bait-and-switch, so she changed it to a much simpler sign that just listed the names of the Island Pharaohs.

The idea of "Island Pharaohs" of course points to Daymon Smith's belief that "'Egypt' in [Joseph] Smith's writings points to Tolkien's Numenorean empire, vast yet centered on that island."

⁂

Isaiah 30, quoted in my last post, "On every hill," also begins with a reference to Egypt and the Pharaohs:

Woe to the rebellious children, saith the LORD, that take counsel, but not of me; and that cover with a covering, but not of my spirit, that they may add sin to sin: that walk to go down into Egypt, and have not asked at my mouth; to strengthen themselves in the strength of Pharaoh, and to trust in the shadow of Egypt! Therefore shall the strength of Pharaoh be your shame, and the trust in the shadow of Egypt your confusion (Isa. 30:1-3).

This chapter also includes the famous verse about those who "say to the seers, See not" (v. 10). Another kite-and-octopus link I discovered recently was the Rider-Waite Nine of Pentacles, which features a falcon (close to a kite) and a snail (the octopus's closest land-dwelling relative). In "A darker view of the Three of Pentacles," I connected the hooded falcon on the card with Isaiah's line "the seers hath he covered" (Isa. 29:10, 2 Ne. 27:5), just one chapter earlier. These references to seers not seeing obviously relate to "blind as a bat."

Upon every hill

This evening I stopped reading Words of Them Which Have Slumbered near the end of a section, having flipped forward a few pages to check. The next section, which I have yet to read, is called "Every Hill of Valinor."

Just now, on a random whim, I used a website to select a truly random verse from the King James Bible, something I haven't done in many months. I got this:

And there shall be upon every high mountain, and upon every high hill, rivers and streams of waters in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall (Isa. 30:25).

Desert scenes

My recent post "Half under the sea" began with this image, an adaptation of an existing meme:

Commenter NLR determined that the background image in the meme was originally a 2016 photo by Kate Ferguson of a salt flat in a Bolivian desert, as viewed from a rocky outcropping.

To this has been added a moon or planet in the upper left and the central figure, who is dressed in yellow robes and has a sun for a head. Of this figure, Bill commented, "Yes, the golden clothing is going to point right to Pharazon, of course (standing in a desert, no less)!" I suppose he emphasized the desert because he identifies me with Pharazon, and this blog is called From the Narrow Desert.

Later, I made another connection, since at the time I posted the meme I was reading Hugh Nibley's Lehi in the Desert. This, combined with the yellow-robed sun-man, made me think of my old post "Red Sun, Yellow Sun," in which I ran across this image in a children's book about flags:

I wrote:

Apparently, the man in yellow with his yellow sun is leaving the larger country represented by the red sun and becoming independent. Can a Mormon see this and not be reminded of a certain prophet, often depicted in yellow robes, leaving his country and heading east under the guidance of a yellow ball?

Yes, that's Lehi, whose time "in the desert" is the subject of Hugh Nibley's book. I posted this back in 2020, well before I had "met" Bill  and learned of his theory that the Liahona (Lehi's magical ball) is the same as Tolkien's Anor-stone, which takes its name from the Sun.

My post with the sun-man meme also included this image of an obscure "post-hardcare" album:

In a comment, Jacob G. correctly pointed out that the album art "is pretty clearly based on the Romantic painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" by Caspar David Friedrich.

At first, my only reaction was to note that that particular painting has appeared on this blog before, in "Another light-and-dark butterfly pair" and "Flammarion," both from December 2024. Later, though, I realized that it ties the album cover to the title of my post (a line from a dream): "Half under the sea." If we follow Friedrich in calling the fog a "sea" (Nebelmeer), then both his painting and the album cover show rocky crags that are "half under the sea."

The sun-man meme is also somewhat similar in composition to these two images, with rocky land in the foreground overlooking what appears to be a white "sea." A desert seems entirely different from a foggy landscape, but as it happens Lehi in the Desert asserts the opposite:

[T]he culminating horror [in Arab desert poetry] is almost always a "mist of darkness," a depressing mixture of dust, and clammy fog, which, added to the night, completes the confusion of any who wander in the waste. Quite contrary to what one would expect, these dank mists are described by travelers in all parts of Arabia, and al-Ajajj, one of the greatest of early desert poets, tells how a "mist of darkness" makes it impossible for him to continue a journey to Damascus.

