Children as Mice, and rescuing the Lost

I introduced my post yesterday with a dream about a mouse.

I didn't attempt any interpretation of the dream specifically, because I didn't know what to make of it.  Rather, I used it to transition into the account of the mouse that horded all of its dog food in my truck, and then I was mentally off into the story of the Pied Piper.

A little later in the day, I checked a blog by Bruce Charlton.  He has come up before on this blog, and I've even linked to a post he invited me to write on Notion Club Papers blog having to do with orcs, of all things.

As it turned out, on the same day I was writing about mice and rats on this blog, Bruce had written his own little piece on these rodents.  It was intended to be a humorous take on the brand name "Murine", and how the packaging could be implied to make one believe (if they understood what Murine meant) that the eye drops were intended to be used on mice.

I thought it was noteworthy that we were both writing about mice that day, and left a comment calling that out, but also making an oblique reference to 2 Timothy in the New Testament about itching ears.  Hay Fever gives one not only itchy, watery eyes, but also an itchy throat as well as itching ears.  Since I am way overboard right now on seeing story symbols in lots of things, including mice, I thought it was a relevant take on the 'mice' or rats in my own story.  They are sick - afflicted with something that affects both their ability to see and hear correctly, and if they are to be healed, they (and maybe it is more accurate to say "we" here) will need to have some remedy other than what is currently available, it seems, in a pharmacy or otherwise.

That was the gist of my additional commentary beyond calling out the synchronicity of us posting on mice.

However, another commenter by the name of Hagel left a comment a few minutes before my own that said simply "People who have pet rodents would be interested".

This comment caught my attention.  In my rodent post, I concluded with the music video to Steve Miller Band's "Abracadabra".  In that video, a woman is seen interacting with a rat as if it were a pet.  Here is a sample still shot from the video showing the woman and her rodent pet:

This woman does indeed look like the type of person that would buy some eye drops for her rat if it was suffering from hay fever.

At this point my wheels were turning a bit due to these two fairly conspicuous links to my post (the fact that another person wrote about mice, and that a commenter referenced rats as pets).

Bruce's post is short enough I will just paste in the whole thing below and bold a few of the statements that jumped out at me:

Observing the above at a pharmacist's, I was struck by the question of why on earth the manufacturers would suppose that I, or anybody else, would care enough about mice with hayfever to buy this product?

And then - presumably - we are supposed to go to the immense trouble and inconvenience - even danger - of capturing and treating these unfortunate rodents? Pah!

You probably think me callous. But, for my part, any such mice can just shelter in their burrows and endure their "itchy, sore and watery eyes" - I do not intend to do anything whatsoever to resolve their problem.

On this matter, I am unrepentant.

In re-reading his post, I began thinking through my dream again, which included a mouse trapped under my bed, who was clearly in some kind of distress and trying to communicate with me in some manner, but which I found to be, as I called it, "creepy and unsettling".

My imagination started to take over, and I began imagining that the mouse hadn't asked to be a mouse.  In my dream, I noted that its face had almost human features, and I began wondering if this mouse WAS actually human, but by some terrible misfortune had been turned into a mouse.  It had been trying to communicate with me in the only way that was left to it, and at first I, because I do not like mice, did not want to hear it.

At this thought, the interpretation of the dream seemed to click into place, and I had a vivid memory come to me of a movie my siblings and I watched when we were very small, which seemed to tie it all together.  

My dad recorded tons of videos onto VHS tapes when I was growing up, and had a fairly organized and numbered index of these tapes.  Every VHS tape was numbered, and there was a binder that had the table of contents for each number, showing which shows were on it by the counter number.  To get to the right show, you would rewind the tape all the way to 0, and then just fast forward until you reached the corresponding counter number, and there you were.   Makes me feel like I grew up in the stone age just writing that, and when I explain it to my kids, but that is how it worked.

Anyway, he had a fairly exhaustive Christmas collection on these VHS tapes, and as kids we would watch all sorts of shows during the holidays.  However, there was one show we stayed away from because it freaked the absolute crap out of us.  That show was called The Nutcracker Fantasy.  I remember watching it through at least once when I was a bit older and so not scared, but in my very young years, we stayed far away from it due to its absolutely terrifying opening scene

Sometimes, we'd be watching the show that came right before this one (I can't remember what it was exactly) and we couldn't find the remote to turn the VHS player or TV off.  The Nutcracker Fantasy would start playing, and we would be running around screaming and crying in absolute terror trying to find the remote so we could shut the stupid thing off.

What was so terrifying about the opening scene of this movie?  The Ragman.  The Ragman was set up as a Being who would go around at night and turn disobedient children into mice.  It is not the best quality, but I found the opening segment on YouTube, so watch it here first, and listen to the woman's monologue, and then I will go into my thinking (I also found a full remastered version of the movie on YouTube, if anyone ever wants to check it out):

First off, and in case you are wondering, I did check Ragman in Elvish, and "Rag" means "crooked", much like the crooked cane the woman specifically said he both used to walk and apparently used to turn the children into mice.  Another word that means "crooked" in Elvish?  Gog.

