the timboucher experience

I came up with a really effective way of entering into hypnagogic visions intentionally last night. Besides whatever mental preparation you want to do, in terms of quieting your mind, you basically make up a sentence in gibberish.

Wait, before I go on, I just looked up the origin of the word “gibberish” and it says that it’s of “imitative origin,” which I guess make it onomatopoeia? But then I got to thinking, what if the “Gibbers” were like a tribe of people with a weird language that nobody could understand? Or, here’s a better one: what if Gibberish is actually the True Human Language? Like, what if all other languages are just Gibberish whittled down using rule structures and phonetic filters?

Anyway, so, you make up your gibberish statement while you’re laying there with your eyes closed and your mind relaxed. Start repeating the statement over and over again to yourself. For me, I found what happened was that the sentence would slowly morph as it was repeated. First it would change to a slightly different gibberish sentence, and on and on until English words I knew started to appear in it. And then, by the time it was done, it would be pretty much all English words, but they wouldn’t make any sense, or rather they would make only partial sense like in the way hypnagogic statements do that.

Here’s one of the English statements my first one turned into:

Son in common, black dog, daughters, you match

The other thing you can do, once you have an “English translation” is to keep going with it. Like, you can see what other words will come out of the statement now. Just repeat it until it reforms itself. Let the accents and sounds get garbled a bit. Let me give you some alternate examples from that one up there:

- Sunning, come in, black god, doctors, Shamash

Actually, I think this is sort of a major key to how Finnegan’s Wake was written. Where you have these multiple layers/interpretations for each word and sentence, so that all these other implications and possible meanings come through. It’s very clever. Also, while you’re doing this, its hard not to have different sorts of visions come across your minds eye.

The statements themselves come out neatly mysterious, and can lead you to other investigations. Like, in mine, “Shamash” is actually the name of a Babylonian sun god (husband to Ishtar), which is referenced by “sunning” and which is the opposite of a “black god” basically. And you can make neat inferences like the “black dogs” might belong to the “black god,” which would only make sense. Stuff like that.

Another phrase that I came up with was:

A fig, a leg, a log, a demon

These all just seem so symbolically loaded to me, that I could research connotative associations all day long based on them.

Anyway, I also wrote down two regular dreams that I had as well. In the first, I was at this stadium, or sports complex or something, and for whatever reason, I met up with James, from Pataphysical Graffiti (who I’ve never met), and he was meeting Arnold Schwarzenneger there. Now, this is, I think, the second dream I’ve had involving Arnold. The other one was while he was campaigning for governor. Actually, let me quote from that original entry:

In this dream, Arnold Schwarzenegger was playing Scrabble with me as part of a publicity stunt for his gubernatorial campaign. Except he was TOTALLY not playing by the rules. He kept taking words off the board, and then those words would turn into big red dice like in Risk. Anyway, that game ended when I was like “Hey, what the hell are you doing?” and I realized that we were being filmed and stuff. I had thought it was just for fun. Then later on, we had a much more publicized and formal rematch which was broadcast on national tv. But first, we asked these guys in a comic book shop what were the real rules, and then we agreed to abide by those.

During the game, some mediator asked us questions about American cultural values, like violence in the media, and shit like that. I remember the question was directed at me, but Arnold tried to jump in, and then I cut him off. Oh, and we were playing inside a dining room at a huge long table like in Bruce Wayne’s mansion, and the walls were a cream color.

Also, I remember meeting these guys who ran an independent movie theatre, and I was trying to convince them to show that Chinese martial arts masterpiece “Hero” in order to promote the upcoming Scrabble match between me and Arnold. I forget where chronologically that fits in with the rest.

Anyway, so within that context, it sort of makes sense that the next time I see Arnold in a dream, it would be at some stadium, at a place where people have like competitive matches or whatever. But, we didn’t actually play any sporting events. Instead, it was a friendly meeting. The two of them seemed to go way back. Arnold was very polite and friendly, and seemed genuinely pleased to meet me. The three of us went to get a few drinks. And then we ended up at this house. At the house, James went through the rooms and did a sage smudge, for whatever reason (probably because I’ve been thinking about doing that in this house for a little while). Then we watched this new Michael Moore documentary about artificial intelligence, and about robots taking over the world, like as though it had already happened. We saw all these maps of the world get reformulated as robots took over and pushed human civilization into weird pockets in far away places, like the very northernmost reaches of Canada.

Just before waking up a final time this morning, I had another dream, this time about a group of anarchists, who had broken into and fucked up the corporate headquarters of Domino’s Sugar. It was one of those dreams where I wasn’t in it, but I saw what happened. This group went around in the building breaking stuff, and screwing up files, and just general mayhem. They were all dressed up too. Like there were a few girls in the group who were dressed very fancy, like 1920’s style or something. And this one girl, in a white dress and blond wig, and high heels was bringing up the rear of the group. They were all walking on like this catwalk thing, and she tripped on some of the broken glass, because of her heels, and then she plummeted down to her death in the lobby of the place. The group immediately went down and picked up her body and ran like hell out of there.

The next day, there was a big investigation at the company. For some reason, they mistook the blood of the woman who fell to have been blood from a kidnapped kid who may have been sexually molested too. So, they ended up questioning and thoroughly searching every single employee and executive of the company. But the anarchists got away. And yet, people knew about them, because then I was watching something like a MTV special about this group. And there was a guy who was supposed to have been an ex-member of the group. And he was talking about the leader of that group, who everybody called “Char Charlemagne“. And then this Char Charlemagne guy ended up becoming this like minor notorious celebrity…

Oh, I just remembered another dream I’d had before that. I was sort of in my highschool art class, except it was downstairs in my brother’s house. And we had to design our own tattoos as a project in the dream. I didn’t come up with anything good though, because nobody had told me about the project, because I’d missed class or something.

You know, I just was thinking about the connection of these three figures: Shamash, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Charlemagne. I feel like they are linked. Arnold, as an action hero, frequently has played roles in movies where he bears attributes of a “Sun God.” Also, his last name apparently means “The Black Ploughman” in Dutch, which seems to bear a mysterious resemblance to “The Black God” which I formulated out of that Gibberish statement. And the historical Charlemagne, as well, was a sort of Sun God figure, going out and forcibly converting the Heathens, on behalf of another Sun God religion, Christianity. It all makes some sort of weird sense together.

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