A tale about prepping – with a large order of woo-woo this morning. Lots of background to the prepping point, as well – which is our agenda – plus a ton of woo-woo.
As long-term readers know, Elaine and I went with friends (Robin and Judy) to see Johnny Mathis at the “world’s largest casino” this weekend. Winstar in Thackerville, OK. Show was great and on Sunday morning, I cashed in a $507 chit and a $206 chit. In my odd approach to gambling, I go in with three or four hundred dollar bills and when they have been through the machines, I print the chit and walk away. One of the few gambling techniques that works: Find the high payout machines, then play until you get a statistical outlier, then cash out and walk away.
In the process, I figure we got gipped out of an hour of sleep by the hotel, though – what with the Daylight time changel. I don’t know why hotels don’t change check out to 11:30 for that one weekend a year when it time change works against the customer.
(Continues below)
That’s the short version of the trip. With all the walking around the world’s biggest casino, I actually came home 2-pounds lighter than when I left. Which is something of a miracle given the high-end food. Saturday night, for example, was a filet (7 oz) with shrimp scampi. That’s after a warm-up on cold (massive) shrimp in a one-off sauce that is the best yet in my life. Going on 70, that’s one hell of a compliment. I’ve had shrimp all over the country and in a dozen foreign spots and this was amazing.
A Prepping Story from “The Realms”
From my birthday – in mid February – until sometime in May is my “hot time of the year” for dreaming. This is when I have amazing, and sometimes precognitive, dreams about the world. Things like detours while traveling – in advance. The Deepwater Horizon oil disaster – 18-hours in advance. And there was the strange case of the Melbourne bus accident.
Not all dreams are precognitive, but there is usually a message to them.
So “REAL” are these dreams that I often remark it’s like waking up in another life – living that for a while, and then reawakening on this side of the dream boundary. More sense of how it works in my novel DreamOver: A David Shannon Adventure. Which, I might add, is based on more than half a dozen such other-worldly dream-life adventures.
Now to this one:
In last night’s dream adventure, Elaine and I had gone to a capitol city which was on the coast to look around.
Directions tend to be 90-degrees off in my dreams (something usefully learnt from the Melbourne bus case), but I will give you the “sense” of direction as we go.
We parked the car just to the north and a few miles west of the downtown waterfront district. We walked downhill toward the water looking for…not sure what.
But, as we came to the waterfront of the city, we were amazed to see nuclear missiles being erected and readied for launch among the buildings. The buildings were not very tall. I’d say no more than five or six stories tall. And the missile warheads were distinctly built with large domes on the tops, not the “pointy end” type missiles.
We got the sense that time was running out. There would be nuclear war, but we didn’t know when, but soon. Like in the next few days.
Realizing this, we went into a myriad of building types, trying to find something that would be survivable.
In the upper part of the downtown area, there were a lot of two and three story buildings. But these were made in a very heavy way that would be blown over immediately in the vicinity of the target area.
We worked our way south, and up a number of rolling hills, stopping at one deli that looked promising.
A two story building, it was built stoutly and we figured it would survive. But it lacked the basement I was looking for. As we left through a side door, I noticed another door that opened into a chicken-raising area. Most strange.
Continuing up, and south, there were a number of old churches/religious buildings. these seemed to meet my search criteria; they had basements and they were heavily-built and all. But, on talking to a priest (who was in a side yard to the church rescuing a small dog with a broken leg) we began to understand that in the coming war, this building, too, would topple. And the heavy (dark granite) stones would be impossible to escape from.
So, we kept walking.
We stayed to what was emerging as a main highway that at one point went under a kind of earthen embankment. It was too short to be a tunnel, really, but the building (through which the road and pedestrian walkway went) was of huge timber construction.
The way it had be built seemed like a civil defense project in a sense: The heavy timbers had been set up as a massive frame and then tin roofing had been applied between the beams to keep dirt from drifting down into the traffic area below.
The whole thing couldn’t have been more than a block, or two, long. A few shops were inside. We kept walking, though, because there were no blast doors on the (capitol-facing) north side, from which we’d come.
