N'EGO: The Negation of the Ego

I'm still mostly on blogging vacation. This is just a little postcard from Synchroni City.

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On the night of Saturday, April 23, I had a dream in which Kanye West had released a new album, in collaboration with two of his children. Not wanting to take unfair advantage of his name recognition, they had used some forgettable pseudonym like "the Williamson Family" or something, but everyone knew it was actually Ye. The name of the album was N'EGO: The Negation of the Ego.

In the morning, I made a quick note of the dream and then went about my day. At around 4:30 in the afternoon, I happened to come out of a shop just as two people went past on a scooter. One of them recognized me and, without stopping, waved and said, "William!" I waved back to be polite, but actually I had no idea who it was I was waving to. They went by really fast and were both wearing full-face helmets.

I then got on my own motorcycle and headed for home. Before long, I had to stop at a red light. I noticed that the guy on the scooter in front of me had a huge white rabbit on the back of his T-shirt, so -- the white rabbit being a recent sync theme -- I pulled out my phone and snapped a quick photo for future reference. When the light turned green, I turned right and the white rabbit continued on straight.

Several minutes later, while I still on the road, I thought, "Didn't that white-rabbit guy have NEG on his license plate and then some numbers? I wonder if the NEG was followed by 0 or 15 or something."  I was thinking of the "N'EGO" in my dream, of course; O looks like zero and is the 15th letter of the alphabet. When I got home, I checked my photo:

It's not 0 or 15, but NEG is followed by four digits of which the sum is 15, so it still encodes NEGO. What are the odds?

Assume a license number of the form ABC 1234, which is the most common format in Taiwan. In theory, the probability of getting NEG is 26^-3, or 0.0057%. However, my impression is that one sees the same letter combinations recurring much more often than would be expected if all 17,576 possible three-letter combinations were assigned with equal probability. I think the government probably uses only a small subset of the possible strings, so to err on the side of being extremely conservative, let's say the chance of getting NEG is 1%. The chance of the numbers that follow encoding O is much higher than you might expect. The first digit could be 0 (10% chance); the first two digits could be 15, or could add up to 15 (5% chance); The first three digits could add up to 15 (6.4% chance, when overlap with the first two cases is excluded); or all four digits could add up to 15 (5.58% chance, excluding overlap). The total probability of any of these being the case is 26.98%.

Surprised it was so high, and wondering if I had made a mistake in my arithmetic, I did a quick empirical check by having random.org generate 100 truly random four-digit numbers. Of these, 22 met one of the conditions listed above. More surprisingly, one of the numbers it gave me was the very same four-digit number that was on the license plate! The odds of that are not astronomically low, though: 1 - 0.999¹⁰⁰, or 9.52%.

Normally, in estimating the probability of a license-plate sync, I would have to take into account the number of license plates I see every day, a figure which is likely in the hundreds. In this case, though, it's not just that one of the hundreds of plates I see every day happened to encode NEGO; it was one specific plate, one which I had photographed for reasons entirely unrelated to NEGO.

Later that day, I was thinking about the people that had gone by on a scooter and shouted my name, trying to think who they could have been. I thought, Oh, maybe it was so-and-so! (an acquaintance I only see a few times a year). That night, I happened to be in so-and-so's neighborhood; there was a small parking area across from their house (shared by them and some neighbors), and there was a scooter parked there with a NEG license plate! Had that been them? When I saw the rabbit T-shirt and snapped a photo, had I unwittingly been taking a photo of someone I knew but didn't recognize from behind?

No, actually, this was a different NEG plate:

Recall what I had asked myself earlier: "I wonder if the NEG was followed by 0 or 15 or something." Well here was a different scooter which had NEG followed by 15 and 0. What are the odds?

Several minutes later, I just had to go back to their neighborhood and double-check. I must have seen something wrong. It must actually been the same NEG plate. So I went back and looked more carefully at the five or six scooters that were parked there. I had seen it right -- but this time I noticed that just across the street from that scooter was the one with the other NEG plate I had photographed before. (Sorry about the photo quality, but it's documentation, not art.)

Now that I had reason to believe that it was so-and-so, I sent her a message the next day, and she confirmed that she had been the one who passed me on the street and said hi, and that she had been with someone wearing a white rabbit T-shirt.

