Siege – “Confederate” -Tarot – Dream 02-07-2025

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Here is last night’s dream. I managed to sleep until 5 AM without interruption which is unusual these days. We watched the film “Old Guard” last night.

The dream starts in the South-Eastern corner of America. It is in the recent past. It is sweltering hot, humid and sweaty. We are under siege. We can hear gunfire from the nearby town which is surrounded. There is smoke in the air and cordite on the wind. From time to time the night sky lights up with an orange light from afar due to a large munition. They are being pounded. We too are besieged but by a much smaller force. It is quiet where we are but we know that they are out there on our property in numbers.

In the dream I am very surprised to be in America. Though it does make sense.

I am sat at a large table in the kitchen or scullery. There are candles burning and several finished bottles of wine. I have a glass on the go. We are speaking Cajun or creole French. There are a few of us white and a few servants or slaves black. We have all hastily eaten something quick. Others are keeping watch. We are in some wooded “mansion” type house on a plantation of sorts. The windows are boarded up from the inside.

On the table is a tarot deck de Marseilles. On the wall there are pictures of soldiers in a kind of uniform of dull grey colour. My minds thinks Confederate but it could have been earlier. It could be militia but is definitely not redcoat.  There is an air of civil war or revolution and of tearing apart. On the table I can see the cards 0,1 and 10. The cards are le mat, le bateleur and la roue de fortune. I focus on the latter. It seems apt. Also on the table someone has been sketching a contemporary “confederate” set of cards and having them cut out. The table is like that of le bateleur in front of us. The tarot arcana have been given a modern twist. La roue de fortune is comprised two pistols intertwined head to tail to make a kind of pistol ying-yang circle. Other figures are made contemporary with white wigs sat on judicial “thrones”. One of the company is whiling away the time drawing. We all know what is coming in the morning. One of the black women in a dark blue dress clears the plates from the table. One man in the corner is drinking brandy to forget. There is a sense of impending.

The scene changes to morning. We are outside in daylight. I am wearing black riding boots, black pants and a dirty white blouson shirt with a lace up closure in the front. It is partially undone. I have blood spatters on it. It needs a wash as do I. My long dark brown hair is held at the back in a pony tail. I am partially dishevelled and have been roughed up. My hands are tied behind my back and I am being held by them. I am being brought before. I can sense a pistol very close to my right temple. I can sense an arm and a hand holding it. They are going to execute me. I see a flash of smoke as the pistol mechanism fires. I hear a loud bang.

In the dream I know that it does not kill me because I can see myself back in Europe as an older man with a white-grey ponytail and clean shirt sat at my desk. This shooting is early in my previous life.

The dream ends.

What is Safe to Ignore?

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The ongoing foray into medical things has thrown up a few things which may or may not be safe to ignore. As a part of the ongoing saga I am going to have a full cardiovascular MOT or road worthiness test. The presence of excess iron has many knock on implications and I have already been prescribed one medication which is no longer recommended.

You can call me rusty.

It is a long old haul and the garden is suffering a bit from lack of attention.

It seems so far that the Jury has decided that I don’t have five of the genetic mutations which I have tested for. I am going to discuss these further, a little. My status as a mutant has not yet been confirmed.

Traditional western medicine is based upon symptoms. By the time symptoms are apparent disease has arrived. More recently tests are done with a mind to early prophylaxis where possible. What may be, is clear in some case and less so in others. The UK mass newspapers are full of misdiagnosis horror stories.

“I went to see multiple GPs. They sent me home with a box of Rennie’s. Later in A&E after I tripped up on the way home from the pub, they found a basketball size alien tumour of extraplanetary origin growing in my kidney. I have two and half weeks to live!”

These cases are rare and anomalous. The tendency is to discount and not pay sufficient attention to things which do not fit your story, your view of how things might be.

“It is impossible to have extra planetary tumours growing in the kidneys. They are usually found in the spleen!! Everyone knows this! DOH.”