What we did learn, though, was that if we walked a long ways further, there were some stock yards outside the city – about 20-miles on. Once past those, we learned there was a river we could follow inland.
The name of this river didn’t survive the transit back onto this side of The Realms but its name began with an O and there was a ch, an e, and and r in it best I can remember.
When we learned it was such a distance, we decided to return to the northwest part of the capitol city and try to find the car so we could make better time traveling.
As we came into the city again, Elaine walked east, down the hill into the most populated part, looking for a major road to left which would take us back to the northwest area where our vehicle was.
Neither one of us had bothered to note the “car” location when we departed on foot for the downtown area east (and down hill).
Now, there was a rising sense of urgency that we find our way quickly and get the hell out of there. It wouldn’t be long before the missiles flew and we wanted to be south of the stock yards and near the river before things went bad.
How does one analyze such a dream?
Much of it is a mish-mash of an old newsman’s brain. It’s likely the rounded nose-cone missiles were an archetype processor output of “Iron Dome.”
The layout of the capitol was more difficult. I don’t know of any where there are stockyards 20-miles from the city and a river beyond that going inland. Anyone with map ideas, please let me know. And remember from the Melbourne dream, which was 90-120 degrees counterclockwise on this side of the Realms, that I don’t know what my recent Cartesian ordinates are.
Language provides no insights, either. That is because in The Realms people communicate ideas directly. What we, as a species, are going through right now with iconography in computers is a start. We still “attach” verbose words to things (empty Recycle bin?) or “Find?:_____” but these are half-measures.
I get the sense that past high civilizations operated more in the “ideasphere” than present world inhabitants. Perhaps, in the intermarriage of the Neanderthals and the Cro Magnons with the Homo Sapiens, some of our native genius was bred out (deliberately so?) in order that the survival skills of more aggressive species, less thoughtful and reflective compared with Sapiens, could be integrated.
Or, perhaps the co-breeding was the result of animal needs to recover from one of the great planetary catastrophes… we will never know.
An “accidental detour” on our trip this weekend also figured into things.
Because of traffic, and picking the wrong lane, I ended up taking I30 east from Dallas a few miles. This put us on surface streets through southeast Dallas and I remember thinking how much the apartments and condos in this area looked like “chicken coups.”
Understand that while we live in a modest (wildly decorated and customized) mobile home, people who live in “coups” have a special problem: They are “captives of the City.”
I spent a few minutes while we were driving (back on the 635 West and taking the 175/Kaufman exit to head down our way) thinking about this notion of how and why large-scale civilian populations are in the (supposedly) “modern world” held hostage for geopolitical purposes.
Why do people put up with it?
Is it the money?
We happen to live in an area that is so dispersed and spread out that it’s almost unthinkable that anyone would waste a nuke on us. Rural and “independent living” mean much the same thing.
Yet, people in cities like Bremerton, Washington, Long Beach, Oakland, Honolulu, and so on, by simply choosing to live where they do, have essentially placed their “necks in the noose” of geopolitics.
And that, my friend, is (far as I can tell) the point of the dream.
In order for global geopolitical conflict to occur, all you need are targets of convenience. The Big Cities? They’ll do fine.
Back in the “dream port” (bed, this side of The Realms), Elaine and I talked about the holding of civilian populations hostage, as they are. “Why do people allow it?” she wondered.
Honestly, I didn’t have an answer. Maybe they just don’t see it. I mean, sure, I understand the reasons from past Ages. When cities sprang-forth at river junctions, where downstream travel was easy. I totally get that.
But, in an era where we’ll be upgrading our internet connection here in the Outback to 25 MB this week…why THEN do people allow themselves to be held hostage in geopolitics at the macro-level or higher sales taxes at the local level?
That’s our prepping ponder: People – when thinking of prepping – place far too much emphasis on “The Job.” They go “where the money is.” But is that the wisest choice?
