On September 20, I happened upon, and saved, this meme:
Just a clever pun. I’m a connoisseur.
Today I reached the epilogue of Joshua Cutchin’s Ecology of Souls, which is, unexpectedly, about headlessness as a recurring paranormal theme. This made me think of Washington Irving’s famous headless horseman, which reminded me of the meme because the name Philip denotes a horseman (from the Greek for “lover of horses”). Then I read this in Cutchin:
[C]ollecting heads often underscored martial prowess, rather than serving any greater metaphysical purpose. Victory trophies involved fashioning drinking goblets from vanquished enemies’ skulls, for instance.
My next thought was that he was probably going to go on to mention decapitated horses or someone named Philip. Right on both counts:
Elsewhere in the world beheaded animals, many of them psychopomps like horses, were also interred as grave goods.
And:
“Certainly there is no shortage of Celtic examples of magical decapitation,” wrote Philippe Walter.
In the last book I read, Mike Clelland’s novel The Unseen, the main character discovers a dead body and buries it but leaves the head unburied. And in my Book of Mormon blog, I’m coming up soon on one of the book’s most controversial episodes: the decapitation of the unconscious Laban by the otherwise sympathetic character Nephi. Laban was drunk, having perhaps had one too many Phillip’s head screwdrivers.
One more thing:
Lower Pecos petroglyphs from southwest Texas, for example, show shamans alternately with antlers or without heads entirely.
The above quote from Cutchin juxtaposes antlered men with headless men. Back in 2020 I had a dream about a man with antlers. Care to guess what his name was?
I had a clear vision of Philip -- as a man, not a reindeer, but wearing a rather elaborate headdress in the shape of a pair of caribou antlers which, as they were covered in red satin, did look rather Christmassy.
This evening I was about to go to a particular coffee shop to read, but the thought suddenly popped into my head, "No, go to the night market first" -- even though that was very much out of my way. I tend to follow these random whims unless I have some good reason not to, so off to the night market I went.
On my way there, there was an electric scooter in front of me on the road, with a man operating it and a woman sitting behind him. The back of her short skirt was pinned to the scooter seat, but the sides were freely blowing in the wind. I idly thought, with the sort of perfunctory prurience which still strikes me from time to time even though it's been quite a long time since I was twelve years old, "I wish she would shift a bit in her seat and the wind would blow the whole skirt up. Maybe if I will it to happen, it'll happen." It was a shameful and ridiculous thing to think, and of course it didn't happen. At the next light, the scooter continued straight, and I turned right to go to the market.
Before going out, I had just finished reading the novel The Unseen by Mike Clelland, an author I discovered last year when I read his non-fiction book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee. Owls in connection with gray aliens are Clelland's specialty; he is known in paranormal circles as "the owl guy." Central to the plot of The Unseen (which of course also features owls and aliens) is a peyote-inspired painting called The Dream and a black T-shirt with the word dream printed on it. I discussed synchronicities related to this "dream" theme, and to the name Freeman, in my last post.
Almost the first thing I saw upon entering the night market was a man whose T-shirt had an enormous owl printed on it, covering almost the whole torso, and then a woman with a black T-shirt that said dream, exactly as in the novel. Less than a minute later, a man walked past with a gray alien head printed on his baseball cap, and then a Vietnamese woman with three gray alien heads tattooed across her cleavage. "Oh," I though, "it's going to be one of those nights," and it was. I wandered around the market for about an hour, and in that time I counted six different owl-themed T-shirts, plus a stand that was selling owl-themed ceramic chopstick rests, and so many instances of the English word dream -- in a Chinese-speaking country, remember -- that I lost count. Most of these were on people's clothing, so I didn't get a chance to photograph most of them, but I got a few. The first one I saw was this bath mat:
Immediately after I photographed that, two people with English T-shirts walked past. The first said "FREEMAN"; the second, "CHOOSE." All dreams come true, freeman, so choose your dreams well.
Here are two others I managed to capture, both on the backs of T-shirts:
There were lots more like this. These are just the ones I managed to snap photos of. Everywhere I looked, owls, aliens, and dreams coming true. "Where Dreamers Become Doers" made me think of my earlier thought about the woman on the scooter: "Maybe if I will it to happen, it'll happen" -- if our thoughts affect reality, then dreaming becomes a kind of doing.
After finishing at the night market, I was going to go home, but then I thought, "No, I think I'll still go to that coffee shop after all." On my way there, I was thinking about all the crazy synchronicities I had just experienced and wasn't paying overmuch attention to my surroundings. While stopped at a red light, though, I became aware of the scooter in front of me and -- you've got to be kidding me! Yes, it was that scooter again. I had been behind them when I was on my way to the night market and they were on their way to wherever they were going, and now an hour later we were both on our way back, and I was behind them again!
The light turned green, and I guess she was sitting a little differently this time, because her whole skirt immediately blew up in the wind, revealing -- whoop-de-doo, some random lady's underpants, not the slightest bit interesting or titillating. In fact, it made me angry. I felt like the sync fairies were mocking me: "Sure, we'll make your dreams come true. It's not our fault if you happen to have the dreams of a retarded twelve-year-old!" I pulled the throttle and passed the scooter, leaving it behind me as fast as I could. "Choose, freeman." Okay, here's my choice, you sick fucks: not this.
I arrived at the coffee shop, got my coffee, and sat down to read the Book of Mormon. (Yes, I'm aware of the irony here.) As fate would have it, my bookmark was near the end of the Book of Alma, and I proceeded to read about the final victory of the Nephite faction known as -- of all things -- the freemen.