People can be very dismissive about things which later turn out to be highly important. They ignore things which are not safe to ignore.

I like to offer people options. The easiest option is that I am an eccentric borderline nut-job burn out. I suspect that as an explanation this would find purchase in the minds of many. It is a pigeonhole into which I can be fitted easily. I can then be ignored. I may be briefly entertained but never taken seriously. To develop this a little further. If one is enamoured with intrigue, one could say that whacko-nut-job-eccentric is my cover.

With a high degree of certainty one can predict answers to certain questions. This is because denial is a Pavlovian response in some. I have asked a number of people if they feel they have unresolved karma with me. To date no-body has answered that question. Nobody has tried. They have ignored it and let it drop. It is easy to discard and discount. On my part it has been a genuine and well-intended question very largely for their benefit. But of course people know best and are unwilling to do the work needed to answer a question of moderate depth and wide implication. People want to preserve face above all else. FOLOF, fear of loss of face.

Is such a question safe to ignore?

In the “normal” world and within its confines and rules, yes. But this is a world and philosophy bridging question and the limited “normal” context loses its imagined wide applicability. Ignoring such a question ignores and devalues a way of being held by hundreds of millions of people.

A lot of people think small details can be ignored. A prime minister preaching about lock down may deem it his God-given right to party. Ignoring, conveniently, the detail which he said that we didn’t ought. A small detail ignored can come back to bite you on the bum with rabid and perhaps gangrenous teeth.

“The law was not broken in its strictest and most convenient {for us} interpretation.”

Obsessing about detail can be very tiring. So knowing what is and is not important makes life easier. We all make choices and assign priorities whether consciously or by default.

People may argue the toss when it is very unwise so to do. The toss once argued for cannot be u-turned always. You may have won the toss but you can be up shit creek in a barbed wire canoe without a paddle. The toss will not keep you warm in a nuclear winter.

My own opinion is that it is not safe to ignore your dreams. Experimental evidence has suggested this to me. This morning’s dream had someone I once knew trying to manipulate a situation, to find some kind of pretext. It was suggested that some kind of trap is in preparation. It revolves around the number of conspiracy three, three people. In every conspiracy there has to be at least three. Without being paranoid I am opening myself up to the dream both at night and during the day to see what, if anything, the dreaming has to add to this morning’s dream.

It is very easy to imagine important and significant the wrong things entirely.

We can ignore the things we did not ought to. We may need to pay strict attention and focus to things which we might otherwise flippantly ignore.

What is safe to ignore?

When Professor Google Does Not Know…

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Something weird is happening at Eurofins the lab which analyses the blood tests. On Saturday they sent me the results of my alpha-1 antitrypsin survey. This came back normal, so there is no genetics causing a suppression. Yesterday evening they resent me the results twice!! This kind of thing is not normal, so it caught my attention.

The really weird thing is the low parathyroid hormone level.

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“Hypoparathyroidism is the combination of symptoms due to inadequate parathyroid hormone production (PTH) (Hypo-parathyroid-ism).  This is a very rare condition, and almost always occurs because of damage or removal of parathyroid glands at the time of parathyroid or thyroid surgery. This bears repeating: When people have too little parathyroid hormone (PTH), it is almost always because they had thyroid or parathyroid surgery and all four parathyroid glands were removed or injured.”

Source parathyroid.com

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I have the low hormone level BUT not the reduced calcium levels. I used to get cramps and have had neuropathy in my fingers. This neuropathy being probably down to the cervical spine injury ~2008 and the hernias therein. Calcium levels are however normal.

I have asked Professor Google about the PTH low Calcium normal using different sets of key words. He/she/it does not have much to say on the subject. There was one case of a Māori woman with similar numbers. It was weird enough to ask the laboratory to check the parathyroid hormone data. It was not wrong. They made a “special” report.

The endocrinologist may yet comment.

