What a Good Boy Am I

He put in his thumb,

And pulled out a plum,

And said 'What a good boy am I'!

Dream: I was at a small, somewhat remote high school doing research, I was a cultural anthropologist. I was researching the curious popularity of sign language at the school, and how the student body had formed a club and even spent time creating their own hand signals and signs for one another. I was very interested in this.

I'm nearly finished with my research, but then I'm in my car and I need to back it up to a building in the middle of the campus, right over a lawn where there were a bunch of students hanging out and studying, enjoying the spring time sun. I turned around and gave them their hand signal for "get out of the way" and to my amazement they all quickly got up and made enough room for me to pass! One of the students pantomimed giving me his business card, and he was smiling so I think he was showing me that sign language was like a membership card or something to them, so that they knew me, recognized me as one of their own.

I felt really good about understanding that, and I drove away from the school in a wonderful mood, as if I'd finally got what I came for.

For a very long time now, I've been interested in achieving a dialogue with my subconscious. I can receive via dreams and visions, but I've never really been able to send, and I think my subconscious finally told me why. It's because my dream self doesn't really understand English - "it has no British". The subconscious is the realm of symbolic meaning, so it's important to speak in symbols, the only language she understands. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and someone in the sync sphere (sorry, can't remember the source) said that a symbol was worth a thousand pics. Do the math, that means a symbol is worth 1,000,000 words. Words are cheap.

During our last sync skype, I remember talking about the written language and how I considered words to be an improvement on Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Alan broke in and said something like "Yeah, but they are so beautiful". I consider fonts and prose and such to be beautiful in their own way as well, but the difference is what we call an abstraction layer.

Computers run on multiple layers of language abstraction. The base layer is binary code, 1 or 0, yes or no, yin or yang. This is the basic duality engine of the universe. On top of that sits Machine Language, and on top of that, C++, which we might call the Latin or Romance language of computing, of which the various operating systems like Windows and Mac are equivalent to Italian or French.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are much closer to the Machine Elf language than our modern, font based languages, they are closer to pure symbol. And I think that's what the dream is trying to tell me. Don't talk in words, talk in symbols. And the next question is... how? And that was answered by the student body. Don't talk with words, talk with your hands.

OK, I wish he was speaking like that...

I was stopped at an intersection that was under construction last week, the lights were out, and a traffic cop stood in the center, directing traffic with only his hands. We all understood him perfectly, and we understood him whether we spoke English or Chinese. He was demonstrating the power of the Machine Language to me. A language of symbols, created before we even had the power of speech, and translated through the hand.

Perhaps this is also the lesson of Harpocrates. Speak not with your mouth, but with your hands.

In the immortal words of My Fair Lady, Don't talk of words, show me.