At one point I got up and went to a sideboard to get some paper napkins. There was a brochure there about the different kinds of cakes you can order. I hadn't the slightest interest in cake, but I felt a sudden compulsion to open it. I opened right up to an owl staring at me:
I remember last time I read a Mike Clelland book, it triggered a sync-storm, too. But hey, it was my choice to read it, right?
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.
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."
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."
Last night (night of January 16, well after midnight so technically the 17th), I was using YouTube to listen to the Muse album Black Holes and Revelations, which had been suggested to me by a correspondent (some weeks ago, but I'm slow about getting around to these things. Between "Starlight" and "Supermassive Black Hole," the latter of which has lots of owl imagery in the video, this ad came up. As you can see, I noticed it just in time to screenshot it before it ended.
It's an ad for a lutein supplement, boasting "17% higher absorption," but what caught my eye was the big white number 17 on a green background. You will of course remember this picture from my last post.
I had also posted about the symbol of a horizontal green rectangle above a red one, linked to the green and red doors. In the top right corner of the ad, you can see the Haleon logo, with a horizontal green rectangle between two black ones. "I see a red door, and I want it painted black."
Looking up Haleon, I found that it branched off from a company called GSK. My history shows that I ran the search for Haleon at 4:43 p.m. Then I checked my email and found that I had received an email at 3:42 p.m., just one hour and one minute earlier, from an unrelated company also called GSK -- a local manufacturer I used to do consulting work for many years ago. (In S:E:G:, the letters G and K are 7 and 11, respectively, while S is the infinity sign as used by Leonhard Euler; note the link between Ha-leon and Leon-ha-rd. Leonhard is 77 in S:E:G:.)
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The music video for "Supermassive Black Hole" is very weird. You see a lot of people wearing full-body suits that cover everything. One of them is an obese man whose suit is made to look like an owl, a connection which is made explicit by showing him side-by-side with an actual owl.
Near the end of the video, these people, including the fat owl-man, unzip and remove their bodysuits, revealing that inside they are not flesh-and-blood humans but windows into outer space.
When I was playing the video last night -- or rather very early this morning -- I screenshotted the moment when the unzipping begins, since the lighting makes the bodysuit look green on one side and red on the other.
As you can see, this moment is at 2:43 in the video, and I took the screenshot at 3:42 a.m. -- the same digits in reverse order, and also precisely 12 hours before 3:42 p.m., the time of the GSK email mentioned above.
My post "Break on through to the other side" began with a few epigraphs, the second of which was this quote from "owl guy" Mike Clelland while under hypnosis:
I understand how people take in a story, and how they need a symbol or a sign on the door. But the owl is meaningless to what is on the other side of the door. It’s just the doorway that’s important.
The owl is the right symbol for the door. We are on this side, and EVERYTHING else is on that side of the door. There is is a LOT more! We are in this little tight hallway here, and on the other side of the door is this vastness!
The red and green coloring identifies the bodysuit with the door. Owl features are painted on the bodysuit as "a sign on the door," and when the suit is unzipped -- the door is opened -- on the other side is "EVERYTHING else" -- the universe.
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One more thing: Today I happened to pass by Killin Ur D00dz Cafe and found that it's right next to a building that not only has a green door but appears to be constructed entirely of green doors!
From the conclusion of Mike Clelland's book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee:
[P]ulp sci-fi publisher Ray Palmer . . . said that flying saucers intrude into our lives to make us think. I would amend that to say that they intrude into our lives to make us think deeply. The same could be said for owls. . . .
Those owls at sunset didn't grant me enlightenment or anything so grand, instead they initiated a process of crumbling. Some brittle part of me started falling away and something new has been trying to emerge. . . .
I have changed. I now see magic in the world around me. It's woven into the fabric of everything. This might seem naive, but I see owls, UFOs, and synchronicity as an expression of this magic, all blurring together and playing a similar role. These are deeply challenging ideas, but they are also seductive, and they've been tugging at my soul.
I agree entirely with this assessment, and I find Clelland's formulation of it to be helpfully clarifying. The primary purpose of synchronicity, and of the elusive nonhuman intelligences that are inextricable from it, is to elicit -- patiently, often over the course of many years -- new ways of thinking and of being. Clelland's title refers to messengers, but this is clearly a case in which the medium is the message.
Whitley Strieber has expressed a similar idea many times, saying that the close-encounter experience is primarily "a process of creating questions that can neither be borne nor answered," and that it is in this way that other worlds are helping our own.
I understand what Clelland means when he refers to "some brittle part of me . . . falling away" under the influence of synchronicity (mediated, in his case, by owls). Looking back, I think I can even say that synchronicity had its role to play in awakening me from my dogmatic slumber and leading me by slow degrees out of the narrow desert of dismissive materialism and back into the fold of Christ. I refer not to any particular synchronicity, not to any dramatic "conversion experience," but to a gradual falling away of brittleness through an influence as patient and diffuse as the love of one's parents.
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Despite having a rather idyllic childhood, I secretly spent a rather large portion of it in a state of abject terror. In very early childhood, this took the form of a paralyzing fear of "bad dreams" and of "monkeys" and "bugs" coming into my room at night. This led to insomnia, and when my parents offered the advice that one good way of falling asleep is to close one's eyes and pretend to be asleep, they had no way of knowing that what they were suggesting was absolutely impossible, that I could no more do it than I could jump off a cliff. (My 2013 poem "The Bugs" deals with this chapter in my life.)
Around the age of 11 or 12, I discovered the works of Whitley Strieber, which terrified me more than anything I had ever read and provided a sort of nucleus around which free-floating terror could congeal. As late as my college years, I suffered from an intermittent but extreme fear of the dark which was very difficult to overcome, even though I constantly challenged it by taking a night job and walking home every morning at 4 a.m.
