Sub-zero, red and blue specs, Ides of March, Diego

It occurred to me to see if any major films had been released on my birthday, the Ides of March. Only one that's a household name, it turns out: the original Ice Age, released March 15, 2002. I don't think I've ever seen that one, though I did see one of the sequels. The poster immediately got my attention:

Right at the top, even bigger than the name of the film, it says "SUB-ZERO HEROES." Just two days ago, in "The Jolly Switzer," I had posted this picture of a novel titled Less Than Zero:

My reason for posting that was that the art on the cover -- a pair of spectacles with a red right lens and a blue left lens -- was a link to my January 14 post "Red and blue spectacles." The very first image in that post, the one that kicked off the whole red-and-blue spectacles theme, was about a movie called The Ides of March.

My other reason for finding Less Than Zero synchronistically relevant was that Vox Day had just published a post called "Less Than Zero," referring to his assessment of the probability that the Darwinian model of evolution is true. Ice Age, being about prehistoric animals and primitive humans, is obviously evolution-adjacent.

Looking up Ice Age, I discovered that the latest installment in the franchise, set to be released next year, is called Ice Age: Boiling Point. The boiling point is 212 degrees Fahrenheit, which corresponds to Darwin's birthday, February 12. I know that some other person I recently looked up was also born (or perhaps died) on February 12, but I don't remember who it was and can't find it now.

Coming back to the original Ice Age movie, the plot is apparently that a group of Pleistocene mammals are trying to bring a human baby back to his family. One of the group, a saber-toothed cat named Diego, was originally secretly planning to deliver the baby to his pack to be killed in revenge, but by the end of the move he has a change of heart and helps save the baby.

Since the significance of the movie to me is that it was released on my birthday, it's natural for me to see the baby as the character representing me. In my dream "Fighting in ash-mud and putting out the blazing white tree" (March 2024), a man called G (who I thought might represent me) fought with a man called Diego, and after the fight, I asked G, "Are we in a movie?" and he replied, "Well, let's say it's a preview for a movie." As discussed in "Tim, Claire, Diego" (June 2024), Bill Wright thought that Diego in my dream represented "Israel" (or rather his Tolkienian reinterpretation of that name), and then shortly thereafter I met a real person named Diego and helped him rather than fighting him. This seems relevant to the plot of Ice Age, where Diego is originally the baby's enemy but eventually becomes its protector.

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Last night I dreamed that I was back at my old Ohio home in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area. I was with my wife, and we were walking in the woods. There were several leopards and tigers living there, and we were responsible for them. A tiger and a leopard got in fight, and I separated them, realizing that this was a potentially dangerous thing for me to do but trusting that neither of them would attack me, and they didn't.

These big cats all subsisted on milk, being breastfed by my wife. I had some doubts as to whether that was a suitable diet for adult cats. I tried to look up on the Internet whether it was healthy for big cats to live on human breastmilk, but of course couldn't find anything because probably no one else had ever thought to ask such a question. I wasn't sure what else they could eat. White-tailed deer? Or should we bring in some goats? But I like goats and would feel bad about feeding them to the cats. We decided to stick with breastmilk for the time being.

I had this dream before looking up Ice Age, but the big cats and breastfeeding seem related to the saber-tooth and baby in the movie. I see that my original Diego dream also involved going back to the Hell Hollow home to feed the pets.

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In a later dream segment, which was very brief, I was offered a book by Elizabeth Kashara but said I didn't want it. I wanted a book by Brant Forest. I have no sense of what kind of books these were or what I wanted them for. Looking up the names after the dream didn't turn up much. Elizabeth and KaShara are apparently two members of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, and Sebastian Brant did a woodcut called In the Forest near Carthage, illustrating a scene from the Aeneid.