I'm at an archeological site in China. I find inscriptions in what look like Roman letters. But they're not alone--color variations in the checkerboard stone-mosaic floor map out big, blocky Chinese characters, a few Latin-family words AND a third script I can't even recognize. Georgian, Armenian, Ethiopian? They seem to be parts of a picture--an old, ornate hotel with a big spidery frame on the roof holding up neon signs in these three scripts.

One problem: do they read left-right? If not, you'd get a different message. One part's symmetrical and thus unambiguous. It hints at a treasure--I recognize Chinese jīn, meaning gold. But probably not a literal treasure; other bits sound Taoist or Zen. Says "she" has mystical insights. I try to convince a Chinese scholar of my reading, but he remains skeptical--but then, he can't read the non-Chinese parts, and won't believe some American could know anything of Buddhism OR Taoism.

Now a powerful Chinese woman weighs in: Jiang Qing before her downfall? She says one faction in China is old-school Communist--the state should plan it all. Oppressive. Western media treat China as monolithic, ignore these internal disagreements. I have mixed feelings--respect some features of state planning and dislike others. As I do with capitalism.

I show a Chinese mystic another find from the site. A small, egglike plant-stone? Old, carved, both stone and living plant. He, unlike the earlier scholar, sees and admires it. But admiring its beauty isn't understanding. We still both struggle to interpret those carved symbols...

Huh! Feels like my struggles to interpret a beautiful dream that's not psychological but prophetic.

Ohhhh...

and I wake.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Chinese archeology: refers to Once a Hero, a series of dreams that bared traumas making me hide.
• Third script:
  1. Saw a map of Ibn Battuta's travels in the 14th century, with placenames in Moroccan Arabic's rounded, Roman-influenced lettering.
  2. A friend showed me a book with Ethiopian syllabics on the cover. A dreamlike, weird and wobbly yet very concise script.
  3. Just before bed I did a little calligraphy in my personal shorthand (I get cramps if I handwrite a lot, so a concise way of writing helps) and my streamlined version of Tolkien's wonderful Elvish script--also conciser than the Roman alphabet.
  
• Jin, gold, on building: saw a warehouse with an odd logo: a thousand hooks held up shiny little disks that shimmered in the breeze, forming the Chinese characters Jin Shan (Gold Mountain / San Francisco).
• "She" has spiritual insight: odd since there's no "she" in traditional Chinese; tā means he or she, him or her. But that Ethiopian book was on a 17th-century woman, Walatta Petros, who fought against violent Catholic persecution to save the Ethiopian church tradition.
• This dream echoes two nights ago: I saw loosely stacked transparent overlays, blurred & unreadable. But if you lined them up cleanly and pressed tight, shadows from one layer suddenly lined up with letters on others, enhancing not blurring them. Focus matters!
• Rooftop signs: "signs"--portents--up on the highest level where intuition lives. I think the dream's flagging itself as predictive! Though the signs are hard to read--so far. Prosperity seems predicted, and the dream wants neither capitalism nor communism (democratic socialism, anarcho-syndicalism instead?) But its heart is still mysterious. That mystical egg still hasn't hatched; the meaning still uncracked.
• I can read the past but struggle with that egg: I get the gist of normal dreams on my past and present. But not all dreams are. When they bring news of the future, I flounder. But then, all through history, good interpreters have struggled with psychic dreams. Until events confirm them or don't, you're suspended in vacuum. Plenty of so-called experts deny such dreams even exist. (Their loss! I've had too many clear, detailed, bizarre ones to doubt they happen and not by mere chance.)
• Why post this? I tend to show you dreams wrapping up neatly. But plenty of mine are like this--tangles of weird interests plus baffling, probably-psychic intrusions. So don't get discouraged! Prediction's inherently hard. Joseph did help that Pharaoh, but that was a while back.

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