Using the above logic it perhaps makes sense to re-test the hormone level.

Because I am asymptomatic, this does not seem like a big deal. It could be a harbinger of problems yet to come. The hormone level is low; it has not dropped the calcium yet…

Like me it is a bit of an anomaly an outlier. The question is, is it safe to ignore and chalk up as just one of those things or does it need further investigation?

When You Just Know

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I have started the process of looking around for an alternate orthopaedic surgeon. I have secured a provisional appointment. I just know that should I follow through, this it is going to open a can of worms. In principle a second opinion is “allowed”. In practice it can put noses out of joint, cause gossip and stoke rivalries. I can stop it. I am going to sleep on it. But the moment I tip up for an appointment I will have to explain myself. There will be uncomfortable feelings on both sides. It will not be smooth and I will be the problem, not anyone else. I am also a foreigner now, too. I do not have citizenship and my right to stay expires in a few months’ time, March.

Way back when I lived near Farnham, I had a GP doctor who was athletic-skinny. He had a pro-forma crib sheet for calculating BMI. It was issued by the Ministry of Truth. He calculated mine and proceeded to lecture me from his soap box about the need to lose weight. Even though I was not officially obese back then. I asked him to show me my extra body fat. He could not. He said that people can be fat on the inside. Whatever that means, those were his literal words, fat on the inside. I showed him my large biceps and claimed muscle mass but he persisted. I then said that I had recently read an article in the BMJ about how raw BMI data was often over interpreted in general practice medicine. His back was up and he was affronted.

I just knew that we would never get on and for our mutual benefit it would be better for me to have another GP. I saw him a few times before I changed practice and each meeting was fractious. He is a human being, so was I. I have rarely had a reaction like this from a woman. I concluded that possession of a penis played a role in interpersonal dynamics. I am not insecure about the average size of mine, physically and metaphorically. I don’t have a whole bag of chips on my shoulder.

The caveat here is that my perception could be skewed. I perceive that I have an uncanny knack of putting people’s back up especially when they deem themselves superior, more expert, to me. I can be more frank than some like or can handle. I am just being me. I am not trying to wind them up or belittle them. I get what I perceive of as bad reactions.

In general I know when I have the early stages of a bronchial infection. I report to a GP doctor and quite rightly because there is not enough cack in the lungs, they do not initially prescribe an antibiotic. I just know in many cases I will be back soon when the cack gets cacky enough for antibiotics. They have a process to go through to limit over prescription. I just know that I have to wait until a certain severity of illness presents. They are doing their job, that is all. It is possible that I might wait too long one day.

I had a bad clash of personalities with my cancer “care” nurse a decade ago. She had severe mother superior tendencies and I met her dogmatism head on. This made collecting my results from her an unpleasant thing which I came to dread. Rather than looking forward to her support, I would dread the meetings. I asked them to send my carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) results by email. They refused. If anything went wrong it would have to be very wrong indeed before I would reach out to my allocated cancer care nurse. I never did. I just knew that the best thing was to switch hospital care teams. It sounded simple and I could offer the reason of enhanced proximity.

However I opened a can of worms. Every time I went for a colonoscopy or to follow up blood in the faeces, they wanted to know why I had changed teams. They kept pressing me. They seemed obsessed with gaining this information. I gave the same answer that they were closer, which was true but incomplete. On a number of occasions the chimney sweep insisted that the blood was from piles. I just knew that was not the case. So we had to have an examination for piles before he agreed to a sigmoidoscopy. I don’t particularly like having endoscopes shoved up my arse but there was no way of avoiding his adamant insistence that it was piles. I just had to let him go through his process. He had all the power and I wanted to find out if I had a new cancer or a recurrence of the old one. I was not anxious I wanted data. People can see anxious when need for data manifests.

Sometimes I just know when the best thing is to drop something and walk away. It is for everyone’s benefit. Even If I am inconvenienced it can be better just to let things lie, leave them well alone.