My tromping around this (dreamscape) capitol in the midst of preparing for nuclear conflict with its entire population at risk, was deeply disturbing. It echoed off the “chicken coups” of we saw in suburban Dallas & Mesquite, Texas.
“This is a fulfilling life?” I kept asking myself? How do people in coups keep from going nuts? Where’s the meaning?
In a country with so much land, requiring only commitment and a vision, why haven’t huge population centers emptied out -dispersed- already? Is it the Urban Real Estate Mega-bubble?
Or, is it something about the BUZZ of a city that entrains people? The economic GLUE that hypnotizes people into trading their own self-determination for a comfort of living a life of the well-fed hostage?
Perhaps we need a word for it: Urbanosis: (n) “A state of unquestioning participation in a pseudo-life.”
Thus, countries of hostages, cities of hostages, all competing for more paper in order to…what, exactly?
Superficially, as a past master of the balance sheet – I once lived it. Not like we don’t grok the deal. Far from it.
Maybe it was the casino that set off the thought. People all looking for the same statistical outlier. Missing the Miracle Money Technique, just like chickens working over a handful of scratch tossed out by the farmer.
It’s nice to be back from the dream port, but some deep questions came with me this visit. And no simple answers.
Just damn tough questions about modern values, such as they are.
Write when you get rich,
George@ure.net
George, your questions about ‘hostage civilizations’ brought to mind the works of Zecharia Sitchin, who posited that ‘our’ human ancestors were bred to be compliant workers by ancient visitors to our planet. Crazy theory? Yes, but when you think about it, why is there a universal human societal need for monarchies, chieftains, and ruling priestly classes all over the globe? It seems ‘most’ humans have an innate need to comply, to follow. Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays understood how easily the typical human mind could be manipulated by those who were more sinister and controlling. Bernays published his seminal work “Propaganda” in 1928 detailing how businesses and leaders could manipulate the minds of the masses. It was Bernays who convinced women that smoking cigarettes was a form of suffrage protest, resulting in a boom for the tobacco market and millions of cancer cases among women and birth defects in their children. One the even darker side, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels fully embraced the tenets of Bernay’s Propaganda, resulting in one of history’s greatest horrors, the rise of Nazi Germany and their Jewish ‘Final Solution.’
I read in one of Joseph Chilton Pearce’s books his theory that this compliance with authority characteristic has its basis in our infancy when we are wholly dependent upon parents/caregivers. He went on to say that we instinctively know that our very survival depends upon these “super beings”.
He also said that many basic religious tenets come from this prelanguage stage of life. I agree. Beginning in toddler years, we comprehend that being good means one is rewarded, the importance of avoiding angering the “god” and deserving punishment, also appeasing the “gods” and even feeding and sacrificing for them.
It all makes sense to me. Those earliest memories are the deepest and probably some is actually genetic.
Being an adult IMO means challenging and rewriting that programming as much as possible.
Your letters for the river George are similar to the Chicago River or better known as the Illinois River. The stockyards would be going back in time, but the Chicago Stockyards used to be the main market for cattle and hogs in the Midwest. For water you have Lake Michigan to look at. There is a church somewhere downtown where my folks were married that matches your description, granite block, etc. I’m not saying this is your area, but there are details. The Navy has a base there that would be a good location for hiding missiles to be launched.
http://www.neonnettle.com/news/3918-climate-scientists-warn-the-earth-could-experience-a-pole-shift-any-day-now
Nuclear war.. While I’m not particularly worried about that. Some interesting things have been going on in the news.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/opinion/trump-north-korea-trip.html?referer=https://www.google.com/
Is one.. Personally I am not worried about north Korea’s leader trying to assasinate our president. I have thought for a long time that the only reason he was threatening towards the USA and our allies is because he wanted to let the destroy snatch and grab puppet masters know that he was more than willing to include their homes as a battle ground in the event that they decided to try and kill and destroy his citizens.
