More fun with mystical ciphers
A page from my magical journal regarding my work for the Esoteric Order of Dagon
I drew a random card from the Abzu deck yesterday and put it under my pillow. I’ve seen mention of people doing this and things to this effect in the past — I also want to try out John Tenney’s video tape under your pillow experiment to try and record dream images at some point — I didn’t look at the card and decided to check it out in the morning and compare whatever it was and its cipher values to whatever I ended up dreaming about. I slept poorly, though, and had to really dig deep to pull up any memories of dreams but I managed to recover one.
I stole a car with some guy I’ve never seen before. Just some dude. We’re on a mission to steal gold, I think. We’re in some mental construction of California and the whole thing feels like an old movie from the 70’s. At times the stolen car looks like the General Lee from Dukes of Hazzard.
We eventually add a woman to our conspiracy. I can’t remember where we picked her up. It’s just sort of how things happen in dreams. You subconsciously “yes and…” yourself and roll with whatever gets added without missing a beat. It’s a quality about dreaming that I always find funny because in the rational waking state, the fact that I just accept whatever happens in dreams without ever considering how weird it all is, kind of blows my mind.
While driving through the streets of whatever this place is, we’re stopped by police because there’s some kind of violence going on up ahead on the same street. We’re asked to get out of the car and wait in a safe place off to the side and while doing so I notice that the police seem to be clashing with some clubhouse of skinheads. After a time, the skinheads are corralled into the same place that we are and they get really aggressive toward us, particularly the girl. Many times they almost drag us into a fight and at one time several of them gather around me, threatening to rape me.
We’re magically back in the car, driving up narrow roads in this city until we’re on the outskirts, which seems to take place in the usual country-road setting that I find in a lot of my dreams. Over the last six years I’ve noticed a sort of consistent geography to my dreams that, again, I’ve talked about on Fear is the Mind Killer. In this case, I got what I call City B, being that my dream cities tend to come in two flavors. I get City A sometimes, which is a mental approximation of Boston, surrounded by the same sort of twisting network of highways that you find in IRL Boston, only vastly more dreamlike and weird, as well as a strange version of Logan Airport. City B, however, is a little scuzzier and threatening. All travel tends to happen uphill and the streets are all quite narrow and perilous. The country road setting seems to be a sort of frontier space between the various settings. It’s just a dusty road through a forested area in my mind with the occasional break for civilization and it seems to be informed by my experience of living in places featuring this kind of landscape here in the liminal real-world space between the urban and rural mountain country. In this case, we emerge to an area that’s heavily zoned for big box stores and malls. For some reason we have to make our way up into the hills where there’s some kind of store of water that we need but we first stop at a motel to crash and in the course of this stay we pick up another member of the conspiracy, a random black guy. I’m not sure how he’s involved in all of this, he’s just suddenly there and we’re all quite friendly.
In the night while the other two sleep, me and the original guy try and sneak off in the car but find out way blocked by cascading streams of water running down from the mountain, so we turn around and find that our former companions have been taken hostage by some criminal types that are forcing them to take part in some sort of crime that’s not clear to me. We rejoin them and it’s around here that I start to lose the thread. I suspect that my mind is trying to set up some kind of rescue story here but it all goes a bit gooey and fades. Apparently, this part of the dream was not worth remembering.
When I awoke, I pulled the card and looked at it. It’s the 52 card.
Otherworldly desires
Evoking elusive angles
Values for 52:
Esoteric Order of Dagon
House of Dagon
Forbidden Necronomicon
Parting the cobwebs
A way to break down the barriers
Inquiry to Follow
52 in the UFOnaut Cipher:
Thou
Lord of
Aeons
Wet
I’ve used the UFOnaut Cipher in concert with the Abzu Cipher a couple times in the past and I’m noticing a clear connection between the two leading me to think that they’re both born of the same intelligence. As a matter of fact, one of the things Allen Greenfield mentions in Secret Cipher is that once the cipher is cracked, it’ll be scrapped and a new one will be used. Is it possible that the Abzu cipher is the new one?
The results for 52 in both ciphers don’t seem to connect at all, but they do when you reduce 52 to 7 and compare 52 in the UFOnaut Cipher to 7 in the Abzu cipher.
