The Book in the Sky, Part 1

I am reproducing my January 2009 Reality Sandwich article "The Book in the Sky" here on Evolver in multiple blog posts. The original format was blog style with lots of images interspersed with text, however RS understandably has restrictions on the number of images per article (60 was a bit high), so it ended up linking off to a lot of the images on a separate page on my own site. The article had a good response however as the author I felt that separating the images significantly detracted from the intended effect. I am doing this both to show it in the original format intended, and to set the groundwork for more material that I'll be creating that continues from where this left off.

The Book in the Sky, Part 1

There is currently much speculation on the possibility of imminent changes in our external reality, due to forces in nature, economy and society, as well as changes to our consciousness, or internal reality, during this same period of the next few years. This period coincides with the 2012 end date of the Mayan calendar, but regardless of one's views of the Mayan system, there is a general feeling that we are at a crossroads and we will be required to choose a new direction. At such a time it can help us to be open new ways of obtaining information, while remaining careful to evaluate it in a discerning way. It would seem that more people are experiencing synchronicities, and are increasingly seeing them as pointers towards information, or as sources of information in themselves.

I began to experience synchronicities in the early nineties and in the last three years or so they started to become frequent and more complex. Feeling that they were too significant to simply experience and then let go, I started blogging them in 2005. Some friends became interested and I dubbed them my "field reporters" – they would report their own experiences of that type back to me. The involvement of multiple people seemed to create a feedback loop that resulted in some complex events.

Another aspect of my experience that began to change at this same time, during spring 2005, was dreaming. I began to have dreams of greater significance, that I was very sure were communications from other sources, often about events in the near future.

In the last few months I have found that the synchronicities have again increased in complexity, and they are increasingly containing what I interpret as communication. This generally takes the form of a group of events that take place over a period of days or weeks, that are aligned in a synchronistic way, and that seem to convey information.

This chain of events has presented a picture to me, and it is this larger picture that I want to convey here. It is an unconventional form of narrative in which the interpretation and recording of the information conveyed through synchronicities seemed to set of more synchronicities which then had to be fed back into the interpretation and recording. The writing, reading and broadcasting of this article, the subject and the object, have essentially merged. I believe the publishing and reading of this article then continues to feed back into this same continuum, as has been the case already.

In June of 2008 I read the Reality Sandwich feature "Radical Interdependence and Online Telepathy: How Twitter Helps Us Find One Another" by Jennnifer Palmer. I then began following Jennifer's Twitter feed. A day or two later she tweeted that she had had a dream a few months previous that involved an observatory and a large letter "A" in the sky. I had a very strange feeling come over me, as I had also had a dream a few months previously about a large A in the sky. I contacted Jennifer about this.

Both dreams took place around November of 2007. I had written mine down with the date marked only as November 07, and she pinpointed that hers was just before she first contacted Reality Sandwich, which was also that November.

My dream consisted of several rows of large symbols or characters that were scrolling slowly across the sky. I was on the ground looking up. Out of these characters, I could only recognize a letter A, which was prominent and obviously intended to be the object of focus in that scene. The others were exotic and unfamiliar looking. A woman standing beside me looked up and said "Not long now."

Here is a sketch of the dream, keeping in mind that the characters aren't from memory, with the exception of the A.

That evening, after the dream, I watched Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey on TV. While riding in the back of a carriage with Mr. and Mrs. Allen, the main character Catherine is reading a passage from an Ann Radcliffe novel:

"A tumult of emotions stirred in the bosom of Adeline. Fear gripped her heart, that, at any moment, ruffians would fly upon the carriage and return her to the ignominy of her captive state."

Catherine falls into a fantasy in which she is abducted from her carriage by a man who examines the crucifix around her neck, to her excitement. She snaps out of it, and Mr. Allen looks into the camera and says "Not long now".

Northanger Abbey Part 1 (start at 4:30)

In Jennifer's dream, she saw something shoot out of an observatory into the sky. She wrote, "I looked up and the A appeared after some other static and gibberish. The A was the only thing I could recognize. The sensation that I had in the dream was very, very strong - it was an emotion of profound elation mixed with belly dropping fear and wonder - whatever launched in the sky seemed to produce a thunder that shook me at what felt like a molecular level."

Both dreams not only included a large capital A in the sky, but the A was among other characters that were not legible for whatever reason. Only the A could be made out. Jennifer and I had both written articles for Reality Sandwich, and both had themes of technology crossed with telepathy or mediumship. We had never communicated before, and yet we had the same specific and unusual dream imagery at around the same time. I felt that this needed to be looked at further.

Carl Jung wrote:

"...the archetype is not evoked by a conscious act of the will; experience shows that it is activated, independently of the will, in a psychic situation that needs compensating by an archetype. One might even speak of a spontaneous archetypal intervention... Because of its ubiquity, the archetype can by its very nature manifest itself not only in the individual directly concerned but in another person or even in several people at once - for instance, in parallel dreams, the 'transmission' of which should be regarded more as a Psi-phenomenon than anything else."1

It is conceivable that the act of bringing people together that are looking for insight into the idea of 2012, through the Reality Sandwich website, created a psychic situation, as described by Jung, that brought about a spontaneous archetypal intervention in the form of parallel dreams. If Jennifer and I received such a transmission, it should contain some kind of information that can be interpreted, and it would be worth attempting to interpret it.

The dreams have the same core idea of a set of characters appearing in the sky, that can't be understood with the exception of the letter A. The other elements of the dreams vary.