When I became an atheist, fear stopped as if it had been turned off with a tap. (When I was 17, I had written an essay arguing that atheism was a response to the fear of the dark. It's a bit rich that five years later, with zero self-awareness, I myself dealt with my fear of the dark by turning to atheism!) I had decided that I no longer lived in a supernatural world, and the disquieting aspects of the supernatural obligingly withdrew. This disappearance of fear -- not a manic sort of fearlessness at all but a bored fearlessness -- was extremely abrupt, and I noted it at the time and found it somewhat disturbing even though I had to admit it was perfectly rational. (Under atheism, there are no stakes and nothing matters, so what the hell is there to be afraid of?)
Somewhat surprisingly, the return of faith has not brought a return of fear. The supernatural is back, and of course some aspects of it are extremely malevolent, but I'm just not scared of it anymore. It's neither mania nor ennui this time, but just a calm sense of being "persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8:38-39; I think Paul also exhibited non-manic fearlessness). 'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fear relieved.
Why am I writing all this in a post about synchronicity? I don't know, it just seemed relevant somehow.
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I think some people resist synchronicity because it is fundamentally irreverent, blending the absurd with the holy and stubbornly refusing to recognize the demarcation that separates the sacred from the profane. I have sometimes had occasion on this blog to apologize for, well, the vulgarity of some of the sync fairies' links, and of course I've just been going on about how St. Michael's defeat of the Dragon is related to the nonsensical palindrome "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm."
I no longer really object to this, obviously. The Hebrew word for "holy" means "separate," but the English word holy means "whole."
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Another little synchronicity: In this post, I included a link to my old poem "The Bugs," which describes a technique I used to use as a very young child in order to fall asleep without closing my eyes first: visualizing two clouds, one on either side of my head, and trying to focus on them both at the same time. Just before finishing the post, I went into the kitchen and saw that my wife had bought a drink from a tea stand and that the cup was decorated with this image:
Many times now (see "More whiteboard telepathy!" and follow the links), I have had the experience of one of my young students -- always young children, and different ones every time -- writing, drawing, or saying something that seems to have been pulled directly from my own mind, something so specific and bizarre that chance seems to be ruled out as an explanation.
This one is not quite so specific as some of the others, but I though it was worth noting. This is from a highly intelligent nine-year-old I tutor in English. Not quite a child prodigy, but definitely what is called "gifted and talented" (though fortunately her parents, like my own, have been smart enough to keep her far away from those sinister "gifted and talented" programs). Basically, she reads a dozen or so English books every week, and then we talk about them.
For those who came in late, the background is that I have spent several weeks reading a book about owls, which brought with it a large volume of owl-related synchronicities. I have not discussed the book, or owls, with anyone except on my blog, which none of my students read or even know about. I read the book of Kindle, so there's no chance anyone could have seen the cover or anything.
Yesterday, July 30, we were talking about the border between the United States and Mexico, and she said, "I guess if people want to smuggle drugs from Colombia into the United States, they probably try to sneak across that border at night. It's probably pretty hard to guard the whole thing, especially after dark." I said that that stood to reason, and then she joked, "Soooo . . . the border patrol needs to invest in some trained owls!"
Later in the same tutoring session, the conversation had turned to the French and Indian War and how the British victory, and the need to pay for soldiers to garrison their newly annexed territory, had led the king to raise taxes, setting in motion the chain of events that led to the American Revolution. My student said, "So obviously in a situation like that, you're going to need a lot more soldiers -- and owls!"
Unlike the previous reference, this made no sense even as a joke. "Owls?" I said. "Why would they need owls?"
"Well, they could work as alarm clocks to wake up the soldiers, and they could also scare the enemy by hooting."
Owls hoot at night, when people are sleeping, not in the morning, when they want to wake up, so they wouldn't make very effective alarm clocks. However, in The Messengers, Clelland refers four times to owls metaphorically "playing the role of an alarm clock."
On July 28, 2022, I was stopped at a red light when I noticed the text on the back of the T-shirt of the motorcyclist in front of me. It was written in the style of an eye chart, and it said: "Stay with me boy. See the world through the eyes of Mickey. Don't stop looking." I assume this was some sort of mutant Disney knockoff, but in the current synchronistic context I figured "Mickey" (a nickname for Michael) was more likely to be a hawk-eyed archangel than a mouse. Anyway, I took it as an injunction to keep my eyes and mind open.
At the next light, my eyes were drawn as if by magnetism to a license plate that read NPH 421. That means Nephi, of course, an important name in the Book of Mormon, so my first thought was that the numbers were giving chapter and verse. There are four books of Nephi, and none of them has 42 chapters, so I looked up 4:21 in each of the first three books of Nephi. Fourth Nephi is very short and isn't divided into chapters, so I checked 4 Ne. 21. Of the four verses I checked, only one of them struck me as in any way noteworthy:
He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh (2 Ne. 4:21).
I thought that was an odd turn of phrase. In the Bible, the "consuming of flesh" is always associated with burnt offerings, destruction by fire, and horrible plagues. The verse from Nephi made me think of Paul's equally strange statement that "though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing" (1 Cor. 13:3). Paul's other examples of things that are worthless without charity include prophesying, having great faith, feeding the poor, and the like; how did "giving my body to be burned" make it onto that list of good works? How is that even a good work at all? I thought it might be a reference to submitting to fiery martyrdom of the type pioneered by Nero and taken up centuries later by the Inquisition, but 1 Corinthians was written before Nero's accession to the throne, and I don't think "being burned" would have been an understandable reference to martyrdom at that time.
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Then I had the thought that 421 was a year, not a scripture reference. AD 421 is, after all, the very last date in the Book of Mormon chronology, the year in which Moroni, the last surviving Nephite (NPH), finished the book -- an abridgment of the Plates of Nephi, with additions by Mormon and Moroni -- and buried it in the earth.