So that's a coincidence of four things: The scooter with the rabbit T-shirt I photographed (1) belonged to an acquaintance who just happened to go past at the moment I came out of a shop (2) and had a license plate encoding NEGO, a nonsense word I had just dreamed about (3), and which was also encoded by her neighbor's license plate (4).

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That was all on Sunday. Now an epilogue from today (Wednesday, April 26).

Last night, I had a dream in which I did not appear as a character but simply observed the story as if watching a movie. It was about a man who had decided he wanted to visit a place "where the ocean empties into a river" (sic) because of all the amazing things you could see there -- "Imagine, you could see sharks, octopuses, all kinds of things -- in a river!" So he was walking off to a place like that, with a female friend tagging along rather unenthusiastically. She asked if they were going to Africa, and he said, "No, Michigan. It's a bit north of Africa, but the ocean empties into a river there, too, so it's just as good."

They were walking through a swampy area with lots of tall reeds and rushes, and the woman was complaining about how far they had to walk. "We can't complain about that," said the man. "Don't forget, Jesus himself used to walk everywhere -- more than 30 miles a day, and that was in a hot desert!"

I jotted down the dream and went to work.

This morning, I met with an adult student who studies at home with a magazine intended for English learners and sometimes brings it to class if she has questions about anything she has read. She had given me a copy of the magazine, but I hadn't read any of the articles before today's class.

Today we looked at two consecutive articles. The first was called "Across the Mojave Desert on Foot," about a geologist named Nick Van Buer who did what it says on the tin, and it synched pretty remarkably with my dream of last night.

The dream, as you will recall, was about a man who was hiking through tall reeds and rushes to get to a place in the US where the ocean empties into a river, and who told his companion she shouldn't complain because Jesus used to hike more than 30 miles through the desert every day. The page I have photographed has a man hiking 31 miles ("more than 30") through a desert in the US and -- unexpectedly for a desert hike -- going through reeds. It also has the words river and ocean juxtaposed, and even includes the number 150, a figure which was significant when I saw it on a license plate on Sunday night.

After "Across the Mojave Desert on Foot," the next article was called "The Right Way to Deal With Criticism," and it featured this illustration:

Recall the name of the Kanye album in my Saturday night dream: N'EGO: The Negation of the Ego. Come to think of it, it's also a bit of a sync with last night's dream, which, unlike the vast majority of my dreams, "left my ego out of it" by not even including me as a character.

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One final sync wink. More than one commenter has compared some of my more extravagant sync posts to one of those "evidence boards" used by detectives and paranoid schizophrenics on TV, the kind with all the string. Check out the magazine's table of contents:

There it is, right next to the two articles I clipped for my own crazy wall.

Also notice the lower right corner: "Biggest Myths About Traveling to Africa." According to the guy in my dream, the biggest such myth is that you need to go all the way to Africa when actually Michigan has everything you need.

Further syncs related to my Kanye dream and Facsimile 1

 Yesterday (November 4), I taught a children's English class in which the word ancient came up (from an article saying that surfing was "an ancient sport," originating in the fourth century BC). After explaining the meaning of ancient, I checked comprehension by asking, "Have you ever seen anything ancient?" A 10-year-old girl immediately replied that she had visited a museum a few years ago and seen an Egyptian mummy case -- and then added that there were also "four little things with different heads, like a person and a dog and an eagle, and I don't remember what the other one was" -- clearly a description of the canopic jars ("Elkenah" and friends) which have featured in my recent posts.

Today, following a link on AC, I read an article called "MK Ultra, Transgenderism, and Feminization of Men." This bit pinged my syncdar:

The term “hypnosis” comes from the Greek word hypno, meaning sleep. Hypnotic trance has its roots in Earth’s oldest civilizations. The first mentions of it date back 5,000 years to ancient Egypt where it was used in rituals in the Temple of Imhotep. “Temple sleep" was an hours-long ritual using herbs, rhythmic drumming, and prayer recitation to induce a hypnotic dreamlike state. This ritual trance was believed to allow a person to heal ailments, see the future, or contact the gods. The ancient Greeks adapted their own forms of temple sleep used by Oracles to divine the future for powerful men like Alexander the Great. Shamans around the world have used similar techniques since ancient times with drumming, chant, and natural hallucinogens to induce ritual trance in the same way. In the 18th and 19th centuries, esoteric physicians and psychologists like Franz Mesmer gave hypnosis techniques new life. French scientists at the Nancy School were the first to formally study hypnotism as we know it today. This led to hypnosis being used by psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.  

