Cognitive dissonance in headlines

Reality and fiction are colliding in our newspapers.

I think you can expect more of the same in the future.  But this doesn't come out of nowhere -- there's a bizarre kind of context -- remember the municipalities and government agencies that put out joking memos about preparations for a zombie apocalypse?  And there's a widely popular show or two on right now that deals with the same.

Now it's true that I let my imagination take me thither and yon without too much of a leash to pull it back.  But is it really all that difficult to see this as a kind of set up?

And before you go all conspiracy crazy about it, let me make clear exactly WHOM I think is behind this, if anyone is.

Not the Bilderbergs, the Super Secret Shadow Government, the New World Order, nor any other conspiracy that you might have heard of.  Because the common denominator in the "zombie apocalypse" stories appears to be a recreational drug.  And you don't need anything but a bored and somewhat knowledgeable drug addict for that.

Well, that and maybe a bit of prompting from a source that is able to tap into our creativity.  So that's where this might tie into yesterday's post.  Maybe the drug creators could say something along the lines of, "I am not drug-making.  It is the hand of the spirit who is drug-making now."  And maybe the fellow who dreamed up the CDC memo didn't think that up all by himself.

I have written fairly often about how musicians and songwriters often don't really know where the songs come from.  A certain percentage of songs are just there, in the mind, already fully formed.  Like somebody gave them to you, but did it inside your head.   The songwriter could say, "I am not writing.  It is the hand of the spirit who is writing now."

So, for me, if there's a conspiracy here, I can't miss how often the creative potential of humanity appears in this story.  The movies and shows are obviously creative so I know you follow me there, but the CDC memo (and the others that came before it) are also a product of creativity, as was the design of the drug that makes some people do horrible, zombiesque things.

Taken together, all of these things have put us in a mindspace to, at least in our weaker moments, actually consider that a zombie apocalypse could happen.

These things usually go thud in the long run, but along the way, they create an uncertainty and anxiety in the people who read or hear about them.  Put that into a context also -- in today's world, the weather is weird and dangerous, politics have gone crazy, unemployment is high, and probably getting higher, while food and gas prices are generally high or going up, and there are wars both hot and simmering all over the world, including a cyber war between the US and Iran.

These are very stressful days.  And if I put on my paranoia hat, I think maybe someone, or something, wants to take advantage of that, even heighten the effect.

For what purpose?  If I had to guess, I'd say it's to make you do something you wouldn't ordinarily do, or accept something that you wouldn't ordinarily accept.  Perhaps it's psy-ops.

Even if that's all piddle, it's an awfully strange coincidence of fiction and reality.

Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams and guided creativity

I'm watching a Herzog documentary this morning called Cave of Forgotten Dreams.  It's a film about Chauvet Cave, which was discovered late in the 20th century.  It is very well preserved because a rock slide hid the entrance for millennia.

I found the imagery in the film just extraordinarily beautiful.

There's something about this artistry, something I can't even put my finger on, that evokes a feeling of awe.  Every stroke is perfect.  This is not paper, where if you make a mistake, you can throw away your first attempt and start over.  There is a mastery that speaks of an intimate knowledge of the animal forms depicted.

I've just gotten to the part, near the end of the film, where a French archaeologist is talking about ways of understanding what we see inside the cave began to talk about how Australian aborigines understood their own rock art.  An anthropologist was following one fellow who went to one of the rock art areas in the 1970s.  The anthropologist noted that his guide became very sad on seeing how the paintings were deteriorating.  It had been their practice to touch up the paintings over time but the practice was evidently dying out.  The guide got to work, doing his best to restore the paintings.  The anthropologist asked him, "Why are you painting?"  His guide answered him, "I am not painting.  It is the hand of the spirit who is painting now."

I was very surprised to hear this spoken by a scientist.  Of course, he more than likely sees it in very materialistic terms but you might guess that I don't.  Having been a practicing musician and songwriter, I understand what the ethnographer's guide said in a very literal sense.

