Joseph the Tirielist

I dreamt that as I was getting ready to leave the preschool after my morning classes, I met another White American there, who introduced himself as Joseph and said he was from one of the Midwestern states. (He said a particular state, but I don't remember which.) He was printing out some vocabulary flash cards and asked, "So do you use cards?" and then several follow-up questions. He said he was applying for a job and would do a teaching demo on Monday. I said I'd be there on Monday and would probably see him.

As I was leaving, Joseph told me where I could find him online and said, "On my socials, you'll find lots of Golf Luther content -- you know, they're golf jokes with Luther."

"You mean Martin Luther?"

"Yeah, I think so. Luther was apparently this guy who like hated logic."

"The devil's bride, Reason, that pretty whore."

A look of blank incomprehension. I gathered that he knew absolutely nothing about the historical Luther. Luther was for him a stock character representing illogic, and he made Luther jokes the way one used to make Polack jokes.

"So I guess you're a Catholic?" I said.

"Yeah. How did you know?"

"It's really only Catholics that see Luther that way. Protestants admire him, since he started their Reformation. So the majority of American Christians respect Luther."

"No, wait, I'm not a Catholic."

"You aren't?"

"No. I'm a tirielist." He pronounced it like materialist minus the first syllable, but I imagined it being spelled the way I have written it.

"You know," he continued, proceeding to sing a line from the Madonna song, "cause we are living in a tiriel world."

"You mean a materialist? Someone who rejects the supernatural?"

"Yeah, a tirielist."

As I walked home (it was night now), I passed a parking lot, where a cop was having two suspected drunk drivers walk in a straight line, at which they were both failing miserably. The drunks were making excuses. "I think we were probably drinking tea," one said. "Yeah," agreed the other, "I'm pretty sure it was tea."

The cop was unimpressed, and one of the drunks lost his temper and shouted at him, "You're a black Barbary pirate!" (All three men were White.)

I thought this was an incredible coincidence and that I would have to tell Debbie about it. (In waking life, Debbie, who is part Black, had emailed me the day before the dream about the discovery that she is the 11th-great-granddaughter of the Dutch Barbary pirate Jans Janszoon.)

When I was nearly home, I passed a tent that had been set up on the side of the road, and a voice from inside said, "So, William, when are you transferring out of Minneapolis?" I recognized the voice of Mark, who was a close friend during my teen years in Ohio. He had (in the dream) visited me in Taiwan some weeks before, and I was surprised to find him still in Taiwan. Had he been camping out outside my house all that time, and I had been ignoring him?

I had something urgent to do in my house, so I said, "Just a minute, Mark," and went into the house first. When I came back out, Mark was no longer in the tent but was piloting a low-flying Cessna 172, from which he was speaking with a megaphone. He had apparently somehow overheard my conversation with Joseph and was ridiculing him.

"So after having put Luther in his place, he takes on God himself!" he said. And then, in what I took to be a parody of low-IQ atheist talking points, he shouted histrionically, "Where's abortion in the Bible? Where is it?" (In waking life, Mark is himself an atheist.)

As I was waking, I thought in the hypnopompic state of these lines from Yeats: "Now his wars with God begin / At stroke of midnight, God will win."

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In an earlier dream segment, my parents had been visiting Taiwan, and I took them to the top of the Taipei 101 skyscraper. The building was rocking like a boat, but I assured them that it was supposed to that, and that it was an anti-earthquake measure. While there, we ran into one of my students, called Peter -- the one whose shoe cubby appeared in "Leo, Egbert, Peter" -- who gave me a comically large pair of black hiking boots and said, "Now you have to put these on!"

I was trying to convince my parents to visit a Chinese temple, which they were at first unwilling to do. I explained that it would not be a religious visit, that we would just be there to take in the art and architecture as a cultural experience -- "just like you would visit a cathedral if you were in Europe," I said. They finally agreed, but I then realized I had no idea where to take them. I had been thinking of the Queen of Heaven Temple in Lukang, but we were in Taipei, and I didn't know any temples in Taipei.

Later, my father was pouring everyone glasses of champagne. He said to me and my wife, "I'm going to mix mine with weaker alcohol, but you'd probably like yours mixed with stronger alcohol, am I right?" I understood that this was his letter-of-the-law way of circumventing the Mormon prohibition on "strong drink." (What's weaker than champagne? Beer? And who mixes anything with champagne?) This is totally unlike my father in waking life, who follows the Word of Wisdom very strictly -- eating meat sparingly, abstaining from caffeinated sodas, etc. -- but it fits with the way he was portrayed in my dream "Pterodactyls, the foil game, and a fake séance," where he was trying to tell me that smoking pot was consistent with his religion.

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Upon waking, I thought Tiriel sounded very Tolkienian and might be the name of some obscure female character. It turns out it's not a name but is good Sindarin, meaning, depending on the diacritics used, either "gazing" or "having gazed."

I wondered if Joseph, who is neither Catholic nor Protestant but invents a new -ism of his own, might represent Joseph Smith. He appeared as something of a buffoon in the dream, but Smith was famously uneducated and may have appeared that way to some of his contemporaries. It's also probably not a coincidence that my two brothers are named Luther and Joseph, and that while Luther is a staunch CJCLDSian, Joseph is in fact a materialist.