Common to both dreams are the letter A amongst undiscernable characters in the sky and the time of November 2007. In my dream we have a matrix of characters in rows, slowly moving across the sky, and the message "Not long now". Elements unique to Jennifer's dream are characters emanating from an observatory; "profound elation, belly-dropping fear"; and "Shook me at what felt like a molecular level".

The letter A comes from the Greek Alpha, and can be traced back to Aleph, the Egyptian hieroglph for Ox. A and its predecessors make the first letter of Latin, Greek, Cryllic, Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets. Wikipedia tells us:

"Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 1. ...

Plutarch in Moralia, presents a discussion on why the letter alpha stands first in the alphabet. Ammonius asks Plutarch what he, being a Boeotian, thinks of Cadmus...placing alpha first because it is the Phoenician name for ox – which...the Phoenicians considered not the second or third, but the first of all necessities. "Nothing at all" Plutarch replied. He then added that he would rather be assisted by Lamprias...For Lamprias had said that the first articulate sound made is "alpha" [ah], because it is very plain and simple — the air coming off the mouth does not require any motion of the tongue — and therefore this is the first sound that children make."2

Some symbolic meanings of the letter A then could be Beginning - Alpha;
Essential practical value – Aleph/Ox, "the first of all necessities";
Accessibility, simplicity, universality - "The first sound that children make", the first letter of Latin, Greek, Cryllic, Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets;
Upward shift or ascension - A geometically forms an arrow pointing upward.

I found a kids toy that evoked this dream imagery. It is a simple computer with buttons with numbers, objects and shapes. There is a switch with two options: a scroll with a capital A and a scroll with a question mark. When the question mark is selected, the computer names something and asks you to press the appropriate button. When the A is selected, you press the button and the computer identifies the item for you. The A means that all of the the information is available to you. I would say that the primary meaning of the A is this accessibility or availability of information.

What is the information that is being made accessible? In my dream, the alien characters were arranged in several rows stacked upon one another, forming a field of information. The field moved horizontally across the sky from left to right. This evokes the Matrix movie series, with its columns of descending alphabetic characters representing the digital information underlying the reality that Neo and the other characters operate within.

David Icke regularly references the Matrix movies when describing the holographic nature of reality, and this holographic concept originiates with physicist David Bohm's holomovement. There is a particular version of this framework from systems theorist Erwin Lazslo, incorporating much older thinking.

A couple of weeks before learning about Jennifer's A dream, and connecting it to my own, I had finished reading Lazslo's "Science and the Akashic Field", in which he proposes that our reality is grounded on an information field, that he calls the Akashic Field, based on the ancient Hindu concept of Akasha. He refers to this as the "A-field".

"Akasha is a Sanskrit word meaning "ether": all-pervasive space. Originally signifying "radiation" or "brilliance", in Indian philosophy akasha was considered the first and most fundamental of the five elements - the others being air, fire, water and earth. Akasha embraces the properties of all five elements: it is the womb from which everything we perceive with out senses has emerged and into which everything will ultimately redescend. "The Akashic Record" is the enduring record of all that happens, and has ever happened, in the whole of the universe."3

The symbols appeared in the sky. In Supernatural, Graham Hancock makes connections between themes found worldwide in shamanic journeys and those found in UFO abduction experiences:

"...most abductees report that at the beginning of the experience they are 'floated' out of their houses or cars and up to the sky to where the UFO awaits. Similarly, most accounts of shamanic initiations also begin with a sky journey (because the realm of the gods and spirits is located in the sky...)"4

The techniques used to transport the shaman or abductee to the sky are similar; both are floated or levitated through the air, by a beam of light in the case of the abductees, and by a "sky rope" in the case of the shaman. The abductees end up in a flying craft of some sort, and it is common for the shaman to also end up in a boat, "flying shield" or even a vessel with "walls of metal".

Once they have reached their destinations the shaman generally meets with a spirit guide and the abductee meets what are perceived as aliens or extraterrestrials.

"...the purpose of a shaman's spirit guides is to bestow upon him the power and teach him the requisite skills to shamanise: to travel freely and at will in the spirit world, to negotiate with its inhabitants, and to return to earth equipped to heal the sick, influence the weather, control the movements of animals, and find out the truth of hidden things – not for his own benefit but for the benefit of the tribe. ...from the reports of UFO abductees, it is also clear - despite their frequent of confusion and trauma – that they regard their encounters with the aliens as important learning experiences."5

In some cases this tranferal of knowledge makes use of a book. Hancock cites the case of Mazatec Indian shaman Maria Sabina from the 1950s:

"...the spirit smiled, and immediately he had in his hands something that he did not have before, and it was a big Book with many written pages. 'Here,' he said, 'I am giving you this Book so that you can do your work better and help people who need help and know the secrets of the world where everything is known.' I thumbed through the leaves of the Book, many written pages, and I thought that unfortunately I did no know how to read. I had never learned and therefore that would not have been any use to me. Suddenly I realized I was reading and understood all that was written in the Book and that I became as though richer, wiser, and that in one moment I learned millions of things. I learned and learned."6

Maria could not take the book with her, and said that it "remains in the sky". The same story is told separately by UFO abductees Betty Hill and Betty Andreasson, who were given books but had to return them before leaving the ship – as if it were a reference library.

Another theme heard in UFO abduction reports is of the abductee being shown pictographic symbols or characters of an alphabet. Abduct.com has a list of 25 such reported cases. Within many of these alphabets are recognizable numbers or letters.

The phrase "Not long now", clearly emphasized in the dream and later that day with an additional synchronicity, would imply that this accessibility is imminent. Once I had worked out a rough interpretation of these dreams, the imagery began to spill over into my daily reality.

The Book in the Sky, Part 2
The Book in the Sky, Part 3