Then I remembered that in my July 2021 post "In the sync stream" had prominently featured Moroni (both the Nephite and the city in the Comoros) and even mentioned that the "golden plates are supposed to have been buried by Moroni in the Hill Cumorah."
In the opening paragraph of that post, I had written that "when I think Moby-Dick, I think 'The Whiteness of the Whale' and I think 'Loomings.'" Then at the end of the post, I noted seeing the number 142 and feeling it was significant, not knowing why until eventually I "realized that 1 and 42 are the numbers of the two Moby-Dick chapters I mention in the first paragraph."
But I had actually begun the post by mentioning first "The Whiteness of the Whale" (Chapter 42) and then "Loomings" (Chapter 1) -- not 142, but 421. Then in the same post I had gone on to mention, for reasons entirely unrelated to Moby-Dick, Moroni's burying the golden plates -- which is supposed to have occurred in AD 421. Not until now, a year later, did I make the connection.
Moroni, the last survivor of his people, passed on their history to future generations. This is precisely the role played in Moby-Dick by Ishmael, the sole survivor of the wreck of the Pequod. The epilogue begins with an epigram from the Book of Job: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee."
One of the comments on my "In the sync stream" post began: "Interesting. The license plate post was also good."
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So satisfying was that interpretation of NPH 421 -- the last Nephite in the year 421 -- that I dismissed my earlier attempts at chapter-and-verse interpretations as barking up the wrong tree. Then I noticed my July 30 post "And then the message said, 'End of message," which ends with what I admit is a completely unrelated reference to spontaneous human combustion.
Spontaneous human combustion -- doesn't that very obviously sync with "He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh" (2 Ne. 4:21)? Also it's a little known fact that the name Nephi is not original to the Book of Mormon but appears in one of the apocryphal books of the Bible -- as the name not of a person but of a flammable liquid (2 Macc. 1:36). Nephi is the King James rendering; most modern translations have naphtha.
Why does my July 30 post have the title it has? I was posting about how I had just finished reading a book called The Messengers, so "end of message" seemed appropriate. The precise wording, though, is from one of Joe Biden's teleprompter gaffes.
In my December 2020 post "American politician spontaneously combusts!" I describe my absurd but persistent premonition about the spontaneous combustion of Joe Biden (without mentioning Biden by name). Later, in September 2021, I had a dream in which reference was repeatedly made to "Joe Biden, the Human Torch"; days later, Biden suddenly acquired the nickname Brandon, which is French for "firebrand."
My 2020 post quoted an excerpt from Unsong in which George W. Bush bursts into flames after someone hacks his teleprompter and makes him utter a magic word that has that effect. One of the comments to that post said:
After reading the George Bush excerpt, I think 'spontaneous human combustion' might be a metaphor for a politician 'melting down' during a public appearance. Justly or unjustly, Biden is particularly singled out among politicians as someone who relies on a teleprompter to keep on track.
Then, yesterday, without consciously making the connection at all, I published a post with a Biden teleprompter gaffe as a title, and although it is primarily a post about Mike Clelland's book on owls, I included a reference to Unsong and then one to spontaneous human combustion.
Well, I've finally done it: This evening I finished Mike Clelland's book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee -- a title which my readers are surely getting tired of having me mention and quote in every single thing I post here. I don't think I've had such a sync-heavy reading experience since Unsong.
At the end of the book (uh, "spolier alert," I guess?), Clelland relates what he calls his "confirmation experience." This involved seeing in a "psychic flash" of a map.
The only way to describe it is as an instantaneous visual download. I clearly saw a map in my mind with [a] straight yellow line running west to east with three distinct markers on it. I knew this map was southern Utah, the Four Corners area.
After seeing this map, Clelland thought of three extraordinary paranormal experiences he had had in the Four Corners area. Using Google Maps, he placed markers at the sites of these three experiences and found that a 231-mile straight line drawn from one site to the other passed right through the third site, just as he had seen in his "psychic flash."
And "right through" means right through. The precision is unreal.
This made me think of my post "Three in a row," posted while I was reading Clelland's book. On Clelland's map, the three points are not evenly spaced. The middle point is about twice as far from the rightmost point as it is from the leftmost. On July 21, 2022, I took a photo of three heavenly bodies arranged in a straight line, and in this case, too, the middle point (the Moon) is about twice as far from the rightmost point (Jupiter) as from the leftmost (Saturn).
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In unrelated news, I just checked The Higherside Chats today after a few weeks of not doing so and found that the July 21, 2022 episode is called "The Mysterious Reality of Spontaneous Human Combustion." I haven't listened to it yet.
Last night, I read this in Clelland's book about owls:
The woman I spoke with is Jacquelin Smith, and along with having UFO contact experiences, she is an author, psychic and animal communicator. Her first book from 2005 was titled, plainly enough, Animal Communication.
This reminded me that I had on one of my bookshelves a book with the very similar title Animal Speak, by Ted Andrews, which I had picked up for a dollar years ago at a used bookstore but had never so much as opened. Today I decided to take it down from the shelf and see if it had anything interesting to say about owls.
I opened the book at random -- a 383-page book which, the cover promises, covers "creatures great and small" and "includes a comprehensive dictionary of animal, bird, and reptile symbolism" -- and these are the pages I got:
That's right, I just happened to open up directly to the first page of the entry for "Owl." Either the book's previous owner consulted the owl article a lot, or else it's just one of those weird coincidences.
Skimming what Mr. Andrews has to say about owls, I don't find too much that's new to me. However, a few passages caught my eye. The first:
To the early Christians and Gnostics, [the owl] is associated with Lilith, the first wife of Adam who refused to be submissive to him.
