William, meet Nile

Notes on a dream I had on August 3, 2011:

I'm in a car, driving down the road very fast. The scenery is so covered with clouds that it looks like the view from a plane, except that the clouds are occasionally broken by wooded hills and crags.

Two voices -- apparently of people in the car with me, but I don't see them. In these notes I'll call them A and B.

A says, "In Chinese we say 'foothills' -- is it the same?"

I say, "Yeah, for the small ones." (We just passed an enormous crag with a couple of very, very tall trees.)

A says, "The small ones?"

B, referring to me, says, "Yeah, he believes in much bigger things, like that tree." (When he says "much bigger things," I understand him to be insinuating that I believe in God.)

After a pause, I say, as if making a difficult but necessary confession, "I once saw a bear as tall as that tree." (The bear I picture when I say this is black.)

They say, "What? No way! Come on…"

"I saw it," I insist.

"Are you sure?"

"I saw it. I was there. And it was standing right by the tree."

They still don't believe me, but I still insist: "Come on, why is it so hard to believe? Why can't a bear be that tall? Dinosaurs were that tall!" (Actually, dinosaurs were not that tall. The tree in question is a good 30 meters high.)

Later, in a hypnopompic state, I discovered the name of one of my interlocutors:

After I woke up (or so I thought), I did as Dunne recommends and, with my eyes still closed, reviewed the details of my dreams so as to establish them more firmly in my memory before they disappeared. Realizing that I didn't know who I had been talking to in the car, I thought to myself, "I don't know his name."

In response, another mental voice immediately said, "I don't know his name. Hey, what's your name?"

A third mental voice answered. What he said was originally garbled and hard to understand, but after a second it became clear: "My name is -- Nile."

Why am I thinking of a dream I had more than 12 years ago? Because I just read this little exchange in The Tower, Colin Wilson's second Spider World book:

Niall asked: "What are you called?"

"Bill."

"That is a strange name."

"No, it's not. Where I come from it's a perfectly normal name. What's yours?"

"Niall."

"That's not a name, that's a river!"

This appearance of a character named Bill who knows of the River Nile is the first clear indication of a connection between Spider World and the world we know.

Incidentally, a slightly earlier dream, on July 7, 2011, had also featured the name Nile in the context of driving a car with two unknown speakers:

I'm driving my car down a broad, slowly winding road in a slightly hilly, grassy rural area. The different areas I drive through are physical spaces but are also different schools of philosophy and perhaps also literary or artistic movements. (My general impression was clearly that I was driving through schools of philosophy, not literature, but when I try to remember any of the specific areas I drove through, the first thing that comes to mind is "Romanticism.")

Someone asks, "Did you find the solution of the Nile?"

Someone else answers, "No, I didn’t get that far yet." (It's not at all clear who is speaking or even whether or not I am one of the speakers.)

I think to myself, "That's appropriate, because the Nile is a geographic place, but a solution is something you find in philosophy."

 Actually, the Nile itself might be termed a "liquid solution":

Note added (1:50 p.m.): One of the first comments under that King Friday video is "Mr. Rogers, I presume" -- a reference to Dr. Livingstone and his quest to find the source of the Nile. When I wrote my "Milkommen" post a few days ago, I looked up references to the "milk of the word" in the New Testament and found this:

As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ (1 Pet. 2:1-5).

More syncs related to the "Glove Puppet" video and crop circles

It turns out (see Debbie's comment here) that my most recent reference to the Locust Grove crop circle (pdf), in "Michael the glove puppet and X the Owl," was posted on the 19th anniversary of the appearance of that formation on August 24, 2003. On the same date in 2004 a very similar formation appeared in Miamisburg, Ohio (pdf).

The glove puppet referenced in the title of that post is from an episode of the British TV show Pipkins. As WanderingGondola pointed out in a comment, the broadcaster's logo features a vesica piscis -- actually, two overlapping vesicae, each with a circle inscribed in it to make an eye shape (as in the Locust Grove formation), and these circles overlap to form a third vesica. The whole thing bears more than a passing resemblance to the 2004 Miamisburg crop formation.

Here's a schematic representation of the geometry of the ATV logo, which is based on four overlapping circles forming two vesicae piscium in which smaller circles are inscribed.

There's another well-known logo that approximates this same geometry pretty closely.