Thou, lord of aeons. Wet. Let’s go down the new list.
Added together: 5 + 2 = 7
Dream
Orm
Atlantis
Water
Enki
Net
Web
Mirror
Now, that’s some interesting shit, ain’t it? I don’t know what Orm means but I can tell you what Object-Related Mapping is. It’s an approach to referencing data in computer science that abstracts the way the data is fetched so that data objects remain consistent and fetching them on the front-end of your application never changes even though the shape of the database might change, or the API call to get that data might change. Someone else in the application architecture will deal with what that abstraction looks like, but you there, on the front end, never have to worry about it. So the locations of dream data may change since dream states are pretty fucking fluid, but fetching that dream data never changes. The data and its relationship to other data in the system remains intact and fetchable. I thought this was a pretty wild thing to pop up in my review of the cipher returns.
The inclusion of the word dream is one of those things that the cosmos occasionally sends you to tell you that you’re in the right place. Then we come to Enki, who I honestly don’t know much about. Sumerian religion is a significant blind spot with me beyond what I can recall from Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash and whatever bullshit showed up in Zechariah Sitchin’s Twelfth Planet (Great reading but absolute bug-fuck nonsense). Based on what I looked up this strikes me as pretty wild. His name might mean Lord of Earth but he’s also a water god (wet), sometimes associated with Dagon (the real one, aka Oannes, not the monster).
Put together: Otherworldly desires evoking elusive angles
At first glance this card didn’t make any sense but ain’t that just how it goes? Otherworldly desires are definitely evoking elusive angles. The otherworldly desire is my desire to rise up out of this Earthly shit and take my place among the ascended masters and the elusive angles are definitely hard to get a handle on at this time being that I’m newly initiated. This being the first of my applied work with the Order, this seems to be a sort of welcome mat to the dreaming. Since I haven’t done much in the way of magic in some time, this is definitely a parting of the cobwebs to get back into the swing of things. I’ve been keeping a dream journal of sorts as part of my magical journal since I need to do this as part of my degree work for The Order. Most of their work and enlightenment comes in dream states and this is definitely the weakest tool in my kit. I talk a lot about dreams on my podcast and I’ve had some experiences with lucid dreaming but it’s all been quite by accident and the experience was fleeting. In this one particular case that I can remember, it occurred to me that I was dreaming as I was dreaming and I got a huge kick out of that but I can remember how hard it suddenly became to operate in this dream space once I realized what was going on. Movement was hard, like moving through thick mud but also, I got to do the one thing I’ve always wondered about when I dream: I got to look up. That may sound weird but have you ever thought about your dreams and wondered about the larger world that they’re taking place in? When you watch TV or a movie, most of the time what you’re seeing is a production shot on a set. Everything within the frame is just a facade and if you were able to see beyond the scope of the lens what you’d see is crew, lights, and all the supporting architecture holding up the facade. I’ve always assumed that dreaming works in a similar way. Your brain is likely working in a very efficient way to create only the images you need to see at any given time. So what would happen if you were to suddenly look up and try to see beyond the scope of the dream’s necessary set and props? What I saw ended up changing the way I think about dreams, entirely.
I looked up and saw a sky but it wasn’t just an ordinary blue sky with a sun in it. It was a sky with holes in it. There was a bit of that blue sky, yes, but the holes seems to poke through to something else and I could see a night sky with stars in it beyond the holes. What does this mean? Beats me, man. It’s almost like I caught my brain in the act where it was trying to determine what to put there in the sky but the fact that there’s a sky at all and that even being able to move around consciously and freely in this space makes me think that where I am when I’m in that state is a place that’s as real as anywhere else. If I were making this up on the fly there’d be gaps, blank spots, low-detail extras hanging around in the background. If this were being generated on the fly from random stuff I’ve encountered in my waking life, I feel like I’d be able to outrun the scenery and get ahead of it, cause a crash of some sort but that never happens. It seems to be boundless, with an answer for everything.
This experiment and that card are, indeed, telling me that this is a way to break down the barriers.
Inquiry to follow…