The outline of the rhino above, with it's back rendered in one stroke, shows the effortless accuracy of the artist.  It might indicate many years of practice.  Or it might indicate something else -- the powerful guidance of "the hand of the spirit."

Dream -- Shark attacks seals

Last night I dreamed I was at a beach area like you find in California, where instead of just a lot of sand you have rock outcroppings.  And seals.  The seals were on and around a certain rock outcropping.  I noticed a huge shark, which I took to be a great white, coming toward the seals.  I was very worried about them but there wasn't anything I could do but watch.  I wondered why the seals didn't see the shark, but none of them reacted until the shark drove into their area and took a seal in its mouth.  I was doubly horrified to see that, while the shark was thrashing back out to see with its prey, a large whale, which looked like a sperm whale to me, came out of the deep and fought the shark for its kill.

The whale basically just ripped the seal out of the shark's mouth, and the shark seemed to know better than to fight back.  Instead, it turned around and went back to the seals to take another one.

Yikes!

I just signed onto my computer to see this headed my way:

It's more impressive when it's animated, but that semi-circle of severe weather is racing my way with wind gusts up to 50mph.

We weren't expecting any storms today but we are going to get a big one, it seems.

UPDATE -- we did get rain, but most of it passed to the north and east.  I could hear the loud booms of thunder from the distance, but it was very mild here.

Now there's another one coming along, but it has headed over the mountains and I wonder if it will even make it here before dissipating.

It was odd to see such a big storm pop up and start racing from the northwest like that.

A truly international audience

Over the few years that I've had this blog, the actual readership has remained pretty low -- probably there are about a dozen or so committed readers, and then a few who stop by here and there.

Yet it gets hundreds of hits a week from all over the world:

Just look at all that.. from this week

You would be tempted to be impressed, maybe -- if you didn't know that most of these people are arriving here through google searches on terms like "bull in a china shop" and "frodo and the ring."

They are just looking for pictures.  For some reason, my blog has become a popular destination for people on the hunt for pictures.  I don't know why that would be, when I got all the pictures somewhere else in the first place.

I'm not proposing a conspiracy or anything, I'm just pointing out that search engines aren't all that efficient, apparently.  Or maybe they are?  Maybe it's somehow easier to get the pictures here?

Does anyone know of a way to make it so google won't use your blog as a picture resource?  It's really not what this blog is about.  I've slowed way down on using pictures recently because of this particular issue.

Dreams -- the sagging ceiling, need to replace the pumps

I've had two dreams recently that might have something to do with who knows what, or nothing at all.

The first was rather brief.  I was living in a townhouse.  I looked up and saw that the ceiling was sagging under the weight of a quantity of water.  I could tell that it was water because it was beading up at the lowest point.  I thought, "Oh great, now I'll have to move because this home will be ruined by all that water when the drywall gives out."

In a second dream, I had two "fix it" men come to inspect my air conditioners in a different house.  I had two AC units in my house.  The first fellow took a brief look and said that everything was ok.  Later another man came and said he needed to check the AC units again, and said specifically two parts, which looked like pumps, or maybe valves, along a water supply.  I saw a picture of it as he was talking about it.  He went off to look at them and came back to say they would need to be replaced.  I told him that the earlier fellow had said everything was OK, and he said that was why he came -- he knew the other guy was a new employee and he needed to check on his work.

When I woke up, it occurred to me that I have two active blogs, though they are not so active at the moment.. maybe they need "new pumps?"  When a correspondence like that comes to mind unbidden, I believe there's a connection, so I accept the second dream is in some way about blogs and blogging.  That would make the water stand for something like "information."