A while back someone trying to be clever said that I was a part of the equation as to why things were not working out. I simplified his equation by removing a variable, me. I don’t know how well the equation worked out after that…If I was a/the problem at least they had the possibility of moving forward unencumbered by me.

This feeling that I am a/the problem according to others has presented multiple times in this life and it has resulted in a walk away or a door slam on more than a few of these.

If I am the problem I want to simplify things…

I just know when people are seeing or are starting to see me as a/the problem.

Maybe they are right and it is always me…

It is just one of those things…

South Africa – Richard W – Imperial College Colleagues Dream 29-06-2025

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Here is last night’s dream.

The dream starts in the South African bundu or bush. I am driving along a rough dusty unmade road. The road goes up and own and has a yellow-orange bull dust. I am in an open sided Jeep like vehicle of a classical pedigree age. It is four wheel drive and contrasts with an antiseptic modern SUV. I am dressed in faded olive green park ranger type clothes with shorts. I have a pistol in a holster on my right hip, suitable for my left handedness. It is tremendous fun driving along the road / path. We are near a fairly fast flowing deep river like at the Augrabies falls which I visited two decades ago. I can hear a waterfall.

–

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The sound of the water is loud. The wind is in my hair and I can smell and taste the dry bush all around me.

The scene changes and I am now in the UK. I am in a busy Tesco supermarket. People are queuing. Outside the air is dank and wet. There is a constant hum of urban traffic. In one of the checkout queues I see Richard W whom I know from school and UCL chemistry. He is miles away up in his head. I tap him on the shoulder. At first, he does not recognise me. Then when he does, he is totally surprised to see me. I motion to behind the checkouts and will wait for him there.

When he has checked out, he comes over to see me. Although he looks a lot younger than he would be now, I can see that life is getting him down and he lacks energy. I turn him around and stand behind him. I open up a battery compartment in his back by sliding off a plastic over. I take out the two AA style batteries which are there and replace them with two fresh ones from my pocket. These batteries are similar in colour and design to Duracell. I replace the plastic cover and Richard reboots.

There is a short break for a loo visit.

I return to the dream back into a dank drab UK urban environment. You can hear the noise the cars make on the wet road. I enter a large building which I do not know with some kind of large atrium. It is Imperial College and Chemistry related. The hallway / atrium is being renovated. I bump into various ex-colleagues {sequentially} who were at Imperial two decades ago, all of them now professors. There are more than half a dozen of them both men and women. They are slightly sheepish about meeting me, there is an air of awkwardness or embarrassment. They are unsure as to how to greet me and if to greet or acknowledge me at all. Two males with whom I worked are very noticeable by their absence. The absence speaks volumes. There is a weird feeling that the former colleagues are surprised to see me even though there is a sense for them that I never left.

I walk into some kind of a hallway. There are poster boards up with academic conference style poster presentations on a blue “felt” background. These are all chemistry related. I can see molecules and graphs. Walking past I think some things do not change despite modern technology. A poster is a poster. In the dream I do not know why I am there in that building with them. It seems anomalous to me if not to them.

The dream ends.

Narziß und Goldmund – Quantum Superposition State

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Finding “The Glass Bead Game” and Herman Hesse was a pivotal moment for me. In Knecht, the Magister Ludi, I found someone who innately sensed interconnectivity, the flow of consciousness and how one idea or theme intertwined others. His “lives” spoke direct to me. Finally I did not feel quite so absolutely weird. The scale of concept was vast and hugely refreshing. Someone on the planet was wired a little like me, though far more eloquent and expressive.

Like Magnus Pym and Bern, “The Perfect Spy”, had captured and conveyed a little of what it was like for me to have traversed life. His fiction more complex than mine. Yet I recognised the chameleon into which I once morphed for safety and to blend.

