In my March 19 post "
Meteor sync," I relate how seeing a peculiar "squiggly" meteor made me think of a similarly peculiar description of a comet I had once read. I tracked down this comet reference and found it on p. 100 of Whitley Strieber's 1997 book
The Secret School. (That was the year of Hale-Bopp and Heaven's Gate, which may have influenced Strieber in his emphasis on comets.) While trying to find that passage, I also ran across a reference on p. 103 to being "covered with scorpions," which also fit in with the meteor-related cluster of synchronicities. (Read that post for details.)
Meanwhile, back in the real world, it just so happens that NASA has recently discovered a tiny asteroid that has been orbiting the earth for a few years, and the press is hyping it a "second moon" despite its diminutive size (just a few meters wide).
On March 22, reader and pen friend Debbie (Ra1119bee) left a comment on "Two moons" recounting one of her own moon-related dreams.
On July 14, 2014 I had a dream I titled; Moon River.
Here's the dream:
I recall being at this hippie like market place ( kinda like Yellow Springs ). I recall being on a bus with other people ( we were riding throughout the city like Market place ) … when all of a sudden there was a deadening silence.
I recall it felt out of the ordinary… and then sure enough we could see ( from the bus ) people scattering throughout the village like city, running everywhere.
[. . .]
I walked around and could see large billows of smoke and fire in the distance and the billows were everywhere.
[. . .]
I then began asking different people if they would help me get home. I said over and over again "Are you going NORTH? I have to go North to Clinton County where I live." I saw people getting in train boxcars traveling somewhere , but I don’t know where they were going.
At one point we all were looking at the sky and we saw the Moon come back ( I was excited because I felt the reason why the chaos happened was because of something having to do with the change of planet placement in the sky, and the reappearance of the Moon meant everything would get back to normal.
The Moon began falling, coming closer and closer to Earth, however all of a sudden the Moon fell into the water..
When I read that, I realized that the last part -- about the moon coming closer and closer to earth and falling into the water -- was quite similar to something else I had seen while looking for the comet quote in The Secret School. In fact, it begins on p. 103, just three paragraphs after the scorpion bit. Strieber is describing something he saw in a VR helmet at the age of nine, which he later inferred was supposed to be the Permian-Triassic extinction event.
Then a huge moon began rising, a moon so large that there was the illusion that I was looking down at it and would fall into its immense, bleak surface or be impaled on its mountains. These were clearly visible. They looked craggy and brutal.
In the moon's light, large shapes took whirring flight, their wings rattling like New Year's noisemakers. They drew my eyes upward, but I could not see them clearly. The sight of that ancient moon fully risen was awesome indeed. It has been hanging in my memory ever since, glaring with yellow-golden light. It easily filled a quarter of the sky. . . .
The moon raced up the sky, going so fast that it made me feel as if I was moving instead. Trailing it, I saw another object, a silver moonlet, star-shining.
As in Debbie's dream, the moon is abnormally close to the earth. As in the NASA report referenced in my earlier two-moon post, the moon is accompanied by a much smaller object which is characterized as a second moon ("moonlet").
As Strieber's VR vision continues, his point of view changes; he is no longer on the earth but on the "moonlet" itself.
What I saw was that the whole firmament was filled by a wall of dark blue. For a moment I did not know what to make of it. I thought that I was in a huge room -- but then I realized that the "wall" was composed of water, because I could see long, wrinkled lines of waves. . . . I got the sense that I was falling from a great height. I concluded that I must be on a meteor. I assumed that it was the small silver object I had seen near the moon when I'd looked up. So I had been transported from the surface of the Earth to the surface of a small asteroid that was floating between the Earth and the moon. . . .
The planet below began to get much larger. Because of a movie I had seen, When Worlds Collide, I was well aware of the meaning of this phenomenon. This was a cosmic collision, just like what was happening on a more massive scale in the colliding galaxies. It was the end of the world, I decided.
This second moon is now characterized as a meteor, another link to my "Meteor Sync" post, and like the moon in Debbie's dream, it is falling into the water.
⁂
Debbie's mention of Yellow Springs, Ohio, also got my attention. My first thought was that it was the birthplace of Jorn Barger, the pioneering blogger, whose work I used to follow quite closely in the 1990s.
My second thought was that my earlier two-moon post had been about parallel worlds, and that back in my early teens (in Ohio, though far from Yellow Springs) my D&D friends and I had invented a setting featuring two parallel worlds connected by yellow hot springs which served as portals.
We were very into the Dark Sun campaign setting -- a world called Athas, which had ages ago been transformed by the side effects of magic into a vast desert. All the standard fantasy races (elves, dwarves, etc.) had adapted to this new setting, changing almost beyond recognition, and of course there were plenty of horrible desert monsters. (How this blasted wasteland was able to support so many enormous monsters was never quite made clear.)
The original Dark Sun handbook contained this evocative description of a boiling yellow lake.
The Lake of Golden Dreams lies on the western side of the Smoking Crown, where a thick yellowish steam constantly rises from its boiling waters. Where the yellow water is not too deep, it is possible to see that the bottom of the lake is laced with hundreds of tunnels and passageways. According to rumor, these tunnels lead to an incredible city that lies at the heart of the Smoking Crown. It is difficult to say whether there is any truth to this story, however; those who have survived the scalding waters long enough to swim into the tunnels have never returned.
We decided that what was in those tunnels was a trans-dimensional portal to another boiling yellow lake in a different world. Dune Freak Lake was on another planet, on a large subarctic island inhabited primarily by the distant descendants of Athasian creatures that had somehow managed to survive the boiling lake long enough to pass through the portal. Like fish evolving into terrestrial animals and then back into ichthyosaurs and dolphins, the inhabitants of New Athas were subarctic-adapted descendants of desert-adapted descendants of standard fantasy.
⁂
Debbie titled her dream "Moon River" -- after the song Henry Mancini wrote for the film
Breakfast at Tiffany's. In my June 11, 2021 post "
Synchronicity: The locusts of Joel, and the traveling man," I mentioned that when I was a child we referred to a particular sort of grasshopper as Breakfast at Tiffany's. In that same post, I quote another Strieber book: "She asked me if I was going west. I said, 'No, I'm going east,' and she said, 'Well, that's good'" -- tying in with Debbie's emphasis on directions ("Are you going NORTH? I have to go North").
How did that post begin? "The synchronicity fairies have been drawing my attention to the biblical Book of Joel recently, as I mentioned in
my post on last month's lunar eclipse." I had forgotten about the moon connection.
The eclipse post mentions how Joel's locusts also appear in the Book of Revelation -- where they are introduced thus: "And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power" (Rev. 9:3). So, a scorpion connection, too. Just as the apocalyptic locusts come "out of the smoke," Debbie's dream features "large billows of smoke . . . and the billows were everywhere."
In Strieber's moon vision, he describes how "large shapes took whirring flight, their wings rattling like New Year's noisemakers." These sound like they could be locusts, and my June 11 post, in cataloguing the names of different grasshoppers, says that "the biggest, baddest kind, with rough sand-colored armor and chattering wings, were called Lokeys -- from locust."