In my last post, I said that Adam is (according to Joseph Smith) the same personage as Michael the Archangel, and the title of the post was "Immediate confirmation that Michael is Mr. Owl." One possible meaning of the title "Mr. Owl" would be a man who is married to an owl.
Andrews also mentions how owls blink:
Like humans, they blink by closing the upper eyelids, giving them a human expression which has added to the mysticism of owls.
In "The Locust Grove crop circle," where I first proposed that Michael was Mr. Owl, I said that Michael means "Who is like God?" I wanted to add a picture of an owl with the word "Who?" so I searched the Web for one. As it happens, I ended up choosing an animated gif of an owl blinking.
Finally, this passage suggests that "Mr. Owl" might not actually be an owl at all but a hawk.
Some owls have a balancing raptor. The owl is lunar and nocturnal, while some raptors are diurnal and solar. Owls and some hawks will share the same territory, one hunting and using it by day, and the other by night. They don't necessarily get along, but they do tolerate each other in varying degrees. These can be seen as balancing medicines, and rituals and meditations can be used with the owl and its solar equivalent. They can be used to balance the male and female.
There follows a table of owls species, each with its corresponding species of hawk or falcon.
Of all the Archangels, Michael is the head of this order. He is often depicted with sword in hand. He appears to me as bright and shimmering golden energy (this color is associated with the higher heavenly energy chakras located well above the head), as an image of a brilliant golden wing, in human form dressed in white with wings and carrying a sword or glowing with a gold aura, and in the form of birds of prey, such as falcons and hawks.
More syncs? More syncs. True player don't get no time to sleep. I see there are some comments on my last post already, but I haven't read them yet. I need to get this typed up first.
In my last post, I identified the constellations Hercules and Draco with St. Michael and the Dragon. I further identified the Dragon with the Metal Worm and Michael with Mr. Owl (as in the palindrome "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm") -- this latter connection being made on the rather flimsy grounds that Michael’s name means "Who is like God?"
Shortly after posting that, I went outside to take out the trash. I noticed a big gecko on a wall I was walking past, and I stopped to watch it for a bit, thinking, "Hey, it’s a dragon!" This is uncharacteristic behavior; geckos are extremely common in this part of the world, and ordinarily I would no more take notice of one than I would of a cockroach. This one felt like a significant "dragon," though, and I sort of expected something synchromystically relevant to happen with it. Nothing did, though, so after a minute or so I went on my way.
Later, I checked my blog for new comments, and then I checked the stats, which I don't do very often. I saw that I had had about 12,000 hits last month and about 10,000 so far this month. I used the calculator app on my phone to work out about how many hits per day that was.
Then I started reading, you guessed it, Mike Clelland's The Messengers. I came to a section with the heading "333 and orchestrated clues." Seeing that numerologically significant number reminded me that I wanted to check the gematria value of a particular word. I brought up the calculator app to do so and found that my last calculation was still on the screen:
So that got my attention. In this section, Clelland tells the story of a woman who kept running into the number 333 and the time 3:33. It seemed significant, but she couldn't figure out what it meant. Then, on what I infer from astrological clues given later in the text was January 24, 2003, she had a close-range sighting of a large triangular UFO with three lights on it, and the 333 syncs abruptly stopped. This woman was an astrologer, and later she was browsing her ephemeris and noticed this:
For the entirety of 2003, the number 3:33 appeared just one and only time for the Sun, the brightest and most important astrological luminary, and this fell on the very day of her triangle sighting.
Of course in the course of a year, the Sun will pass the 3°33′ mark in each of the 12 zodiac signs, but the standard Swiss ephemeris only gives the planets' positions for midnight Greenwich time each day of the year. That's how I inferred that her triangle sighting was on January 24 (Clelland only says "a winter's evening in 2003"); the emphemeris gives the Sun's position for that date as 3Aqu33′56.
The woman was still at a loss regarding the meaning of 333 until her epiphany finally came in the strangest way imaginable:
Kaye looked at a fish aquarium in the office. She was shocked to see that the little catfish Draco had been chewing on his favorite treat, an English cucumber. She said, "It was almost like a magnet drew my eyes to the cucumber!"
The fish had eaten out the middle of the cucumber slice, so there was now a perfectly formed hole in the precise shape of an equilateral triangle. Seeing this, she realized instantly how all the clues were related and couldn't believe that she had missed something so obvious.
Sounds like one of those koan stories, doesn't it? "At that moment, Kaye became enlightened."
This first caught my attention because of the name Draco (italicized in the original), since I had just posted about the constellation Draco. Then I noticed a really weird coincidence: Kaye saw that a catfish had eaten a triangle out of a cucumber. It just so happens that I have in my house a cat called Triangle and another cat called Cucumber.
And finally we come to the Michael part. Clelland comments:
While there is no owl in this account, it does show up indirectly. The catfish shares its name with Draco the Dragon, a constellation that wraps itself around Polaris, the North Star. In Greek legend, Draco was a dragon killed by the goddess Minerva and thrown into the heavens where we still see it each night. Minerva, as we know, has a companion little owl.
That's actually just one of many myths relating to Draco (others identify it with Ladon, the dragon that guarded the Golden Apples and was killed by Hercules). But Clelland identifies the (female) conqueror of Draco with the owl. That makes Michael, the male conqueror of the the Dragon, Mr. Owl.
Hercules killed the dragon in order to secure the Golden Apples from the Garden of the Hesperides. This combination of garden, serpent, and forbidden apples naturally leads one to identify Hercules with Adam. The Locust Grove crop circle was in Adams County, Ohio; and Mormonism holds that Adam is the same person as the Archangel Michael.