In the 1920’s, hypnosis was often portrayed comically in Vaudeville stage acts and later in Hollywood, leading to its modern association with quackery. [. . .]

This was only the second time I had heard of the Egyptian ritual of "temple sleep"; the first was yesterday, when I found a reference to it in Mission des juifs, where Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre attributes its invention to no lesser a personage than Moses himself -- pre-Exodus, when he was (Saint-Yves claims) a priest of Osiris:

He [Moses] recommended that well-chosen persons sleep at night in the Temple, to receive oneirocritical or other communications of interest to either the individual or the Society.

(Definition of oneirocritical: "of, relating to, or specializing in the interpretation of dreams" -- c.f. Sigmund Freud's best-known work.)

When I had read this reference in Saint-Yves, I had vaguely imagined initiates sleeping on the floor of the temple, but when I read the second reference, in the MK Ultra article, it occurred to me in a flash of insight that, no, they probably used some sort of ritual bed --and that I was almost 100% certain what that bed looked like. A quick Google search confirmed what I already intuitively knew: One of the first results had a picture of someone sleeping on a lion couch:

The image is just from some random YouTube video, and I have no idea how archaeologically sound it is, but the sync fairies don't care about that. The fact is that, rightly or wrongly, people have connected "temple sleep" with the lion couch. Saint-Yves, rather improbably, connects "temple sleep" with Moses -- just as Joseph Smith had, equally improbably, connected the lion couch with another major biblical figure.

In the MK Ultra article, "the Nancy School" appears in the same paragraph as "temple sleep." In my Kanye dream, Ye was carrying a coffin-like plywood box and said that "Aunt Nancy" had gone to sleep in it and never woken up.

At the end of the passage I have quoted, "Vaudeville" is juxtaposed with "quackery." Yesterday, in a post that probably left my readers scratching their heads, I felt an urgent need to post about some imagined spiritual kinship between Marx Brothers comedies and the music of Billy Joel. In this post, I characterized the Marx Brothers as "classic Jewish Vaudeville" and provided as a sample of their style a clip from the 1933 film Duck Soup.

The Billy Joel thing wasn't my only sudden strange idea about pop music yesterday. Out of the blue, I suddenly got a bee in my bonnet about the song "You're the One" as performed by the Vogues and, moved by a strange sense of certainty about a song with which I have only a passing familiarity, I spent quite a bit of time scouring YouTube in vain for any evidence that they had ever sung "Ooh, never leave me, DO NOT deceive me" (definitely the correct lyrics!) rather than the vastly inferior Mandela-effect version "please don't deceive me," which is all that can be found in the current timeline. It was an extremely strange thing to get hung up on, but in the course of my searching I stumbled upon another old Vogues song I had completely forgotten about: "Five O'Clock World" -- which begins with the words "Up every morning just to keep a job" and later says "in my five o'clock world she waits for me." In my Kanye dream, Aunt Nancy had written a note saying "Wake me up at 5 p.m." before going to sleep forever.

Kanye and El Kanah

After I posted my dream about "Kanye with Aunt Nancy's coffin," my next post was "Synchronicity: Mandrakes and El Kanah." At first, I didn't see any connection between the two, but then I realized that Kanah is a Chinese anagram of Kanye.

In the comments on my Kanye dream, Debbie twice referred to Ye as "Kayne" -- either a typo or an intentional allusion to the biblical figure Cain. Where does the name Cain come from? Glad you asked.

The biblical name Elkanah (father of the prophet Samuel) is from this same root and is more properly transliterated as Elqanah -- so there's a direct etymological link between Cain and El Kanah, both of which are more properly transliterated with the letter q. This is significant because my Kanye dream included the line "Wake me up at 5 p.m." and I connected this with Q because 5 p.m. is 17:00, and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet; and because the Q conspiracy theory is associated with the phrase "Great Awakening." The Hebrew letter transliterated as q is not the 17th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, but it does bear a certain resemblance to the numerals 17.

The reason I considered running into the name El Kanah a synchronicity was because I had just (in "Maha-makara whiteboard telepathy") made reference to the very similar name Elkenah, which occurs in Joseph Smith's Book of Abraham as the name of a god supposedly worshiped by the Egyptians of Abraham's day. In the "facsimile" accompanying the text, Elkenah is identified with the falcon-headed canopic jar in an Egyptian lion-couch scene.