I do not vouch for Nibley's meteorological accuracy here, but this passage placing mist and fog in the desert is synchronistically relevant regardless of how correct it may or may not be.

Today I saw on Synlogos a new post by Laura Wood, "The Desert and Temptation," which caught my eye because of the desert theme and prompted me to click. It's about the temptation of Christ, with particular focus on the importance of his being in the desert when he was tempted. Accompanying the post is one of Gustave Doré's Bible illustrations:

Although Mrs. Wood's post only discusses the first temptation -- to turn stones to bread -- the illustration clearly represents a different temptation, the second in Luke's version of the story:

And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, "All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine" (Luke 4:5-7).

"All the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time" clearly corresponds to the title of that album: Everything All at Once. The general layout of Doré's engraving also matches that of the other images we have been considering: someone standing on high rocky ground in the foreground, with a panoramic scene in the background.

On the album cover and in the Friedrich painting, the person has his back to us, looking out at the view. Doré's Jesus turns away from the view and toward the viewer, and there is a halo of radiant lines around his head. In this, the Son of Man bears a certain resemblance to the sun-man:

Bill has connected the sun-man with Pharazon, who seems pretty far removed from Jesus Christ. However the temptation -- to worship the devil in exchange for power -- is the same. The question is whether or not one succumbs.

Finally, I should mention that the album cover, with the astronaut looking at the Earth, reminds me of another popular meme format:

Pizza, peace deals, and Slavic anatomical vulgarisms

These two posts appeared in close proximity on Synlogos:

Barnhardt's post is self-explanatory: The "pizza" code word used by the Scum On Top may derive from pizda, which occurs in virtually all Slavic languages as what Ann politely calls a "vulgarism for the female genitalia."

In the Didactic Mind post, "pissdill" is meant to be "peace deal" pronounced in a Russian accent. After explaining this and opining that the Russian pronunciation "sounds extremely funny and very rude," he adds this parenthetical note:

(Quick aside: “peace deal” in English sounds very much like пиздел to a Russian, which is a very rude term involving… a specific part of the male anatomy, let’s put it that way.)

For those who don't read Cyrillic, пиздел would be transliterated as pizdel. It's one of the past-tense forms of пиздеть, which can mean "to bitch" or "to bullshit," and which -- despite Didactic's claim that it refers to "a specific part of the male anatomy" -- is simply the verb form of пизда (pizda), the same female anatomical term Barnhardt's post is about.

Half under the sea

I dreamt that I was with my wife and some of our friends. I was playing a music video from the Sugarcubes album More More More! (which does not exist in the waking world), and we were singing along with what lyrics we knew. Instead of Einar Örn, Björk's co-vocalist was a woman, whom I did not recognize.

We played the video twice, so I really should be able to remember more of the lyrics, but unfortunately I've only been able to salvage a couple of lines: "Borneeeeya, I really wanna beeee ya" (which I took to mean "I want to be in Borneo") and (this was a line we all knew and sang along with) "Half under the sea!" There was also a spoken-word interlude in the middle that was a hard-to-follow poem about someone called Carlson going to the Moon and not being afraid. One of our group asked if it meant Tucker Carlson, and I said probably not because he wasn't famous yet when the song was recorded.

After I woke up, I ran a search for "half under the sea" lyrics just to see what would come up. Two of the top results were both from r/PostHardcore, one about a song called "Sky Under the Sea" by a group called Pierce the Veil (from the 2010 album Selfish Machines), and one about a group called Sea in the Sky, and particularly their 2017 album Everything All at Once and its title track. I don't even know what "post-hardcore" means, really (classification into micro-genres is not punk rock in my book), but given my search prompt it was quite a coincidence that I got two different songs from that genre, and that each juxtaposes sky (not in my prompt) with sea. (Cf. the Isle of Skye, recently referenced in "Wonderful Mountain Apes.") Each song is also the last track on its album.

The name Pierce the Veil has obvious Mormon resonances, and the album art is interesting:

Given that the song in my dream included something about someone ("Carlson") going to the Moon, the album art for Everything All at Once is even more interesting:

It's an astronaut, and he seems to be standing on one half of a landmass that has been broken in two. "Half under the sea" suggests Daymon Smith's story about Tol Eressëa (which in Bill Wright's version of the story is not an island but a planet) being split in two and half of it being sunk under the sea.