What time did I read this story in Clelland's book? Well, my calculator screenshot was at 2:06, and I took a screenshot of the bit about Draco and Minerva at 2:29. That means that at 2:27 -- exactly 3 hours and 33 minutes after posting about Draco in my last post -- I was reading this Clelland story about Draco and the significance of 3:33.
I was going to post all this last night, but it was already very late, so I decided to go to bed and leave it for the morning. I had only been in bed for a few minutes when my wife (who is even more of a night owl than myself) called me to come downstairs. There was a baby gecko in the living room, and she wanted me to catch it and take it outside before the cats killed it.
How's that for a nice synchronistic punctuation mark?
I will never understand how the YouTube algorithm works, but last night it decided (correctly, as it turns out) that I wanted to watch this:
The video is aptly summarized by one of the comments: "I like how it was acting so mischievous. 'I'm not doing anything... Just sniffin' the wind... But now I'M CHARGING- ok ok... Backing away... Or am I-? Yeah I am...'"
Today, I was reading -- well, you know by now what I was reading, right? Am I ever going to finish that book, you ask? According to Kindle, I'm 76% of the way there. In this passage, one of Clelland's contacts reports a dream:
The dream started in a bland suburban setting, and I was standing out in the driveway of a house that I assume was mine. The other homes were spaced sort of far apart, it was summer and the lawns were green. The sun was low in the sky and everything was calm. Then I saw there was a grizzle bear poking around on the lawn across the street. At first I didn't feel nervous or threatened, it was something amazing to see. Then this big thing was lumbering towards me, and I retreated into the garage.
I hurried into the house using the inside garage door, only to realize there were about six other doors all lined up. The bear came into the garage and tried to break through each door. The doors, from one to the other, got progressively more flimsy.
Suddenly I was hearing the hooting cry of an owl, steady and clear. I could hear it as this bear was pulling at this thin sheet of plywood with its claws.
It was at that point I woke up, but the hooting continued. I lay there in bed, with the pale light of dawn easing through the only window in my bedroom. I was hearing the unmistakable call of a great horned owl, and it must have been on the telephone pole right outside my window.
Let me state this clearly: A real owl woke me up right as a grizzly bear in my dream was about to rip down a door!
Like the video, this dream begins with the bear just "poking around" in a non-menacing way, and then it suddenly charges. I was also astonished to see a reference to six doors in this book about owls, since a restaurant called Six Owl Door (in English; just Six Doors in Chinese) recently entered the sync-stream.
Here is how Clelland's correspondent interpreted his dream:
This dream was awash in symbolism. Maybe the bear is the truth and the flimsy doors are the crumbling barriers between me and that truth? The owl was saying -- quite literally -- wake up! Bear is bare, the naked truth. Bear also means to suffer a burden. Anyway, this was sure how it felt.
Later the same day he received this account, Clelland heard from a friend who related a very similar grizzly bear dream he had dreamed the same night as the other person. There's no owl in this one, but the recurrence of the grizzly, the door, and the garage is uncanny.
This guy's dream starts in an idyllic forest where he sees a grizzly bear on the opposite side of a river, it's jsut sniffing around and he feels no threat. The whole scene is beautiful and majestic.
The next thing he remembers is a small house, he walks up to the side door and knocks on it. He peers through a window into the house and sees a tiny woman walking up to the door, and walking behind her is this massive grizzly bear. She opens the door and the bear comes outside. . . . He continues moving away, and the bear follows him and they both end up right in front of the garage. The bear has done nothing threatening, it is just lumbering along and sniffing around, but Jack is very aware of the danger. Then the bear looks up at him, he thinks, "Oh fuck!" and he wakes up.
"I'm not doing anything... Just sniffin' the wind... But now I'M CHARGING!"
The "tiny woman" who opens the door is an interesting point, too.
I understand how people take in a story, and how they need a symbol or a sign on the door. But the owl is meaningless to what is on the other side of the door. It’s just the doorway that’s important.
The owl is the right symbol for the door. We are on this side, and EVERYTHING else is on that side of the door. There is is a LOT more! We are in this little tight hallway here, and on the other side of the door is this vastness!
Ere I knew, I had walked to the door, and seated myself with my ears against it, in order to catch every syllable of the revelation from the unseen outer world. And now I heard each word distinctly. The singer seemed to be standing or sitting near the tower, for the sounds indicated no change of place. . . .
Hardly knowing what I did, I opened the door. Why had I not done so before? I do not know.
-- George MacDonald, Phantastes
There's a subtle but discernible sense of frustration from the synchronicity fairies these days, as if they have been trying and trying for some time to nudge me into taking some particular decisive step, and I keep not doing it because, in my mortal obtuseness, I haven't the slightest idea what it is that I'm supposed to do. (Honestly, I don't think they know, either, which is why they can't spell it out for me.) And if the sync fairies ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
Last night, a bit before two in the morning, I was out walking through the dark neighborhood, with the old Doors song "Break On Through (To the Other Side)" running through my mind. The combination of the lyrics and the band name ("There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors") made me think of Mike Clelland's owl as a symbol on the door, "and EVERYTHING else is on that side of the door." At the very moment I was thinking that, I turned my head and saw this:
It's the front door of one of my neighbors. I've passed it thousands of times without ever noticing anything. Can you see what I saw last night -- the stylized form of an owl, complete with facial disks, ears, beak, and folded wings? -- and perhaps, dangling from the beak, a playful hint of a metal worm?
During my lunch break today, I read a bit from Clelland's book. Specifically, I read this:
I've listened to a lot of people tell their owl experiences, and even though these are just stories of people seeing a bird, they almost always get described as a blessing, an honor, a gift, or an outright spiritual event. Almost all the accounts I receive have a similar mystical undercurrent. For me, the consistency of these stories represents a kind of confirmation, that these experiences go way beyond just owls and tap into something much deeper.