Egyptologists, knowing nothing of "Elkenah" and company, say that the four canopic jars represent the four sons of Horus, each of which is associated with one of the cardinal directions. Keeping in mind that we have connected El Kanah with the letter Q and with Kanye West, what name and direction do Egyptologists assign to the falcon-headed jar?

A name beginning with Q and the direction West!

Note also that the canopic jars were used in the mummification and burial process, as receptacles for certain of the deceased's internal organs. This syncs with my dream, in which Kanye was carrying a coffin.

My sync post about El Kanah also featured mandrakes. Ye has been in the news recently for his supposedly controversial statements about the Jews, which have overshadowed his much more outrageous recent claim that the "greatest rapper of all time" is a man called Drake. 

Kanye with Aunt Nancy's coffin

When something is repeated several times in a dream, I take it as potentially significant.

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It was snowy and windy outside, and I was inside a structure that I thought of as a "pillbox," but when I pictured what it looked like from the outside, I thought of it as looking more like a pink Thermos bottle. It was the same shade of pink as Jackie Kennedy's famous pillbox hat, so I suppose that was the connection. Inside, it wasn't pink and seemed like a garage or storage unit -- concrete floors and walls, no furniture.

I could hear someone outside in the snow, coming up to the door. It was the artist formerly known as Kanye West, and his stopping by seemed utterly unremarkable, as if he were just some regular guy we happened to know.

Ye was carrying a big box shaped like a coffin, but obviously not a real coffin. It was made of pieces of plywood nailed together and looked like some cheap prop that hadn't been painted yet. The ease with which he was carrying it made it clear that it was quite light and therefore empty.

Ye explained to me that "Aunt Nancy" had gone to sleep in that box and never woken up, and then he showed me why. He lifted up the coffin so that the bottom surface was visible, and there was something written there in pencil: "Please wake me up at 5 p.m. Aunt Nancy." Apparently no one had seen the message, because she had carelessly written it on the bottom of the box, and that's why she had never woken up.

I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be some sort of weird joke, or if I was to understand that Aunt Nancy had died from sleeping too long, or had been mistaken for dead and buried alive, or what -- but I was pretty sure that that was Ye's own handwriting and that the whole thing was fake.

"Ye, where did you get this?" I asked, and he said the name of some generic American retailer you wouldn't expect a billionaire celebrity to frequent -- Best Buy or Home Depot or something of that nature. I took this as an admission that he had bought plywood and made the coffin himself, and that "Aunt Nancy" was either alive and well or had never existed at all. Ye took the coffin back outside, put it in the back of a white van, and drove off.

A few minutes later, my mother showed up at the pillbox. I said, "Hey, 'Yeeaay' was just here" -- drawling the diphthong in an exaggerated way -- and then proceeded to tell her everything, about the plywood coffin and the Aunt Nancy story and all that. Since my mother's name is also Nancy, I made sure to clarify that Ye had obviously meant his own aunt, not her. She listened to the story without particular interest and later left.

A few minutes after that, a generic "man" came in, and I told him about what had happened with Ye and then about my telling my mother.

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So the Ye-with-a-coffin story occurred four times in the dream: First I experienced it, then I told my mother about it, then I told the man about it, and then I told the man about telling my mother about it. No idea what it means, if anything, but the repetition itself seems to make it worth noting.

I assume "Aunt Nancy" has something to do with Anansi, the anthropomorphic spider trickster of West African folklore. I know very few Anansi stories -- just the usual stuff an American child is exposed to in the name of diversity -- but running a search for anansi coffin turned up this:

As time passed, Dew worked especially hard and tirelessly to build up a large amount of wealth. He bought a scythe, hoe, axe, new clothes, and other equipment. Dew then told his mother his plan: he would tell Anansi that she had died and would then make a mock coffin in which to bury her. In the meanwhile, Dew wished for his mother to hide in their home upstairs while he prepared, so she did. Dew then made a coffin and announced her death to the village, inviting them to come see her burial. Once they had arrived, he snuck his mother from upstairs and had her hide underneath the floor where the mock coffin lay, as well as the many things he'd purchased, as he knew Anansi's greed would spurn him to steal from Dew if he saw them laying around. Now that the plan was in order, it was time for the mock burial to begin. . . .