The same with put in..a couple of weeks ago he made a statement of Russia’s nuclear capabilities. During the animated film it showed one striking the area of the presidents favorite hangout..now I’m more than willing to bet two bits that included on the strike map of theirs that strike points also include the homes of the puppet masters of the destroy snatch and grab bunch..the take the head off of the snake theory.
Now what I do fear is this. The snatch and grab puppet masters have done everything to force the president out of office..bombarding the minds through media blitz and doing any and everything they can to dig something up.
For the president to visit a country that I think is also targeting the snatch and grab group that they might just see this as a prime opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.. Lay the blame on kim and his regime. Then once both are illuminated have them replaced by puppets..
That could be an event that could bring your dream to reality
I foresee great danger in the proposed meeting of Rocket Man and our President. There are powerful people who would like to be rid of both of them. Wouldn’t that be a perfect opportunity to do just that? Perhaps out of safety, each could send their doubles!
Exactly…
I believe that the rocket man made his point.. Trump has made his.
For a meeting this will sound kind of odd.. But with reason..trump wants to see the workers of the us back to the levels of the good old days. The puppet masters have been notoriously known to just destroy and take then come in to gain support by giving the old I feel so bad this happened to you let me help speech and gain control.rocket man and Trump have upset the snatch and grab bunch.. Now in the mist of turmoil. There are some that knows the score of the snatch and grab bunch and their far reaching hands of power.
Just listen to Putin’s speeches.. Sure he has a dark side but overall he shows restraint logic and control.
They’ve only gone into what four countries because those countries asked for his help..
So..have the talks there.. I think he’d be the perfect host and would make sure both parties would be safe from those wanting to see this blown out of proportion. As a good faith message let up on sanctions on necessary products like food and medical supplies. Just a thought.. He’s hated by the snatch and grab bunch just as much..
George, There might be something to that dream. I don’t usually have vivid dreams or dreams that wake me up, at least since I took a lower stress job. Last night though, two very detailed dreams about nuclear war. They both woke me up an hour apart. The first was me waking up at home and checking the news with a great big headline on Drudge, “It’s nuclear WAR!”
I woke up after the first one. Then an hour or so later I woke up after another dream where I had survived the initial phase of the attack. I work about ten miles from a major city in a really large concrete office building. From my cubicle I can see a corner of a window, and I see the flash. “Well, I know what this is.” I duck and cover, and the window blows out and the office furniture goes flying. I am ok, and that is where it ends and I wake up.
Oh yeah, I’m not far from a major river. Got me a little worried there.
Any stockyards between you and that river? Something like a holding area for a meet packing plant would do…
Anymore, no, but used to be home to a huge section of pork production. That and the river thing made this seem a bit above the noise floor.
“headline on Drudge””
I don’t think one reads about nuclear war in that tense.
“ICMB’s enter U.S. interior. Nuclear Exchange underway”
“80% of U.S. under blackout condition’s after surprise attack. President urges survivors to walk south using Interstates”
Then there’s surviving in the devastation with no Internet or TV or Radio. Boo!
Dang, happened to me too. I’m one of those people who can’t remember dreams. Sometimes they cause a great impression (good or bad) and I wake up, but then they’re gone; very rarely can remember them, it’s frustrating.
In any case last night had a very vivid dream where I’m at the top of a small building in the suburbs looking at the city, nothing in particular, contemplating. Then an overwhelming feeling, something ominous, look up and from the horizon a ‘V’ formation of about 8 large rockets (missiles) come high in our direction and looks like it’s going to fly over, except the last one goes off in a very bright white sphere that grows quickly in size and will engulf the entire city. In a reflex I duck and say to myself ‘here it comes..’ knowing that’s my last thought as the blast is about to hit me. At that point I wake up and surprisingly can still remember the entire scene in detail.
Wasn’t March 12th in the John TItor’s timeline when Russia nuke DC among other cities/countries?
Gosh, I hope not!