In the afternoon, I opened an English textbook to see what pages I needed to assign for homework. The first page to assign was this one:
Clelland wrote that people always describe seeing an owl as "an honor." Here, on a English test, the word honor is missing from a sentence, and one of the possible choices to fill the gap is owl.
Just after writing the above, I had the sudden thought that I ought to do a one-card pull from the Rider-Waite deck -- but then I immediately thought, Why bother? I already know it's going to be the Eight of Wands (the decisive action, strike-while-the-iron-is-hot card), and that's not helpful.
I ended up doing the pull anyway, though, and surprised myself by getting not the Eight of Wands but the closely related Eight of Cups.
That's an interesting twist, anyway. The sync fairies always do have a few surprises up their sleeves. I'll have to think about that card for a while. For starters, what comes to mind is how much its mirror image suggests the Flammarion engraving.
I don't think I'd ever made that connection before. It seems obvious now.
Please don’t eat me, Mr. Owl! I’m just a friendly owl like yourself -- definitely not a delicious metal worm!
-- suspiciously worm-like metallic object
Yesterday I posted "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm," having thought of that palindrome while reading Mike Clelland's The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee. The associative link was, of course, owls. Little did I realize that a metal worm was also shortly to make an appearance in Clelland's book!
Today, I read a few pages and then came to this:
Metal object says it's an owl
I heard this from a woman who described a very odd nighttime event that happened when she was about five years old. She was awake and lying in bed alone in her room when she saw a metal object zip down from the sky and clamp itself onto the outside of her window. She tried to scream for her mother, when a voice spoke in her head, "Do not be afraid, I am only a friendly owl."
She knew it was no owl, but all the fear left when she heard those words. She stayed still in the bed and stared at it. She was looking at a round lens on a curved metal stalk. . . .
The association of an owl with a metal object would have been a mildly interesting coincidence by itself, but Clelland includes a sketch of this object by the woman who saw it, and I'm going to call it like it is. This isn't just some generic "metal object" -- it's what you would call a metal worm.
Some months before all this owl business started, one of my students noticed that racecar spelled in reverse is racecar. I told her that this was called a palindrome and gave another example: the sentence "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm."
This morning, while I was reading Mike Clelland's book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee, that palindrome came back into my mind, and it occurred to me to wonder if it might mean anything.
For starters, what's a "metal worm"? Well, worm can mean "dragon." In D&D, "chromatic" dragons (black, blue, green, red, etc.) are evil, and "metallic" dragons (gold, silver, bronze, etc.) are good. The king of the metallic dragons -- the Metal Worm par excellence -- is the Wyrmking Bahamut. The name Bahamut is taken from Arabic mythology and is cognate to the Hebrew Behemoth. In the Arabic version, though, Bahamut is a giant fish, and Kuyutha (generally assumed to be a corruption of Leviathan) is a giant bull, reversing the Hebrew identities.
So the Metal Worm corresponds to Behemoth, but Behemoth-as-Leviathan, Behemoth as a whale. The name Bahamut evokes both of these mythical monsters as one.
Regular readers will get where I'm going with this. In my April 1 post "Call me Ishmael," I discussed a D&D monster called a behemoth, described as "a killer whale with four stubby legs," and connected it to the then-ongoing sync-stream relating to the many-eyed whale of John Dee.
This little train of thought, taking me from "Mr. Owl" to a killer whale, had taken place while I was reading The Messengers. At this point I returned my attention to the book, turned the "page" (virtually; I was using the Kindle app), and saw that -- completely unexpectedly in a book about owls and UFOs -- the next section bore the heading "Orcas in Puget Sound." It related a story about how "approximately three dozen orcas surrounded a commuter ferry as it crossed Puget Sound . . . carrying sacred tribal artifacts" from a Seattle museum back to the homeland of the Suquamish tribe. What was this story even doing in this particular book? The owl connection was tenuous indeed:
The orcas, like the owls, are animals considered devoid of any higher consciousness by the watchdogs of our consensus reality. But nonetheless they are showing up as totems at an important moment, they are presenting themselves as a beautiful example of this attuned symbolic power. This wasn't a dream vision of orcas, they were physically there, playing the role of escort for something sacred on its journey home.
In other words, this story is inserted more or less randomly in a book about owls. Whales are never mentioned again, although their similarity to owls may be deeper than Clelland himself notes. The book is called Messengers because that is one of the traditional roles of the owl in mythology: The owl flies into the dark, representing the unseen realm, and returns with a message. Likewise, the whale dives deep into the sea and, unlike most marine animals, returns regularly to the surface. It, too, would make a good mythological "messenger."
If the Metal Worm is Bahamut, alias Leviathan, the statement that "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm" takes on an added significance -- because one of the things the Bible says about the Leviathan is that God will give it to his people to eat. "Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness" (Ps. 74:14). "Rabbi Johanan says: In the future, the Holy One, Blessed by He, will make a feast for the righteous from the flesh of the leviathan" (Bava Batra 75a).
Those who eat the Metal Worm are (a) the people inhabiting the wilderness and (b) the righteous in the Messianic Age. The owl is a proverbial creature of the wilderness in the Bible. The Psalmist laments, "I am like an owl of the desert" (Ps. 102:6). Jeremiah says, "Therefore the wild beasts of the desert with the wild beasts of the islands shall dwell there, and the owls shall dwell therein" (Jer. 50:39). And who shall inherit the Messianic Age? According to Daniel, "they that be wise" (Dan. 12:3).
In "Lots of owls that fit just perfectly, and I wanna know Y!" I quoted a passage from Mike Clelland's book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee in which someone reports a a dream of "opening her closet and seeing a bunch of owls all lined up on a shelf . . . they all fit so well in that shelf."