The name Everything All at Once also caught my eye because I had just read a reference to a very similarly named movie in Dean Radin's The Science of Magic:

These integrative theories suggest that psi operates unconsciously to manifest an individual's desires by continually scanning the past, present, and future. The first three flavors of these theories also assume that psi can influence the environment via PK. In so doing, a meaningful synchronicity is evoked that satisfies your desire. It assumes that perception and influence act "outside" of time, as artistically portrayed in the 2023 Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Here are the two songs, neither of which does much for me musically:

Note added: "The Sky Under the Sea" includes the line "So do that dance in the dark," linking back to Björk via Dancer in the Dark.

Unlawful possession of a cured vehicle

In "Public urination, and unlawful possession of a cured vehicle" (December 2025) I proposed that a "cured vehicle" might be something like this:

Today I saw on Synlogos a review of some recent film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which (naturally) made me think of that Heathcliff comic where there's a huge banner with a picture of Heathcliff's face draped across the front of a house and some passersby are saying, "Heathcliff must live there." As I was trying (unsuccessfully so far) to track down that comic on Google, I found this:

This is a much better fit. It's not just a cured vehicle but an unlawful one, since it's clearly way over the ham limit.

Note: In case you don't get the joke, here's an explanation:

Update: Found it.

Wonderful Mountain Apes

My post "A feast for the god of war" made me think of the fact that in childhood I was the president of two "societies": the War Society and the Wonderful Mountain Apes Society. The latter (which was a cliff-climbing group) got me wondering whether there might be any real mountain called Wonderful Mountain, and that led me to a poem I'd never read before, "Blaavin" by Alexander Smith. It twice addresses Blaavin (Blà Bheinn on the Isle of Skye) as "wonderful mountain." These are the closing lines:

At a clear open turn of the roadway

My passion went up in a cry,

For the wonderful mountain of Blaavin

Was bearing his huge bulk on high,

Each precipice keen and purple

Against the yellow sky.

The yellow sky of the Golden Age has been a major theme recently, so this got my attention. This photo, from here, where it is captioned "Blaven at sunset, from Loch Hourn," suggests the sort of image the poet had in mind:

Since I'm giving up 4chan for Lent, I decided to give https://archive.4plebs.org/x/random/ one last twirl for Mardi Gras. I got "Occultism & Magick General: Hawk-Headed Lord of Silence & of Strength edition" (April 11, 2018), with this image:

There's lots going here synchronistically, of course, with the Sun and Moon as the two eyes of Horus and so on, but what caught my eye in the present context was the purple-and-yellow coloration of the god. The purple parts of his body form a rough triangle, like a purple mountain against a yellow sky. There is water in the foreground, just as the image of Blà Bheinn I found was taken "from Loch Hourn." Even the name of the lake suggest Horus (Horon in Hebrew).

The post itself was something that is often reposted: a link to a massive (but sadly now defunct) online document dump known as Ape's Library because it was curated by someone using the Crowleyan moniker Ape of Thoth.

So, purple and yellow, with an Ape connection. I decided to click "Random" once more just to see what would come up. I got "/LoA/ - Law of Attraction & Manifesting General" (November 2, 2021), with this image:

A purple mountain against a partly-yellow sky, with a lake in the foreground.

Tim knows

I dreamt that I was at some sort of breakfast buffet, possibly at a college dining hall. There were very few dishes to choose from.

I commented to a woman standing near me, "They've got all kinds of things here: eggs and egg sandwiches."

"Well, we were just talking about wanting to eat more raw food," she said. I understood that she meant not uncooked food but rather extremely simple fare with few ingredients.

"Oh, look, someone found bacon," I said, noticing that food on another patron's tray. I looked around for a bit but couldn't find any bacon myself. I gave up and found a table at which to eat my eggs over easy and my eggs over easy sandwich.

The woman I had spoken to earlier came over to my table, followed by a man. This man, whose name was apparently Rick, had a lot of five-by-seven stickers printed with something like "Rick is pleased to have made your acquaintance," with the name in a much larger font than the rest of the text. When he met someone, instead of offering a business card, he would stick one of these stickers on the other person's clothing, and he had just done that to the woman.

The woman, apparently replying to an invitation from Rick, said, "Well, if you want to have dinner, we should probably do it in the morning."

"That would be pretty hard to do," I said, understanding that dinner in the morning was impossible (it would be breakfast, not dinner) and that she was snubbing Rick. The woman looked at me a little quizzically and then sat down next to me, and Rick wandered off.