But the year, of course, is questionable. Well, the whole Titor thing is really questionable. But an interesting story never the less.
the lure of the city in search of an easier life, behind a plow or a computer pick your strife,
man hopes to please for the love of a wife.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDOL7iY8kfo
The need to ship goods produced has often led to population centers being located at “crossroads” with easy access to transportation. First sea ports, then rivers, crossroads etc. Now Railroads, Airports and Highways figure in. People are also drawn to the capitol cities for the government work and handouts. Commerce is the reason for Cities. My work is only viable in a populated area. I would love to move out, but I love to eat too much.
Perhaps the river is a railroad.
Ogeechee Railway.
Blackshear Stockyard Blackshear, GA.
Close to Jekyll Island.
Checkout the man who painted the future David Mandell. A real dream prophet. Twin towers,Concorde crash,boxing day tsunami,and more.When he dreams of hurricane fighter planes it foretells real hurricanes.Quite a character.
While reading your dream, I found myself picturing Louisville, KY. The old stockyards is east of downtown (but not 20 miles) and near the Ohio River. City also has a ‘Stockyards Bank.’ Major hub for UPS and a long-time test market for the introduction of new consumer products.
Back in the bad old days of the hostages and worries about nukes flying in the Middle East, newspapers used to picture the distance between Tel Aviv and Tehran as comparable to that between Louisville and New York City. Can’t remember how many times I saw that graphic…
Your dream sounds like:
South St. Paul MN had stockyards on Mississippi River floodplain. (stockyards shut down ten years ago).
Minnesota State Capitol is on a hill just across the river in St. Paul. St. Paul is known as the city of seven hills.
Lots of granite buildings in area because there were granite quarries in central MN – Cold Spring, St. Cloud.
Cities and towns, I think, would easily derive from humans grouping for protection. As savage hunters/gatherers in an open environment – there would be need to be grouped, especially in the face of bears, panthers, lions.
For agriculture, one would need a local town for both defense against attacking humans and supplies, and somewhere to sell.
Mega-cities? I’m thinking money is the draw, along with severe inculcation via every media that city living is all there is. Television and print both focus on city events, behaviors and news. If something happens nearby that is only marginally tragic, it is referred to as a “rural” or”undeveloped” area.
Many mortgage companies will not write a loan for land without a home on it – because that is considered “risky” and “outside of focus” – so even down to the corporate policy level, non-urban is considered abnormal.
Me? Don’t want to be normal – herd living I have adapted to, but hate. Postage stamp lots with cookie cutter homes and a sky that you can barely see the stars? Yet most cannot imagine being unable to drive thru Starbucks every morning. Cities are more vulnerable to mass catastrophe and violence, and they allow anonymity for criminals of every stripe. Police no longer even prosecute or pursue home or car break-ins; they fill out a form so you can file an insurance claim.
I no longer see a town or a city as a way to defend from predators, so why exactly do people want to live on top of one another?
Sigh. George…the bomb…I’ve been being ‘prepared for the bomb’, in my dream world, for some time now.
I have stood in a flattened area of devastation of human lives and picked up a teddy bear, by the foot, that lay amongst the rubble.
I spend much of my dream world endeavoring to stop the slaughter. Several years ago, in one dream, I took on Chinese leadership and their frustration with the Vatican’s financial stranglehold of the world…Rome was the target.
I have looked down upon the whole of the Middle East cast into darkness and I was helpless to prevent it.
Of late, I have stood in the dark overlooking a darkened area with the idea that a million people along the Rhine would die.
It is wearying.
As for the other, some people prefer the emotional closeness of others and gather in groups for comfort, ease and safety. Some of us need the emotional room, and live the rural life which is a time, effort and money consuming affair.
Being able to make the land and animals pay for themselves is a more of a crapshoot, a lot of work and mostly unlikely, so some form of ‘other’ work is also necessary.
With over 100 acres of land, irrigation rights, milk cows, pigs, chickens and farm equipment, my dad worked days in town at the local feed store, my mom worked nights in town at the local hospital to help raise the family. We grew our own meat, sold cream to the local dairy in town, raised alfalfa, hey and grain. My folks looked like refugees from a concentration camp, and at 12, I ended up at the doctors office in a state of exhaustion. I milked cows before and after school, fed the hogs, and tended the chickens. Had the price of grain not fallen so far as to be feed for the hogs rather than being sold to even pay for the effort of growing it, things would have been a bit better for us. We moved to another state and to a city, to get a better ‘job’.