Clelland's book stresses the links between owls and gray aliens, and so this dream made me think of a passage in Whitley Strieber's Transformation. He wakes up to find himself walking along a corridor, led by two blue aliens.
The corridor we were in was a neutral gray-tan in color and curved gracefully upward and around to the left. Along the inner wall were large drawers outlined in dark brown, with a round knob in the middle of each.
He is led into a large room full of aliens with translucent white skin and an air of military formality, sitting at tables, and they ask him to explain why the British Empire collapsed. As he does so, he becomes aware of their thoughts telepathically.
"Isn't he wonderful!" "How full of facts!" "How learned!" There was an ugly edge of irony to these thoughts -- which I felt rather than heard -- that was cold and hard and true. I stood there writhing inwardly.
After this speech, during which he feels that he is the object of harsh judgment and sarcasm, he is led out of the room by the two blue beings again.
We were going down the curving corridor again when one of the blue beings . . . pulled open one of the drawers. In that drawer were stacks of bodies like their own, encased in what looked like cellophane. Their eyes were open, their mouths wide as if with surprise. I did not know what to make of it. The oddest thing was the way the drawer was opened with a prideful flourish. I was being shown something the two of them clearly thought was wonderful.
When I read about the owls packed onto a shelf in a closet, I thought of those alien bodies stacked in drawers.
Later, as reported in the same post, I connected the owls in the closet with a video my wife told me she had seen of lots of baby owls packed into a box.
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In "Two videos of rehabilitated baby owls, sent 42 minutes apart," I reported that my wife sent me the video that she had told me about, just 42 minutes after I received another video about baby owls. This first video was about how baby owls had been mistaken for aliens, reinforcing the "owls = aliens" theme.
At the end of that post, I noted an incident that felt potentially significant, as if it were going to be part of a yet-to-unfold synchronicity.
While on the road -- just after reading the above and just before typing it up here -- I saw someone wearing a T-shirt that said "THE TIME IS NOW." There's a clock on my motorcycle dash, so I glanced down at it; it read 14:14. The number struck me as significant, though I'm not sure why yet. We'll see if anything comes of it.
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During my lunch break today, I listened to part of a podcast in which Clelland was interviewed. In the course of the interview, he describes a hypnosis session in which he relived one of his alien encounters. Since transcribing from podcasts is a nuisance, I will quote from a text version of the same story posted on his blog. Yvonne is the hypnotist.
Clelland describes suddenly finding himself walking down a curved hallway, flanked by aliens, exactly like Strieber in the Transformation account. (Strieber's appearance in the hallway was also sudden; he describes it as being as if he had woken up in mid-stride.)
Mike: I’m walking in a hallway.
Yvonne: Can you describe the hallway.
Mike: The floor is flat but the walls are all curved . . . I don’t know how I got in there, all of a sudden I'm just walking there. I'm not alone. They [aliens] are on either side, on one side or the other, there is either one or two on one side, or one or two on the other. They are on the side of me. They aren’t in front of me, and they aren’t behind me.
He includes an image recreating the hallway as he saw it, and the color is the same "neutral gray-tan" described by Strieber.
Like Strieber, he is led into a room full of aliens sitting at tables. Although Clelland is not asked to lecture on British history, he reports the same feeling as Strieber, of being the center of attention and of being judged.
Mike: It’s foggy. They are all bald. And they are not moving, they are sitting very still. It’s like a trial, or like a meeting, and they are all looking at me. I don’t think I’m at a podium, but it feels like that kind of thing. It feels like a trial.
(long pause)
Yvonne: Can you describe what is being communicated?
Mike: That now is the time, and I agreed to this, and I'm here because now is the time.
The italics are Clelland's: now is the time. When I heard that on the podcast, it really got my attention because I had so recently noted "THE TIME IS NOW" as potentially synchronistically significant, and this was in connection with Clelland and Strieber. Clelland goes on to explain to the hypnotist, "It feels like the message is YOUR MISSION STARTS NOW."
Then they jump to the subject of owls:
At this point Yvonne changes the subject. Before the session started I’d asked her to bring up the subject of owls. I requested that she ask me, “What’s the meaning of the owls?”
Yvonne: As they are communicating this to you, do you feel your connection with owls is part of what you are supposed to do, part of your mission?
(long pause)
Mike: I don't think we talk about owls.
Yvonne: What sense do you get about your connection with owls?
Mike: I get that the owl isn’t important. The owl is like a symbol, or like a sign on a door. It’s just a sign on a door and what’s behind the door is what’s important. . . .
At the end of the day, I passed a hot pot restaurant on my way home. I guess it's always been there, but its name struck me as significant today.
I've been reading Mike Clellan's The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee using the Kindle app on my phone.
I at first read this as "a woman who saw a white owl while carrying a jar full of experiencers" -- the UFO world's answer to "basket of deplorables"?
I did a double take, of course, and my second impression was "full of John Mack's experiences" -- written on slips of paper or something and put in a jar? That didn't make much sense, either, and I finally read the passage correctly.
(The two misreadings and the final, correct one all took place in a tiny sliver of a second -- much, much faster than it takes to read this account of them.)
Apparently I had combined car with the ving (visually similar to ying) just below it to create the phantom word carrying; and then, since people don't carry cars, the word ending in -ar had been emended to jar. I find it interesting that car was apparently read twice, contributing to both carrying and jar. Then the second misreading was influenced by John Mack's located directly below experiences.
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I've included more context than seems necessary in the image above because I want to show that immediately after this twice-misread passage was a discussion of certain numbers occurring often in connection with owl and UFO experiences. The first one mentioned is 11:11, but then Clelland goes on to say, "Other number sequences are also reported. 3:33 and 12:34 are often noted."
