When I started reading it, most of the content was very familiar, and I soon realized that "The Paper" of which it was a version was Mike Clelland's original paper on owls and UFOs, which was later expanded to book length and published as The Messengers (which in the dream was conflated with its sequel Stories from the Messengers). I was excited at the prospect of finding in it "lost" material that Mike had not been "allowed" to include in the commercially published version. Paging through it, I did see some new-to-me content, including several reproductions of ancient Egyptian and Cuneiform texts, and some Mesopotamian art portraying the lion-headed Anzu bird.
I understood that Decorations from a Tree of Acorns was code for Stories from the Messengers, and that the cryptic title was to allow people to read it without making it obvious that they were reading a book about owls and UFOs.
Before going to bed last night, I had been thinking about two things. First, the major typhoon currently in Taiwan had reminded me of my first experience with a tropical cyclone: Hurricane Gloria, which hit New Hampshire, where I was then living, on September 28, 1985, and which would later become inextricably linked to my mental image of Marduk battling Tiamat. Second, I had for no obvious reason been thinking of my dream "Nineteen years inside the sphere," which I later understood to have reference to "The Death of Nelson" (the dream was hours after the death of Russell Nelson but before it had been announced in the media) and wondering if I was about to have another such significant dream. Only now, looking it up, do I see that I posted that dream on September 28, the anniversary of Gloria hitting New England.
Thus, after last night's dream, as I was trying to figure out the logic of changing "the Messengers" to "a Tree of Acorns," my thoughts turned to Nelson's successor as leader of The Church Formerly Known as Mormon, Dallin Oaks. His name obviously references a tree of acorns, and he bears the title Apostle, meaning "messenger." The appearance of the book in my dream suggests a Mormon connection.
It occurs to me now that the name Dallin Oaks encodes the Valley of Elah, where David killed Goliath. Dallin means "valley-dweller," and the Hebrew word elah, which modern scholars say means "terebinth," is usually rendered "oak" in the KJV.
As I am writing this post, something completely random has popped into my head -- lines from a Robert Graves poem I last read decades ago. I include them here in case they should turn out to have some relevance:
Cunning and art he did not lack
But aye her whistle would fetch him back
6 comments:
One meaning of decoration applies to covering blemishes and, more specifically, to embellish.
Embellish can mean to make something beautiful but tying to covering something up, I think, also means "to dress up a narration with fictitious matter". Given this is a book you dreamt of, and one you tied to Oaks and LDS church, that meaning could be relevant. Even more so since it was made out to be "a version", one meaning of which is something that has been changed.
Since this is something you mentioned also being "second hand", it gives me GAC-altered-Book-of-the-Lamb vibes, which was viewed by Nephi as passing from the original author's hand into to that of the GAC - a second hand - who created their own version and published it.
The Book of the Lamb in its original form is said to have been written by some individuals known as apostles, further supporting this interpretation of the book in your dream with its tie to Messengers.
An owl-less "version" of a paper about owls also suggests the vastly inferior owl-less Sao Paulo "version" of Bosch's St. Anthony Triptych, the true version of which is in the Ant Money city, Lisbon.
Acorns are so intensely bitter as to be inedible on their natural state, like the evil figs of Jeremiah. (Euell Gibbons provides detailed instructions on how to render them fit for human consumption. It's so labor-intensive that I've never brothered to try it.) So we have True Messengers (Apostles properly so called) being replaced by a tree with bitter fruit, which provides mere "decorations" in place of stories -- all for the benefit of readers who might find otherworldly Messengers embarrassing -- and "Babylonian" content has been introduced.
Several Mormon dissidents have identified Oaks with the appointed leader who will be felled "like as a tree."
A wise old owl lived in an oak
The more he saw, the less he spoke
The less he spoke, the more he heard
Soldier, be like that wise old bird
I had mentioned before my dream from 2020 in which Oaks stood at a pulpit in a church conference while earthquakes were shaking and damaging the building. He told everyone to remain calm, there was nothing to worry about, and that everything would be just fine. Immediately after saying this, another earthquake struck, and the ceiling above Oaks gave way, fell, and buried him under the rubble.
As far as I can remember, that is the only time an LDS apostle has ever appeared in my dreams,. It obviously wasn't positive and was very unsettling to me personally given other associated scenes in and the way the images were conveyed, but at that time in 2020 I wasn't doing very well.
In that dream scene, Oaks would have definitely been "decorating" the truth of the situation.
One other comment because it is relevant to the tie of this Book in your dream to the Book of the Lamb and its confounded, decorated fake.
In my Elvish words from the fall of 2019, the word "Para/ Paru" came up twice in two different forms.
The first was a word play on Paraclete, written as Para-clete (I actually jumbled it down as para-clee't in my half-asleep writing). Paraclete is a reference to the Holy Ghost, and "Para" in Elvish has a few different variations, it seems, and is derived from "Par", which overall means "learn, to arrange, compose, put together", and more specifically can refer to a book, writings, parchment, etc, - including Paper.
And this word game makes sense now (it didn't then), given my current guess that the Holy Ghost will write some things, specifically the Book of the Lamb.
The second time Par- came up was in the form Paru, which puts the word as a noun, or the book itself. The context of that book was relation to an "Elu-maggu" (Elu being another name for Thingol, or John), and some "elf-friends".
The important thing here again is that "Par-" and its variants, mean " fine bark (paper)", and so a potential direct tie to "The Paper", and you reading the GAC's version of that book.
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