I do recall Jesus used a similar metaphor when he said, "I will give you living water to drink" where the water represented his "good news".  There's a spiritual meaning of water that works as a metaphor because all life needs water to survive, and some water is better than other water, depending on the organism.  If you are a freshwater fish, you don't need saltwater, for instance.  And obviously humans don't drink saltwater, either.  In the sense Jesus meant, water is crucial spiritual information, or truth.  Possibly, that's what's intended in my dreams too.  And this would be a natural connection for me because I have always been impressed by Jesus' use of metaphors.  Jesus used the language of dreams in his parables and sayings with a mastery that few have matched.

And as an idea, that fits my experience as a blogger too.  To be clear, if it's true that there is a heaven but there are entry requirements, that would be crucial spiritual information.  I "know" there is a heavenly realm, and I suspect there are entry requirements, but I'm not quite clear on what they are.  (When I pass on that information, I'm aware that the truth may be different than I suppose, but I can only act on the information that I have.  I try to give you enough of it to evaluate for yourselves, and I trust that you will do that, and not blindly follow me.  I might lead you right into a ditch!)

As a symbol water can be quite complex in any case and the context is important.  Water is a constant theme in my recent dreaming, and in most cases there is some trouble associated with the water.  I have hesitated to apply a spiritual meaning to this because I can't imagine what a flood of spirituality would mean.  Floods are negative events to human beings.  The ceiling falling in due to a massive water leak is a bad thing because not only do you have to leave your house, you aren't likely to recoup your investment in it either, so unless you have good insurance, you are out of luck.

And that is two clear dreams about houses falling apart in recent days, also.  In the prior one, the house was also townhouse, which to me suggests that whatever the consequences are, they are shared.  So I continue to think there's something coming that will interrupt our ordinary way of living.  Just because of my observations in the last few years, I suspect it will have something to do with weather, or people's reaction to how the weather is changing.

The weather here in the DC area has been strange the last few days.  We have continual flash flood warnings due to the inflow of moisture from the Atlantic which began with the tropical depression that passed by a couple days ago.  But that moisture is hanging around, causing some big thunderstorms and dumping a lot of rain on ground that is already saturated.  One could make a parallel between my dreams and these facts, but the facts don't seem to rise to the level of needing any kind of warning.  So if that's all it's about, why a couple of months of warning dreams?  Or is this the beginning of something else?

They threaten children

If you've been a regular reader, you might recall that one of my sons and I saw a UFO hovering over our neighborhood.  This was during the time of high strangeness when I was contemplating leaving bigfoot research.  I took it as a clear threat to the safety of my children.

Now, yesterday I put up a mild post that contrasted the strange secrecy of our beasties with the complete openness I experienced when I thought I was speaking with God.  Well, not speaking -- no words were exchanged, but information passed between us in a very clear way that involved thoughts and emotions.  Yet that's part of it -- everything was revealed in the communication, nothing held back.

Last night, the son who shared the UFO experience had a frightening dream.  He was playing outside with his friends, a game that involved running and hiding, when he was accosted by a large wolf.  The wolf morphed into a bear, who said, "I'm going to eat you in front of your father."

When my son told me the dream this morning, I didn't immediately connect it to what I had written yesterday.  But the image of the wolf and the threat to eat him in front of me has me convinced that the two are connected, and that this is another, much more direct threat.

If it is a threat, it's rather inelegant.  It would also expose the threatener to the risk that I'll consider them to be demonic, so that if they are, that seems to be a strange choice, given that they've been so keen to hide that all along.  But this echoes what happened at the end of my bigfooting career.  There, too, a seeming miscalculation was made and there was a clear inference left to be drawn that the source was demonic in the most conventional religious sense.

Are they stupid, or are these double super secret fake outs?  And why threaten children?  Wouldn't it be more effective to simply silence me outright?  If they ever did harm my children, I can't imagine that would make me want to stop -- it would make me want to expose them all the more.  So the threat has its highest value before it's acted upon.

Last point I'll make -- they don't care what I believe, and they don't care about my children either.  It's someone in the readership of this blog that they are after.  So if you are reading this, you have something to think about.