WanderingGondola also calls attention to two other interesting features of the Pipkins video. At the end of the glove puppet story, Johnny asks Moony to ask Michael to say the word it's, which he does. Then a series of images of clocks flashes on the screen for a few seconds, and then the word Time. Johnny then appears, completing the sentence: "[It's time] for me to make a glove puppet."

This fits with recent syncs involving such phrases as "It's time," "Now is the time," "The time is now," and "Time's up." (See "Owl time, and cold noodles." I notice now that the owl featured on that post is blue, like X and Meneer de Uil.)

Also, the credits at the end feature a name which is interesting in the context of the Mormon doctrine that Adam, the first man, is the same individual as Michael the Archangel.

WanderingGondola also notes that X the Owl get his name from the word escape, mispronounced by Daniel Striped Tiger as X-scape, and that Xscape also happens to be the name of a posthumously released Michael Jackson song and album. Check out what, according to IMDb, Michael Eve was doing just before his work on Pipkins.

Of course the series is a decade too early to have anything to do with Michael Jackson's Thriller, but the name is still quite a coincidence. It's not a just a Michael Jackson album; it's the Michael Jackson album, the only one a non-fan like myself would be able to name off the top of my head.

Michael Eve also worked on a series called Knock on Any Door in 1966. In the O. Henry story "The Green Door," the protagonist, Rudolf Steiner (no relation!) is handed a mysterious card with "The Green Door" written on it, and responds by entering a nearby apartment building, seeing a green door, and knocking on it. Only much later does he discover that all the doors in the building are green, and that he could have knocked on any one of them.

Michael the glove puppet and X the Owl

Back on August 17, Bruce Charlton posted an episode from the old children's TV show Pipkins (which I had never heard of), in which Hartley Hare buys a glove puppet named Michael and uses it to "be naughty" -- bonking someone on the head, stealing food, etc. -- always saying, "It wasn't me! It was Michael!" 

I didn’t actually watch the video until a couple of days ago. The name Michael caught my attention, of course, given the recent syncs related to an archangel by that name, but I couldn't see any connection between an angel and a glove puppet used by a hare as an excuse for "being naughty." Then I went back on YouTube to watch it again, searching for the video instead of clicking Bruce's link. I got a different video -- identical to Bruce's, except that it begins with Hartley announcing, "This episode is called 'The Glove Puppet.' He's called Michael after our director" -- meaning Michael Jeans, the creator of the show.

So in a way it really was Michael doing all those naughty things! Michael the puppet is controlled by Hartley Hare, who is himself a puppet controlled by Nigel Plaskitt, who is an actor saying and doing as directed by -- Michael!

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After writing the above, I took a break to do some simple housework and put some music on. It only took a few minutes, so I only listened to one song:

I think of this as basically Linkin Park (plus Mike Shinoda, who is also Linkin Park) -- but the instrumentals and some of the background vocals are from Train, a group I know only for that awful song that sounds like Dobie Gray minus the soul. I looked up the Train song used in the above video. It's crap, too -- as usual, Kill_mR_DJ redeems it -- but the name caught my attention: "Angel in Blue Jeans." Fancy running into a song called that just after discovering that Pipkins was created and directed by someone called Michael Jeans!

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The general appearance of Michael the glove puppet, particularly his very large nose, made me think of another such puppet: Lady Elaine Fairchild from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

Michael (left) and Lady Elaine

I hadn't thought about Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in ages, and looking up images of Lady Elaine led me to a character I had completely forgotten about: X the Owl, the blue owl who lives in a tree, says "How in the world are ya?" and takes correspondence courses from O.C.S.

This got my attention not because of the general owl theme in recent syncs, but because I have specifically connected Mr. Owl (from the palindrome) with Michael the Archangel. I first made this connection in "The Locust Grove crop circle," the original link being the word who. Owls say "who," and the name Michael means "Who is like God?"

This morning (August 24) I received an email from Debbie with the subject line "Strange Owl Synchronicity." She had stopped at a gas station near Cincinnati (and therefore not far from Locust Grove) and found that someone had drawn an owl on a brick wall at one of the pumps.

Just above this owl, on the white material at the top of the wall, someone had written "WHO?" -- with an X inscribed in the O.

If memory serves, this is only the second time in my life anyone has emailed me a photo of graffiti. The first time was three days previous, on August 21, when an anonymous correspondent sent me this:

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Note added: How did I miss this little sync wink in the Pipkins video?

It's not just that there's a green door; there's a moment when there's nothing but a green door on the screen.