But it was with Narziß und Goldmund that I learned in the courtyard at Mariabronn of my own duality superimposed into a superposition state. There I sensed something of my monastic pasts and my reckless wild child. Initially I felt more Goldmund, later Narziß. The coefficient of the latter in my superposition sate is higher, when time averaged. I saw in this duality the autobiography of Hesse and his delicate and nuanced verbalisation. The sense of friction but not conflict, of phase and of interplay.

In a way each of my blogs are / have been by way of a glass bead game, only making sense to me. They are a way of arranging things like a sand Mandala, waiting for the brush of diaspora onto wind.

And again I am back with Narziß und Goldmund, wondering what fate may have left in store. Are there adventures left or is a retreat deeper into cloister on the cards…

Self-Diagnosis – Avoid Cannibalism

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The internet is awash with medical, pseudo-medical and dietary advice. It is very easy to ask Dr Google, Nurse Edge or Prof DuckDuckGo for advice and thereby arrive at a diagnosis. No doubt this may drive the medical profession up the wall, but on occasion it might be useful. I am able to research things thoroughly without arriving at a firm self-diagnosis. I don’t have a favourite disease, nor a goal I am aiming at. There is no bucket list of maladies. Looking through a list of rare diseases I found this one, which is quite specialised, no need for fava beans and a nice Chianti.

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Kuru

Awareness: There’s no known Kuru awareness group or dedicated day.

Discovery: Occurring at epidemic levels in the ’50s and ’60s, it was eventually discovered by Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, whose research won him the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Treatment: There’s no treatment for Kuru, other than the preventative measure of not committing cannibalism.

Symptoms: Tremors and muscle jerks (Kuru is the Fore tribe’s word for ‘shiver’), headaches and arm and leg pain, difficulty walking and swallowing, progressive and severe coordination problems.

Discovered only in a remote region of New Guinea among the Fore tribe and closely related to mad cow disease, Kuru is caused by prions, which is a protein that encourages build-up of abnormal brain tissue that results in irreversible brain damage. 100% lethal, it’s brought on by the consumption of human brains that contain the infection. The Fore tribes practiced cannibalism prior to the 1950’s to preserve the spirits of the dead, but it is now outlawed.

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The prophylactic advice to not commit cannibalism is not too arduous to follow. It should be within the ability of most. I read today that ~75% of Americans are obese. I just cross the threshold for obesity which means that ~70% are more weighty than me. That it is a serious arthritis epidemic in the making. Lardy, lardy.

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People can self-diagnose with all sorts of things including grandeur, omniscience and importance. They may imagine themselves angelic and incapable of the oral phase change of butter. Not all diagnoses are accurate.

Today my results for alpha-1-antitrypsin are in and the result is mid-range and very normal. Which raises a slight question about the low alpha 1 globulin data. I would like to see the error bars on reading a labelled electrophoresis result. My guess is that they could be a few percent. As a technique is does not scream highly quantitative to me.

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Alpha-1 (α1) globulins

Proteins migrating within the alpha-1 region include alpha-1-antitrypsin (constituting about 90% of the band intensity), alpha-1 lipoprotein, alpha-1-acid glycoprotein, and alpha-1 fetoprotein. A haze stain at the leading edge of this band may be due to high-density lipoprotein (HDL).

–

The GP may wish further clarification. Up to her, if she thinks I need more tests. The thing making up ~90% in the electrophoresis is normal using a more quantitative method.

Logic suggests that having something iffy with my liver is possible / likely. But I am not yet yellow. One genetic problem has now been ruled out. There is a faint hint on line of some endocrine stuff implicated. We shall see what, if anything, the specialist suggests.

I may hear back from the Rheumatologist next week and it is possible something else needs investigated.

On exactly the ten year anniversary of my arse {colon} cancer operation I get to see an anaesthetist to ensure that I am OK to have a colonoscopy. Some blood / piss tests to measure creatinine may be on the cards….

