Six degrees of Neil Finn

In my September 29 post "Syncs: Tropical dreams and not-dreams, 555, Freeman and not-Freeman," I noted that a 4chan post beginning "I don't dream" had made me think of the Crowded House song "Don't Dream It's Over." Well, it made me think of the song. I had to look up name of the band, which I had never heard of.

The intro section of Crowded House's Wikipedia article mentions "Their most recent album, Dreamers Are Waiting, was released in 2021." The recurrence of the "dream" theme made me click the link. Here's the cover art:

Why is that significant? Because the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival fell on September 29 this year, and two of the symbols most closely associated with that holiday are the rabbit (usually white) and a big green citrus fruit called the pomelo. I assume that's meant to be a shrub on the Crowded House album, but its shape and color sure suggest a pomelo.

The appearance of a rabbit on an album called Dreamers Are Waiting made me think of a line from The Code of the Woosters where Stephanie "Stiffy" Byng thanks Jeeves for his assistance by saying, "Jeeves, you really are a specific dream-rabbit!" to which he replies, "Thank you miss. I am glad to have given satisfaction."

I watched the music video for "Don't Dream It's Over," and idle curiosity as to the ethnicity of the lead singer -- I couldn't quite tell from his physiognomy -- led me back to Wikipedia to early-life him. Neil Finn, Irish. "He is best known for being a principal member of Split Enz with his brother Tim, the lead singer and a founding member of Crowded House, and a touring member of Fleetwood Mac."

Really, Fleetwood Mac? I clicked the link. And wait, isn't Stevie Nicks's real name Stephanie, just like Stiffy Byng in the Wodehouse novel? I clicked that link, too. Yes, Stephanie Lynn Nicks. The intro to her Wikipedia article mentioned (as the band's article had not) that Fleetwood Mac's only number one hit in the U.S. had been the song "Dreams."

Today I happened to think about the website Clickhole, which I hadn't checked for ages because it hasn't been funny for ages. I visited it just in case. Nope, still not funny. One of the recent articles, posted on September 25, was "Stevie Nicks And CNN, Ranked." It featured the same photo of Nicks I had just seen on her Wikipedia page and consisted of a list of reasons why Stevie Nicks isn't as good as CNN. One of the tags at the end was "She Can Sing But Wolf Blitzer Is On CNN." That made me check Wolf Blitzer's Wikipedia article -- no, not because I'm so clueless I need to early-life Wolf Blitzer! I just wondered if that was his real name. Apparently I'm not alone:

Blitzer has said he has frequently been asked about his name, which has been characterized as seemingly made for TV. He explained that his surname goes back for generations, and that "Wolf" is the same first name as that of his maternal grandfather.

The words "made for TV" were a link to the article "Stage name," which I scrolled through. Of all the thousands of examples they could have chosen, this one made the cut:

Members of New Zealand art-rock band Split Enz all took their middle names as stage names, so as to keep their private image separate from their public personae.

Two days ago, I had never heard of Split Enz. Today I knew it was what Neil Finn was in before Crowded House and Fleetwood Mac.

Syncs: Tropical dreams and not-dreams, 555, Freeman and not-Freeman

On August 29, I changed the wallpaper image on my phone from the Ace of Swords to the White Tree of Gondor. The next day, I happened to pick up my phone at precisely 5:55 p.m., which struck me as significant, so I took a screenshot. One week later -- and I mean exactly one week later, to the minute -- it happened again.

On September 24, I bought and began reading Mike Clelland's novel The Unseen. Central to the plot is a picture the main character painted while tripping on peyote. The painting is called The Dream, and portrays "a thin, scruffy tree with a blue ball of light centered in the branches." This syncs with my wallpaper image shown above: a tree which could be described as thin and scruffy, with stars in its branches.

I started reading The Unseen immediately after posting "The Moody Blues, Embody the Soul, snails and ammonites, stars and stones, blue ball of light," and I mention it in the comments. That post had featured both a "blue ball of light" and the number 555.

Later in The Unseen, the main character, John, has abandoned his life as a successful artist in New Mexico and is working as a dishwasher in a coffee shop in a tiny town in southern Utah. (They're lax Mormons who drink coffee.) A woman he knew as a child, who has recently reappeared in his life, walks into the coffee shop wearing "a black t-shirt with the single word 'dream' centered on her chest." This T-shirt also becomes important to the plot.

Yesterday, September 28, I was in a coffee shop (I'm a lax Mormon who drinks coffee), and they had this hanging on the wall:

The Unseen features a painting called The Dream in which a blue ball of light is in the branches of a tree, and a black T-shirt with the word dream on it. This wall hanging has the word dream in the branches of a tree (or in the foliage of a large plant at any rate), against a black background.

Last night, I read some more in William Fairfield Warren's Paradise Found, which I started some time ago but hadn't picked up recently. On page 120, the text refers the reader to "the diagram which constitutes the frontispiece of this work," so I flipped back to look at it. That's when I noticed for the first time that the "tropical" part of the globe is labeled "5 5 5."

The very first sentence in Paradise Found is, as noted in my September 13 post "Syncfest: 'Wake Up Time,' dreaming in a forest, AE, golden apples, Klein bottle, etc.," is "This book is not the work of a dreamer."

I wanted to include the above image of Warren's frontispiece in this post, so rather than photographing my own copy, I went to archive.org to get a screenshot of it. When I started to type the address into my browser, autocomplete suggested archive.4plebs.org/x/random/ (click at your own risk), which serves up a randomly selected thread from /x/, the "paranormal" board on 4chan. I thought what the hell and pressed enter. It gave me an old 2015 thread about, of all things, not dreaming:

The first reply mentions Morgan Freeman, Just last night I read a passage in The Unseen where John meets the leader of a mysterious operation and asks his name. He says, "I don't use my name here. The team calls me The Freeman." A few paragraphs later, he explains, "I answer to one man, and he gives me a lot of freedom" -- oh, I think, so that's why they call him The Freeman.

Only it turns out I didn't read that. Wanting to quote the passage correctly just now, I put freeman into the Kindle search function and got -- zero results! Had I remembered it wrong? Had it been Freedman, maybe? Or was it hyphenated? I tried various things, including just searching for the string free, but couldn't find what I was looking for. Finally, I just flipped back through the pages manually and found it. It had never said Freeman. It said Foreman. How could I have misread that?

The "I don't dream" /x/ post started a song playing in my head: "Don't Dream It's Over" by Crowded House.

One of the verses begins "Now I'm walking again." The 21st chapter of The Unseen begins with the sentence "I was walking again."