Can’t say I hold a good thought about ‘speculators’ whose stuntery radically affects lives.
I’m tired this morning, been battling in my sleep a lot…
So with this experience that you’ve had in the past when you were younger what is it that kept your family seceding you know what it is if you think about it I know what it is and I’m not sure that yours knows what it is but all man knows what it is and a few of us others though what it is that keeps us from being able to survive Beyond Army okay let me go ahead and tell you what it is is the government right you have to pay taxes on your land you have to pay taxes on your income well that’s getting ready made from a system there’s no need to create taxes when money is made to give to the people to the government to the cities counties states does no need to have Praxis money is an object you can create a system where anybody can contribute to a certain calls without
If I had to bet, I’d bet on Chicago (or wherever HeavyD lives). But the ancient city of Rechovot’ (Rehoboth) Israel fits, being close to the Jordan river. Also, Montgomery Alabama fits somewhat; Large stockyards there, and its on the Alabama River–Note; The Alabama River is formed from tributaries Coosa River and Tallapoosa River. Is there an Indian/First Nations name for the Alabama River that has O,Ch,R, and E?
Question is if the IDF would station strategic forces in Rechovot’? If that were ther case, then the dream freaking rocks….and NOT. But like Deepwater Horizon, it was what it was…
With all those hills (in your dream) and the giant bullet shaped building (?) (Salesforce Bldg), I would guess it’s location is San Francisco….
https://www.dezeen.com/2018/01/24/salesforce-tower-pelli-clarke-pelli-completes-san-francisco-tallest-skyscraper/
You can zoom in to see all river names:
https://txpub.usgs.gov/DSS/streamer/web/
During my working career in Honolulu I was acutely aware of being in a ‘target area’. I was raised as a country boy, and I hated living in a concrete box.(BTW they are chicken ‘coops’, not ‘coups’) My prepping plans included placing cache supplies at outlying areas that I had access to. I knew that I would have to get out of the crowded city and away from the mass of needy people who would be survivors of any catastrophe. I stayed there because that’s where the work and money were. But I looked forward to retirement out in the sparsely populated country of the Big Island, and now I have my wish. Yes, when the now-infamous ‘Nuclear Missile Alert’ for Hawaii came in I wasn’t too worried. I’m 250 miles from Honolulu with a couple of volcanic mountain ‘blast shields’ next to me. I figured no one would waste a nuke on the sparsely populated jungle with no military targets nearby. I’m very happy to finally have a house and lot big enough for ham radio antennas!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_of_the_United_States:_O
‘Might also look at river names that’ve been romanticized or Americanized.
Like Ouabache, which is the French phonetic spelling of the Miami Indian name “Wabash.”
The first towns that popped into my head were Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Carbondale, Evansville, Louisville, and Memphis. KC has/had as major a stockyard as Chicago, but despite being there several times, while I’ve checked out the railyard, I have never visited the stockyards. IIRC Dallas also has a major stockyard. The only time I was there, I, too, drove street-level in SE Dallas — reminded me of Chicago’s south side and the near NE of Baltimore, and maybe inner-city Cleveland, although not as dirty or dangerous as these. — Sardines, but to escape to the ‘burbs now is to kowtow to some draconian HOA.
The no tall buildings thing bothers me a lot. None of the above-mentioned cities fits the bill. IMO the implication is of a “class 3” or “class 4” city that’s no-longer in the commerce lanes — OR Washington, D.C., whose building height is statutorily-limited.
FWIW a FEMA friend told me years ago the only building standing after an F5 or a nuke would likely be a postwar laundromat built before 1955. He said they were all double-wall, double reinforced concrete. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen one which was not built on a slab, and which didn’t also have large windowed spaces…