I tried to pour myself a cup of coffee, but the coffee pot was a strange complicated contraption that I didn't know how to use properly, and I ended up spilling it all over the chairs and the floor. The woman and I mopped up some of the coffee with paper napkins, and then someone came over and offered to use a real mop, which I thought was impressively professional.

We moved to a new table, and the woman showed me how to use the unnecessarily complex coffee pot properly, adding that timknows.com was a great resource for that sort of thing. I understood this to be a website operated by Tim Hortons that dispensed all sorts of coffee-related know-how.

Our new table didn't have normal chairs. It was close to a wall, and the seats had no legs but had to be stuck to the wall using very strong tape, and the customers had to do this themselves. I taped my seat to the wall, guesstimating how high it should be, and sat down.

The woman said, "Let me check you so I can see how high mine should be." I held out of my arms and she started sort of frisking me.

"Wow, you're really fit."

"Uh, not really."

"And I'm so gross."

"Oh, come on!"

I keep myself in peak physical condition -- meaning the peak of the bell curve -- and she was very conventionally attractive, so it was transparently obvious that she was flattering me and fishing for compliments. I thought, What kind of amateur-hour honeypot operation is this?

As I woke up, I heard, in "Agartha" style, the lines "where women glow and men blunder" from the song "Down Under." (The original is actually "plunder" rather than "blunder.") In the context of the dream, I understood this to mean "Where the women are conspicuous undercover government agents (glowies) but the men are duped by them."

Then I realized that other lyrics from that song also connected to the dream. It begins with lines that have been discussed here before (see "Choom smoke and zombies"):

Traveling in a fried-out Kombi

On a hippie trail, head full of zombie

As mentioned in that post, Bill has associated the "zombie" in the song with Saruman, whom he also identifies with the "Tim" character from another of my dreams (see "Tim and The Key") -- so a potential link to timknows.com.

There's also a reference to an impressive phsyique -- "six foot four and full of muscles" -- and my "not really" reply even syncs with this annotation on the Genius lyrics page:

In the music video for this song, this particular guy is the band’s drummer, Jerry Speiser. Only he wasn’t really "6 foot 4 and full of muscles," which meant that he had to stand on something to get extra height and also wore a wig.

but the clearest link to the dream is these lines:

I met a strange lady, she made me nervous

She took me in and gave me breakfast

In the dream, I'm having breakfast with a strange lady whom I suspect of being a fed.

A feast for the god of war

Chinese New Year, beginning the Year of the Fire Horse, coincides with Mardi Gras this year. I'm thinking this is not a good omen.

Mardi -- ruby Tuesday, stupid bloody Tuesday -- is the day of Mars. In the Chinese system, both Fire and the Horse are associated with Mars as well. Fat Tuesday suggests the feeding fat of an ancient grudge.

Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great god, that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them!

After Mardi Gras, Lent. After the red horse bringing war, the black horse bringing famine.

Anyway, happy New Year!

Clavis avis

This morning I was, for complex psychological reasons, listening to a vaporwave remix of "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry.

At the same time, I was browsing /x/, and just as I heard the line "like a bird without a cage," I clicked on a thread with this as the main image:

It's a bird holding in its bill a bit key, such as it might use for getting out of its cage. Just two days ago, in "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen," I had posted this image, which also includes a bird holding a bit key.

I got that image from the Duckstack, hence this post's Duckstack-style two-word rhyming title. The artist's name is, appropriately, Davis.

Chil the Kite and the Day of Doom

Kites -- the bird of prey, particularly in the form of Garuda -- have been in the sync stream, which put in my mind Rudyard Kipling's poem "Night Song in the Jungle":

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night

  That Mang the Bat sets free -- 

The herds are shut in byre and hut, 

  For loosed till dawn are we.

This is the hour of pride and power, 

  Talon and tush and claw.

Oh, hear the call! -- Good hunting all 

  That keep the Jungle Law!

 I was reciting what I could remember of this to myself as I rode my motorcycle, and when I arrived home I sat down to read the nigh-unreadable Words of the Faithful. I turned a page and thought I saw the italicized word garuda in the text, but it turned out to be instead the somewhat visually similar gunwudu. (What I quote below is, believe it or not, a single sentence!) [Note added: actually two sentences.]

