Here is this morning’s dream. The wife says that I was kicking about whilst having it.

The dream starts with me walking down from Mount Sinai past Saint Catherine’s monastery I am to meet someone there. I have just watched {again} the dawn on top of Mount Sinai. As I near the walls of the monastery I am taken suddenly to The clockmaker. I travel instantaneously to his workshop.

In front of me is small man with wispy grey hair who is wearing an Eastern European black cap. He has wire rimmed glasses with circular lens holders perched on his nose. He is wearing a light tan leather apron and a white collarless shirt. He shows me the clock. In front of him is an exquisite mechanical clock mechanism about one metre in diameter. There are fly wheels and rotor arms all in motion. It is truly something. He says to me in a Swiss-German accent that I should watch carefully.

The clock starts to move and transform. It self-organises via a different shape to a nearby part of the workshop. It stutters a bit then continues to mark time. It struggles to regain equilibrium.

The clockmaker says that the clock shows the current lack of harmony in the world. It is struggling to find the simple harmonic motion needed for it to count time. He says that world is dangerously out of balance. He says that he has never seen it this bad.

I am taken swiftly back to the foot of Mount Sinai. At the edge of the car park are two large prayer carpets. On each of them in a few rows about a dozen long are Muslim pilgrims. They are in full stretched out prayer position. One mat has men and the other has women with hijab. They are all dressed completely in white. I understand that they have done purification washing. The white is very marked. They are about to make a pilgrimage to the summit of Mount Sinai. I had shared the night there with another group.

I meet a tall dark haired English man in the car park. He is wearing khaki shorts and an army jacket. He is stood by a fancy black 4×4 vehicle. He greets me and gesticulates to the people in prayer. I say to him that in 2003 I spent the night of my birthday prior to dawn on top of Mount Sinai as I have just done. That time whilst there were a few Muslims the peak was full of Japanese tourists. I say that something profound happened to me back then which I understood to be an initiation. I came down a changed man. The peak this time had many followers of Islam and they were all atop in prayer. I say that the last time I was at Saint Catherine’s I discussed the coming of the Imam Mahdi with my Egyptian guide. I managed to get him to go against guidelines which said not to talk about Islam with the punters.

–

–

He opens the boot of the car and shows me some tourist tatt he has bought. There is a small ornamental sword with red hieroglyph like writing on it he is keen to have my opinion. I look at the sword and say to him that it is a cheap fake. This confirms his opinion.

His wife and two sons arrive and he drives us all across the Sinai Peninsula to the Israel border. As we approach the border, we can see the sign in Hebrew and English saying Israel. There are several small calibre bullet marks in the sign. The border guard stops the car and ushers us into the border post to check our paperwork. He sees my passport and official Science Museum pass.

I go to a computer terminal in the post to check in. The children go to a drinks vending machine. The dark haired man come over to me. We are parting here. I am going back to London. He has a slim notebook computer. He asks me to take this back to the Science Museum, where I am curator, for examination. I explain to him that because I do not know what he has been up to on his computer that would be very, too, risky for me especially given the current world climate.

Dream ends.

*The clock maker aspect of this is reminiscent of Kālacakra tantra, the wheel of time. Perhaps the west “imagines” or “pictures” the same thing but with a different visual vocabulary.