I'm quite sure I had never encountered this particular story before, but the coincidence with the dream is impressive: the name Anansi/Aunt Nancy, the "mock coffin," the mother. I'll see if anything develops from this sync-wise.

Jay-Z in 2009 presages Biden and 2020

Throughout 2020, I've often been reminded of the 2009 music video "Run This Town" -- directed by Anthony Mandler, with Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Kanye West performing. There's no stable YouTube link I can give you, since it keeps getting taken down, but it's not that hard to find and watch should you feel that necessary. Basically, it shows lots of black people wearing 2020-style "face coverings," surging through the streets of burned-out cities, throwing Molotov cocktails, and doing other mostly-peaceful things.

Mandler has been quoted on that site I don't link to (no source is cited) as saying

I showed [Jay] some references from the classic rebellious zones of the world. We live in very orderly society in America, but when you get into Brazil, you get into the Middle East, you get into Africa, you get into Eastern Europe, when you get into places like that, there's a different sort of 'we run this town' [going on]. There's less order and more chaos. So we looked at a lot of those references, new photos and historical photos, to capture that kind of falling-apart feeling.

Back in 2009, you had to do research to create a video like "Run This Town." Watch it now, in 2020, and you might as well be watching a live newscast from Portland or somewhere.

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I wrote the above portion of this post last night. I had planned to include a picture of the cover art for the "Run This Town" single and point out its similarity to Biden campaign logos -- another link to 2020. But something interrupted me, I went to bed without finishing the post, and here I am doing it the next day. So, here's the cover art for "Run This Town."

Why three horizontal red lines? Apparently because the single is from the album The Blueprint 3, and that album and all the singles from it (with the single exception of "D.O.A.") feature those three lines -- which signify nothing more interesting than the number three. "Run This Town" is unique, though, in having nothing but those three lines.

Here, in case you've forgotten what they look like, are two of Joe Biden's 2020 campaign logos.

By the way, how clueless is the guy who designed the logo on the left, given that there's also someone named Jo (the Libertarian Party's Jo Jorgensen) running for president in 2020? The one on the right, on the other hand, is rather neat: "Bid 3 N" -- a bid to be elected on 3 November.

So, anyway, a mildly interesting coincidence: A 2009 music video full of unmistakable 2020 imagery is branded with three horizontal red lines -- a branding choice also made by one of the 2020 presidential campaigns.

Checking the other Blueprint 3 singles just now, I found a much funnier coincidence. Here's the cover art for "A Star Is Born."

If the three horizontal red lines represent the letter E, as in the Biden logos, then this says "A star is Bern" -- i.e., Biden's main rival in the primaries, Bernie Sanders!

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Now, why, you are wondering, did I bother telling you that I started the post last night and finished it the next day? Because of what happened in between: breakfast.

We get lots of junk mail, and when I eat takeout (as I often do) I am in the habit of using a piece of that junk mail as a makeshift placemat to keep the table clean. This morning I tore a page out of some promotional material from Costco, put my breakfast on it, and ate. Only after I had finished did I notice what was on the paper itself. It startled me enough that I took a photo.

Those three red lines again, exactly like the ones on the Jay-Z records! (They were printed as vertical lines, of course, but I had turned the paper to landscape orientation for placemat purposes.)

Looking at the photo on my phone after I had taken it, I noticed yet another coincidence. I was going to crop the photo to show just the three lines and a small amount of text to show that it was from Costco junk mail, but then I noticed that the photo as I had snapped it fortuitously included four very large Chinese characters: 好市多黑. This is from 好市多黑鑽卡, which is the Chinese name for a Costco Executive Membership Card, but only those four characters made it into the photo. Translate them literally, character for character, and what do you get?

I don't know what the synchronicity fairies are getting at with all this, but they've certainly got my attention!

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Note added: 

I just noticed this bit of the photo I posted -- the one with the three red bars and "good city many black":

A right-pointing star, as in the D20 logo, and the words cover story. The intended meaning, of course, is "a report or article connected with the picture on the front of a magazine" -- but it also means "a story someone tells in order to hide the truth."

Second note added:

I don't know how I missed this before, but cover story -- accompanied by a star -- has an additional meaning: the three red bars came from record covers, one of which was "A Star Is Born" (or "Bern," as the case may be).