Well, in that day the wandering dead spirits oft were captured, ensnared, or mislead [sic] into the deep places, Lower Airs of confusing orientation; whereby light itself may be held in awe, fear, reverence, for the faces it brings to memory, or the searing recall of one's deeds to those trusting; or beyond our knowledge, as strangers needless brought to grieve. So death by the sinister gunwudu, the fearful dread of a dark dragon form, disbanding and scattering its fumes across the town-settlement: Death indeed for all folk in those lands a terror beheld; and elves were little spoken of, and often in disregard; weak things, incapable of delivering even themselves  from Sauron's thralling reach.

Gunwudu appears only one other time in the text, in the grapholalia section in the back, where the author translates it as "Hell-dragon," apparently from gunn "dragon" and Udûn "Hell." The fact that I had initially misread the word as garuda struck me as a minor sync, because in "All the pebbles I have seen" I quoted the Donovan line "Dragon kite in the sky" and said it "got my attention because Garuda is a kite."

Now the really weird part. When I searched for the text of the Kipling poem so that I could include it in this post, I found it on the Kipling Society website, but my Yiddish-corrupted mind thought tush must surely be a misprint for tusk, so I decided to check another website for a second opinion. I clicked on the second link in my search results, Poetry Nook, and experienced a very bizarre glitch.

Although the address bar clearly said "https://poetrynook.com/poem/now-chil-kite-brings-home-night," the text the page displayed was not that poem but something entirely different I'd never heard of, a short poem numbered 66 and attributed to someone with the fake-sounding name Michael Wigglesworth:

Thus he doth find of all Mankind,
  that stand at his left hand,
No mother’s son but hath misdone,
  and broken God’s command.
All have transgress’d, even the best,
  and merited God’s wrath,
Unto their own perditi-on
  and everlasting scath.

This turns out to be the 66th stanza of a very long poem called The Day of Doom Or, a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgement, by the totally real New England Puritan poet Michael Wigglesworth.

I hit Ctrl-R, and the page loaded properly, displaying the Kipling poem. I didn't think to screenshot the glitched version, so you'll just have to take my word for it when I solemnly affirm that this really happened. I checked my browser history and verified that I had visited no other Poetry Nook page than the Chil the Kite one. Even more bizarrely, I have not been able to find the Wigglesworth stanza on the Poetry Nook site at all. I went through all 14 pages of search results for Wigglesworth, and it's not there.

Getting some other random poem instead of Chil the Kite would have been weird enough, but look again at the Kipling poem and the Wigglesworth stanza. They are each eight lines with precisely the same meter and rhyme scheme -- iambic tetrameter lines consisting of two rhyming parts, alternating with trimeters -- and they are even formatted in exactly the same way, with even-numbered lines indented by two spaces. (The only difference is that Kipling capitalizes the indented lines, while Wigglesworth does not.) As Debbie likes to say, What are the odds? Furthermore, the gunwudu sentence is, like the Wigglesworth stanza, about the spirits of the dead coming to a bad end.

I have absolutely no idea how to explain what happened.

Since the coincidences are already well into impossible territory anyway, I thought I might as well push my luck and see if the phrase "Day of Doom" appeared in any of Kipling's poetry. A search turned up "La Nuit Blanche," which begins thus:

I had seen, as the dawn was breaking
And I staggered to my rest,
Tari Devi softly shaking
From the Cart Road to the crest.
I had seen the spurs of Jakko
Heave and quiver, swell and sink.
Was it Earthquake or tobacco,
Day of Doom, or Night of Drink?

What follows is apparently an account of fever-dreams or delirium, with the poet's hallucinations including a "Blood Red Mouse" (cf. "Red dragons, red grasshoppers, and red mice"). Curious about the story behind it, I checked the Kipling Society's Readers' Guide, which has this to say:

This is an account of delirium, reminiscent of Kipling’s later “The Mother’s Son” which follows “Fairy-Kist” in Limits and Renewals. It also has an echo of “The Mad Gardener’s Song” by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898, author of Alice in Wonderland) and the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).

Seriously? The first thing they say about it is that it's reminiscent of "The Mother's Son"? As you can see above, the phrase "mother's son" appears in the 66th stanza of The Day of Doom and nowhere else in that very long poem.

La Nuit Blanche means "the sleepless night" in French. The Chil the Kite poem is about nocturnal animals spending the night hunting rather than sleeping.