Ten years ago I was in the GP’s office after a sigmoidoscopy. They has found 11 polyps in the lower part of my colon. I had read that 1 in ten polyps turn cancerous. Given that they has not looked “upstream” I said sampling the probability that often suggested that I may have colon cancer “upstream”. He looked shocked and wanted to reassure me. I was calm and knew the reason behind my statement. A few days later they found more polyps and a T3 cancer.

By the middle of July, just after Bastille Day, I will know the state of my chimney and if there are more polyps {or worse} or not. This sets the clock ticking for the next “gold standard” investigation in due course.

I will be enjoying industrial strength laxative on Bastille Day. There will be metaphorical fire works chez nous. We already have the Sudocrem.

I personally would not diagnose a MOT pass, I would fail my contrôle technique and should probably be kept off the streets to protect other road users…

Challenges – Genetics – Having to Endure – Lama Dorje

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A working hypothesis I have is that because I do not strut about, talk a lot and generally bullshit, people feel that I am need of education by them. Somehow, they are kind enough to bestow the benefit of their grandiose and unsolicited opinion on me so that I, a mere lowly pleb, might learn from their magnificence. So many offer me their opinions. Obviously, I am in dire need of education.

It is a catch 22. Do you let them rabbit on {endlessly} or flash intellect and make them feel more insecure than they already are. I don’t have an answer. Neither works well.

You may infer from the above that I am an arrogant arsehole. Your reflection in the mirror which is me may not reveal my essence.

Given all the tests in a medical sense that I am having its sounds a bit like someone meandering around in search of some kind of elusive diagnosis of sorts. That could be the case. Or it could simply be the generosity of the French healthcare system in action. The tendency for prophylaxis here is higher than in the UK.

The “health” finger continues to point at genetics. There is a non-normal make up, perhaps. Maybe I am special, so fucking special, or a creep, or a weirdo.

In my extensive recapitulations there is a recurring theme, “having to endure”. I have had to endure all sorts of things starting with bullying at school(s) and being gossiped about extensively, especially when my back was turned and I was not there. I am not paranoid; I have anecdotal evidence in support of this tendency. People curry favour by gossiping and in the past, they have claimed power by association to me. Those days are long gone.

I have an inkling that the current health drama belongs to the subset of “having to endure” challenges. There is little I can do; I simply have to endure and remain calm.

Śāntideva in the Bodhicaryāvatāra, has a whole chapter on forbearance. Bodhidharma was rumoured to have sat watching a wall for nine years.

Maybe one day instead of enduring I may give both barrels. I doubt many could handle it if I ramped up to 9/10 face to face with them. It would be very intense. Outside of experience.

The other working hypothesis I have is that I am tangentially involved in the drama, schemes and socio-political shenanigans of others. The thing is they are over “there” and I am only truly involved in their illusions. People make shit up; they make a drama out of it and somehow, I am caught up in their imaginations. I am written into their imaginary scripts.

I used to wear black Levi’s 501 jeans for decades. I now wear army surplus combat trousers. This dress makes me look a bit like a pikey prepper. I do not look for one minute like an ex-intellectual or the co-founder of a high technology high power laser company. So people tend, in the first instance, to talk down to me, even worse I do not speak high quality French, God’s only intellectual language. I must therefore be an idiotic stupid moron. They judge a book by their mis-interpretation of the cover. The French are as, if not more, arrogant than the English.

What can you do? Let them rabbit on {endlessly}. There is no point in trying to change their habits or self-opinion.

The wife and I have a joke. If I wore Buddhist robes people would treat me entirely differently. If they saw me thus attired in their dreams, they would find it weird.

“Alan always wore jeans in life!!”

There is a part of me that might order some robes on line and do a TikTok type experiment. Go in jeans to an estate agent one day and in robes the next…

But that would be fucking about…

Is there some as yet unseen diagnoses?

Or am I simply enduring the Gattling gun fire of multiple medical tests and appointments?

The current bet is towards the latter…