In a hypnopompic state this morning before fully waking up, I was thinking about Jay Leno and how odd that he of all people -- someone in whom I had no interest and about whom I knew virtually nothing -- should have appeared in my dreams. In my hypnopompic reverie, I latched onto the fact (discovered in my post-dream research) that Leno always dresses in blue denim when he's not on TV, and that this must shed some light on the meaning of the blue clothing worn by Tim in my dream, by Tim and Patrick in the Alizio story, and by the two wizards in the Joseph story. I started thinking about various terms for blue denim clothing. Denim itself ultimately means "of the sanctuary," while Levis comes from the tribe of Levi, the priestly lineage -- Aaron! Didn't Aaron, the high priest, wear a blue robe?
At this point I was fully awake. A quick word search on a Bible app confirmed that, yes, the only "blue robe" mentioned in the Bible is the one worn by Aaron (Ex. 28:31, 39:22). But Aaron is just one person, and the Blue Wizards are a pair. I had a hunch that I should look up the etymology of jeans. I already knew it -- it comes from Genoa, and Genoa means "knee" -- but I looked it up anyway, and saw something that I probably wouldn't have noticed had I not just been thinking about Aaron:
Did you notice it, too? Jeans comes from the Old French name for Genoa, which was Jannes. Jannes and Jambres are the names given by tradition and in the New Testament (2 Tim. 3:8) to the "wise men" or "magicians of Egypt" (Ex. 7:11) against whom Moses and Aaron faced off in the court of Pharaoh. I had previously mentioned that in the Joseph story and Mushroom Planet we have two Wise Men, in contrast to the traditional three, but in Jannes and Jambres we have a biblical set of two Wise Men. One Midrash has it that they left the Pharaoh and followed Moses out of Egypt.
Yesterday, thinking about Jay Leno and his blue denim outfits led me to "Blue Jays," the album by Justin Hayward and John Lodge. I assume that the album title has no reference to birds except as a pun but refers to Blue J's -- Justin and John, the two Moody Blues members whose names begin with that letter. Jannes and Jambres would be another such pair of J's.
My other potentially significant fever dreams (I don't actually have a fever, but "head-cold dreams" just doesn't have the same ring!):
I was in a room with a lot of people -- Europeans, I thought, some speaking English and others French. Someone mentioned the name Jay Leno, and everyone suddenly turned and stared at him aghast, as if he had committed some unthinkable breach of decorum in uttering that name.
I was confused by this, and I said, "What? What did Jay Leno do? Did he rape somebody? Did he say nigger?"
Now everyone turned and stared aghast at me, partly because I hadn't used the more genteel terms sexual assault and the n-word, but mostly because I had somehow missed the memo about Jay Leno being unpersoned. An elderly woman hissed at me, "Le n-mot, s'il vous plaît!" -- which I don't think is even proper French, but which struck me as funny because it punned simultaneously on the name Leno and the slang expression "nigga, please!" Under the circumstances, I didn't dare crack a smile. Everyone else was silent, but I could "hear" their thoughts: "He doesn't know! Everyone knows. Everyone knows!" I woke up.
Several hours later, Jay Leno reappeared in another mini-dream. It wasn't even a proper dream, just a static image: a paperback book with a pulp-style illustration of two or three distraught-looking people imprisoned in what looked like a glass diving bell. At the top of the cover it said, "Who Can Say Who's Abducting You?" At the bottom, it said, "Jay Leno." I thought in the dream that this was a quadruple-entendre: (1) a book by Jay Leno called Who Can Say Who's Abducting You? (I imagined in the dream that "Who can say?" must be a Leno catchphrase), (2) Jay Leno can say who's abducting you, (3) Jay Leno is abducting you, (4) a question addressed to Leno: "Who can say who's abducting you, Jay Leno?" As soon as I had processed these four readings, I woke up.
I know nothing about Jay Leno. I know what he looks like, and that he is or was a comedian on American TV, and that's about all I've got. After the two dreams, I looked him up to find out if "Who can say?" was a catchphrase of his (apparently not) and whether he had ever been the subject of a two minutes' hate. All I could find on Wikipedia was some hooha in 2010 over whether he or Conan O'Brien was going to host a particular talk show. Apparently the public overwhelmingly sided with O'Brien:
Artist Mike Mitchell designed a poster similar of the Obama "Hope" poster, showing O'Brien superimposed with an American flag in the background and the caption "I'm With Coco". The poster was widely circulated and displayed online and at various rallies. The color orange also became the choice of color for O'Brien fans, referencing his light orange hair.
Haha, orange hair had a different meaning back then! And is Conan O'Brien called Coco? I'd never heard of that before, but then I'm pretty much a rube when it comes to all things teevee.
In the evening, I went out to buy a few things. My wife had recommended that I get some kumquat tea, for my sore throat, from a particular shop I've never been to, so I was on a road I don't take very often. On the way to the tea shop, I passed another tea shop with a very interesting name and logo:
There's the name Coco, almost precisely the same shade of orange, and a white face with no features other than a pair of eyes and two ear-like projections. This face meant nothing when I saw it, but then on my way home I stopped at a red light behind a motorcyclist with this on her backpack:
A white face with eyes, ears, and no other features. Unlike the Coco mascot, this one is pretty clearly a white rabbit. Ever since Alice in Wonderland (would Alizio be the Italian masculine form of Alice?), white rabbits and rabbit holes have been a metonym for pursuing crazy ideas. The text reads, "I don't mind who u are" -- but the font makes the penultimate letter ambiguous, so it could also read, "I don't mind who u ate."
This ties in with my "Narrative Reasoning" dream, which referenced a scene in the Aeneid where Turnus says to what turns out to be a malevolent heavenly messenger, "I'll obey . . . no matter who you are who call me." That are could also be read as ate makes this look an awful lot like a warning. One is also reminded of "The Statue Got Me High": "And now it is your turn / Your turn to hear the stone / And then your turn to burn."
Who warned Arthur and his knights of a dangerous white rabbit? None other than Tim the Enchanter:
"Narrative Reasoning" also possibly ties in with the "Who's Abducting You?" dream. Though in modern use it primarily refers to kidnapping (particularly by aliens like Tim and Patrick), abduction literally means "leading away." It also refers to a particular type of reasoning -- a sense which featured prominently in a book I read a few months ago, The Methods of Contemporary Thought by Józef Maria Bocheński.
After coming home, I checked my email and found that I had a new message in my Proton account. I haven't read it yet, but the subject line is: "Entering the ultimate rabbit hole."
