Full Disclosure: I have an abiding and increasing passion towards the mystery of love/desire and its relation to space-time. This passion orients me to COD in a particular manner.

In Episode 26, we learned that Xhactu is about to reveal the mystery of love to us humans. In previous episodes we had ventured into the mysteries of quantum reality, space-time, and so on. He begins by imparting some wisdom concerning desire:

Desire is bound to locality. And for this reason, desire itself, and its object are more and more bound to locality of time and space, Desire does not move out into the universe, but it is as if the universe concentrates itself in locality. This is why desire can drive one mad, no matter what kind of creature one may be.

("We can witness this truth in real time in the Depp/Heard trial that is currently running"—unbidden insertion!)

At the point that Xhactu is about to release his wisdom about love to us, the Universal Translator breaks down and we lose the pearls. I was bereft. But my imagination had been fired up by this absence and continued down the path of inquiry to connect love and space-time. Then the “Ask Xhactu” column appeared unexpectedly and … what? A question from "me" appeared there, much to my surprise. This surprise has the same quality in dreams at times when I am surprised by questions I asked in a dream or that another dreamer tells me about (i.e. “my” asking a question in their dream).

Here, “my” question is “what is the nature of love” and Xhactu answers:

—Dear John: Love is what you inferior Earthlings call “mush puppies.” We superior inter-galactics call “love” the Super-Glue of Everything (i.e., the gravitational field of dark matter)

Once again the connection between love and space-time is pressed upon me. Amazing! Now I felt I was on the scent of something important and therefore promptly forgot the whole matter—i.e. until this issue of COD 36-Scene2:

HERON MAN
Something's not right, Owl.

OWL MAN
Of course not, Heron. If everything was all right, time would just stop. You know as well as I do that it is something not right that keeps the next happening, thus the so-called flow of time in the direction of time's arrow. It's not really a flow but a jumping from next to next like steppingstones.

Another pearl was freely cast before this swine! I went right on reading ahead, desiring to get to the horror, as if nothing had happened but then I got pulled up. What WAS said back there on the stairs! I slowed down. My psyche was speaking to me… Psyche (Xhactu?) had once again connected desire, love, and space-time.

How can this be?

“Something not right” must have something to do with desire being bound to locality and forever seeking to extinguish itself in an object imagined as out of reach, in the future, over there on the next stepping stone. And so we jump from stepping stone to stepping stone, seeking the next happening, finding ourselves unexpectedly on another stepping stone but needing to making up stories about how we arrived there, based on our current understanding of there being an arrow of time.

("Once again, witness Depp and Heard on their current stepping stone in court"—another unbidden insertion!)

But now the $60 000 question: what happens if “everything was all right”, i.e. desire’s quest is stilled? The $60 000 answer given us is: “time would just stop”. What would one experience then? So, three questions now: how does desire get stilled? And what would the experience of space-time be then? And lastly how does love figure in this mystery?

If this, my story, appeals to you, fellow readers, you might story a response or maybe ask Xhactu!

Cheers, John

THE MYSTERY OF MYSTERY

I stopped watching television in 1998, when Seinfeld ended its nine-year run. 

In the fall of 2021, I had a dream in which I was watching a BBC crime show. When I worked on the dream, and looked at the offerings on BBC, I found myself attracted to a program called Vera. Vera began broadcasting in 2011 and continues to the present time. The series is based on the Vera novels by British author Ann Cleeves. As I began watching, I also began reading. Something about the crime genre hooked me and since then I have watched numerous other crime shows and read the novels or screenplays they were based on. 

This activity also brought to mind that as a kid I read a lot of mysteries and would also write my own stories and scripts.. When we got our first TV (1950), it also housed a record making turntable. The whole family participated in performing the scripts I wrote. I felt I was reconnecting with some important piece of myself left behind.

A subsequent dream pictured the title page of either a novel or screenplay entitled, Rule of 3. It also showed that this was an "Arlan Condon Mystery." Arlan Condon is one of the main figures in my novel, DREAMS: The Final Heresy (not yet finished). 

The majority of dreams this year have involved the mystery genre in various ways. some seemingly influenced by the books I've read or programs I have watched. But never in any sense just repetitions—always adding a twist or turn or phrase or simply a word. And others with content that is wholly new and different from anything I have read or watched but still enveloped within this realm of crime and mystery. I do not experience the insistence and persistence of this theme as evidence that I am not “getting” the message. Instead, it feels like an essential collaboration with “the other” prodding me with ideas and elements to take seriously in this task.

I am used to experiencing dreams as tasks and most of the things I have written or published have had their origin in dreams. Still, I am an old man now with much “on my plate” as they say. Lots of things to finish. At this rate I will run out of days before running out of things to finish. For some time I fought this “pressure.” No longer. I now consider it a bounty and I am learning to enjoy it.