Note added: I've looked up "The Mad Gardener's Song." I'm sure that I've never read the entire poem but that I have seen these lines quoted:

He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus.

I can't think where, though. Rupert Sheldrake and Richard Dawkins for some reason come to mind as likely suspects, but I don't think it was actually either of them. I remember the key point was the repeated formula "He thought he saw . . . He looked again, and found it was . . . ," and that this was being used to make some point about cognition or perception. Can anyone help me out here?

The Sun in my hand, and in a barn

Less than two weeks ago, I posted "The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand," the title being a line spoken by Doctor Octopus in one of the Spider-Man movies. Today I ran across this in a used bookstore:

According to the summary on Wikipedia, Klara is an intelligent robot that observes the outside world through a window and "watches the Sun, which she always refers to as 'he' and treats as a living entity."

From Josie's bedroom Klara has a good view of the Sun's progress across the sky, and comes to believe that he goes to his nightly rest within a farmer's barn that stands on the horizon.

The idea that an "AI" would not have access to basic information about the Sun is just a bit hard to swallow, but it certainly made for a striking sync.

In yesterday's post "Not in the well," I discuss the children's book Wake Up, Sun!, in which a dog and pig look for the Sun in a well. After that, the next place they think to look is behind a barn.

In the Ishiguro novel, Klara's reason for thinking the Sun sleeps in the barn is presumably that the barn "stands on the horizon," so that the Sun appears either to set behind it or rise from behind it (depending on whether the barn is in the east or the west). In Wake Up, Sun! the Sun also appears to rise from behind the barn.

Earlier, the animals had attempted to wake up the Sun by "yelling" (i.e. making their respective animal sounds) in the night:

In the same bookstore where I found the Ishiguro novel, I also found a children's book called The Moon Dropped, a translation by Mei-hwa Li of a Chinese story by Jin-Lin Jang. In the story, some frogs find a yellow balloon and believe that the Moon has fallen to earth. They try to get the Moon back into the sky by croaking loudly at night.

It's the Moon, not the Sun, but it still seems closely related.

Yellow balloons have been in the sync stream before. Most recently, in the music video for "Grapes of Wrath" (see "Rock my Audible"), Brian Bell has a yellow balloon stand in for him in a group Zoom call.

Earlier, the yellow balloon appeared as a sync symbol associated with Dee, Kelley, and Dee Kelley in "Another link between John Dee and DeForest Kelley" (2022) and "Caster and the yellow balloon" (2025).

Brown and black, cheek and jaw

My post "All the pebbles I have seen" takes its title from a song by Donovan. Bill pointed out that the singer's name means "dark" or "black." More specifically, according to Wiktionary:

From Irish Ó Donndubháin (“descendant of (a person named) brown & black”), from donn (“brown”) and dubh (“black”).

It's not a very common name, Donovan, and so when I happened to glance up from my book to the TV screen playing the Winter Olympics in the café where I lunched today, the name Donovan Carrillo caught my eye. It's the name of a Mexican figure skater.

In keeping with his name ("brown and black"), Carrillo is dressed in black and is racially "brown." Figure skating is, unsurprisingly, dominated by what Leonard Jeffries called "ice people" (Whites and East Asians), and Carrillo is reportedly "the only Latino on the ice at the 2026 Winter Olympics."

Curious about this Donovan's surname, I looked it up and found that Carrillo is a "nickname for a person with some peculiarity of the cheek or jaw, Spanish carillo." Lowercase carillo is defined as "parte carnosa de la cara, desde los pómulos hasta lo bajo de la quijada" ("the fleshy part of the face, from the cheekbones to the lower jaw").

As I mentioned, I saw Donovan Carrillo on TV when I happened to glance up from the book I was reading. That book was Lehi in the Desert by Hugh Nibley. Nibley has this to say about the meaning of the title character's name:

There is a remarkable association between the names of Lehi and Ishmael which ties them both to the southern desert, where the legendary birthplace and central shrine of Ishmael was at a place called Be'er Lehai-ro'i. Wellhausen rendered the name "spring of the wild-ox jawbone," but Paul Haupt showed that Lehi (for so he reads the name) does not mean "jaw" but "cheek," which leaves the meaning of the strange compound still unclear.

So I saw Carrillo, whose name means "cheek or jaw," while reading a book about Lehi, whose name means, depending on which scholar you trust, either "cheek" or "jaw."