Slinkies don't work in space

I had a dream about a Slinky this morning that I at first didn't really take to be anything relevant to what I've been writing about here.  But, as they tend to do, the dream stayed with me and I looked into it a bit.

In my dream, I was on a set of stairs and had a Slinky with me.  I am sure most people are familiar with Slinkies, but in case not, here is a picture of one and a video clip of what they are supposed to do on stairs:

So, I had my Slinky on a set of wooden stairs, and it wasn't working for whatever reason.  I would push it, and it wouldn't assume that same dynamic motion above.  I can't remember exactly why or what it did instead, but it just wouldn't fall down the stairs like a Slinky is supposed to do.  Just kind of stayed there, or laid on its side, or something.  Additionally, as my Slinky was failing to do anything, I kept calling it "my whiskey".  Perhaps because of the similar "Key" ending to the words I had gotten confused, but I kept thinking "My whiskey isn't working!" over and over again.  Finally, at the end of the dream sequence, I realized that the name of the toy is Slinky, and not Whiskey, and once I corrected the name, I woke up (never having been able to get the Slinky to work).

It was the kind of dream where any meaning that might come from this wasn't particularly clear, and I wasn't planning to spend a lot of time thinking about it.  It also came after another right before which I my mind was a bit more.

However, my wife and I got up pretty early to head to the airport in Denver (heading home from our quick escape to Keystone), and she wanted to drive.  So, I was sitting there in the passenger seat, and I ended up thinking about the dream, or rather it just kind of seemed to hang around still.  I had noted, obviously, that I had been calling it the wrong name, and that perhaps there might be something to this "Whiskey", but I actually became more interested in why the Slinky wasn't working in the dream.  "What would cause the Slinky not to work?" was the foremost question in my mind.

In order to answer that question, I thought I should be clear on what makes it work in the first place, or at least read up a bit more on Slinkies.  So, since I wasn't driving, I whipped out my phone and did some quick searching.  You would be surprised at how many university physics departments have papers and videos online fully dedicated to the humble Slinky!

For our purposes, you basically have two main things:  i) Gravity, and ii) the design of the Slinky coils which allows the toy to both store energy and convert that energy to kinetic or motion energy as gravity acts on it.  That was my simple takeaway, at least.  Remove or modify either of those two main factors, and the operation of the Slinky will change significantly.

In my dream, the structure and the design of the Slinky itself seemed normal (nothing visually looked broken), so I honed in fairly quickly on gravity.  And as I thought about that, and some of the themes recently on this blog, I landed on an hypothesis for why the Slinky wasn't working: I was in a zero-gravity environment, specifically outer space.

This seemed to click very clearly when I thought of it.

In a place like space, the slinky would clearly not work anywhere close to how it does here on Earth.  It would just not have the same gravitational pull acting on it.  Interestingly, as I was looking this up to double check if that was right, I found a New York Times article from 1985 that reported NASA having done Slinky experiments on board the space shuttle Discovery that demonstrated the Slinky no longer 'slinked' in the environment of space.

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/16/science/toy-time-in-space.html

Thus, my best guess for why this particular dream sequence had an inoperable Slinky was to simply call out that from whosever point of view I was experiencing the dream through, I was in the zero-gravity environment of outer space.  Space, of course, fits in well with some of the themes here on this blog, primarily with worlds comprising 'Earth' scattered across and separated by space, and that travel through that space, in some form, will be required in order to reach places like Tirion or Eressea (at least initially until those worlds are physically reunited with this one).

That seems the best fit for the 'clue' of the unslinking Slinky.

As to why I was calling it 'my whiskey', I am left to guesses on that also.  Whiskey came up recently in the comments section of my post "Surrounding Darkness:  Dream 1 of 3", where some comments from WG, ben, and Leo reminded me that I had made some comments of my own regarding the Notion Club Papers and Ramer's inability to drink the Whiskey.  He had both a long nose (perhaps a nod to Pinnochio, whose nose grew long as he lied?) and his arms had been changed into black wings.  The notion of black feathers (feathers being what wings of a bird are made of), have definitely come up before, particularly in my tying them to the Black Numenoreans and flying ships (and Jeff Bezos and Dr Evil...).  The vision of the character of Ramer was provided by Dolbear, and here is the scene or dialogue surrounding the whiskey mention:

'I leave the bubbling retorts to you,' said Dolbear, opening his eyes. 'I am afraid I've not yet got down to such high levels as Michael, and I muck about still with the marginal stuff, as he calls it. Tonight at any rate I've been having a bit of a dream: in the rootling stage, I suppose, owing to the distraction of this discussion going on round my body. I got a picture of Ramer, equipped with Frankley's long nose, trying to extract whiskey out of a bottle; he couldn't pour it out, as he had no arms, only a pair of black wings, like a devil in a stuffed M.A. gown.' 

 'The whiskey-bottle was not derived from the sense-data in this room,' said Lowdham. 

 'Now I can sympathize with the psychoanalysts,' said Frankley, rising and getting a bottle out of the cupboard. 'The difficulty they must have in sorting out dreams from the malicious inventions of the patient's waking mind!' 

 'No difficulty with Rufus,' said Lowdham. 'The drink-urge explains most of him. And I don't think he's got a Censor, sleeping or waking.' 

 'Hm! I'm glad I'm so transparent,' said Dolbear. 'Not everyone is so simple, Arry. You walk in disguises, even when awake. But they'll slip, my lad, one day. I shouldn't wonder if it was fairly soon.'

'Lor!' said Lowdham. 'Have I come out in a false beard and forgotten it, or something?' But at that moment he caught a glint in Dolbear's eye, and stopped suddenly. 

 'Go on, Michael, and don't take any notice of them!' said Jeremy. 

 'Shall I?' he asked, absentmindedly drinking the whiskey that Frankley had put at Dolbear's elbow. 

 'Of course!' we said. 'We are fortified now.'

Anyway, I'm just more getting some of this down as I don't know where this leads just yet.  

I looked up the meaning of whiskey which, according to Etymonline, is "waters of life", which might be interesting.  I also looked up any potential Elvish connections, specifically since we had the 'key' sound for the last syllable, which as the same a for SlinKEY or WhisKEY, was English and "wis" was Elvish.  

This might be promising.

"Wis" can be a root or definition for "air", as in the sky, but also more specifically as "to fly, or float in the air" (as an older alternative to the root "Wil").  Thus, whiskey in this case could mean something like "the key to the air" or "key of flying".   Again, given both recent posts and some great comments from the folks I mentioned before, this could be relevant.

I mentioned that there was a dream before this, but I will have to get to that another time.  As a preview, however, and in case it gets anyone's mind going in the meantime before I write some thoughts about it, it involved the following phrase:

"The favor of purgatory is repentance".