Anyway, when I pulled up the clip yesterday and watched it, it seemed to further point to my dream.  Here we specifically have beds, in the context of night, and mice.  These were all prevalent in my dream, as I was using a flashlight in the dark to search under my bed.  Further, we had a very specific example in this movie of human children being unnaturally transformed into mice.

The Ragman himself has some connotations to Satan or Saruman.  As the adult Clara explains (the woman speaking in the clip), the Ragman was said to just turn disobedient children into mice, and this disobedience had something to do with time.  For those who have been through an LDS temple, you might hear echoes of Satan saying that for all those who don't live up perfectly to various promises, they will be in his power.  Here, the children have broken a rule, and the Ragman has them in his power, in the form of turning them into mice.   He also represents a sort of anti Santa Claus.  Whereas Santa carries a bag full of toys to distribute to children, the Ragman carries his bag to collect children.

Anyway, with all of that, here is a brief synopsis of what I think my dream of the mouse meant, and then I will also tie it into the Abracadabra music video.

In the dream, I was looking for something that was lost, clearly.  My guess is that it would have been a child (one of the Children).  Instead, I came across a mouse.   This mouse, however, was the very Child I was looking for, but it had been transformed into a mouse by the Ragman (Saruman).  My first instinct was to 'dispose' of it, as I called it.  The Child was trying to get my attention and communicate with me (and tell me it was not actually a real mouse), but I couldn't understand it, and was in fact put off by how it was trying to speak to me.  Fortunately, I held off on immediate judgment once I saw that it was stuck/ trapped and not going anywhere.  So, I stopped and thought of what I should do next.

Had I not woken up then, my hope (and expectation) is that I would have come to understand the predicament and realized that this mouse was in fact the lost Child I had been searching for.  At that point, the searching part of the "search and rescue" mission would have concluded (for that Child), and then the question would have been how to free it and heal it.  Meaning, rather than kill it as it was stuck there in its trap, I would have needed to find a way to free it, bring it somewhere, and look for a way to transform it back into its true form.  But how can you transform a Child that has been transformed into a rodent back into the Child it truly is?

Magic - Abracadabra!

Which takes me back to the Steve Miller music video from yesterday.

First off, for those that noticed, the video has many scenes that run in both ways - time goes both forward and backward.  The video also ends somewhat in the opposite way in which it began, but the end result still remains the same.  The silver ball is rolling around on the spinning plate.  Toward the beginning, the woman takes the ball off, but in the end she puts it back on.

In any case, our focus here is on the rat that I included a screenshot of earlier.  The rat first makes its appearance as her pet at about the 1:00 mark.  We then see it next at the 1:15 mark, as the magician appears to be cleaning the rat off for the woman.

We won't see it again until around 2:25, and this next sequence might be the most important for the story here, and the true magic trick that is performed in the video.

The magician makes the mouse reappear as if from thin air next to the woman.

The rat then proceeds to transform first into a chicken:

And then soon after into a human baby:

The baby seems to be clearly hers, as she looks down at it with a loving gaze.  It is also interesting to note that the chicken transforms into a baby as the flames grow in front of the woman, as if it is a baptism of fire.

It is a fairly random set of sequences, and who knows what was originally intended, but I think I can apply some meaning to it, given my mouse dream and other thoughts.

The rat is actually one of the Children of Light - a member of that family, just like the mouse in my dream.  It has been turned into something it is not.  The magic trick is turning it back into what it once was.

Jesus compared the Children of "Israel" with chickens that he would gather (and who in the past had been resistant, at least some of them).  The rat in the video is changed into a chicken to show that this rat has been gathered, like one of the Children.  It is actually sitting there with its mother, the woman of fire who is lying there.  The chicken has been gathered home, in other words.

Then comes the baptism of fire, and it is re-born into its true form, as symbolized by the baby.

The woman, then, in the video likely symbolizes either Asenath or Eowyn.  In the Words stories, Izilba (who in my story is the same Bein as Eowyn) is represented by Fire.  In fact, at one point she is said by another individual to be of the "House of Fire", and Fire seems to accompany her in various situations.  Thus, we might be able to peg this woman in the video who is seen in most scenes with fire on or around her as Eowyn.  Her children (and Asenath's), per my words from the spring of 2022, will be gathered back to her.  As a reminder, those words were from Feb 18, and went:

Kle family beth talu milu com-rad cam den Ilmare besse Asenath ren

Loosely, in my book and as articulated in that earlier post, this translates into referring to the Family of Light being gathered back to their mothers - Asenath and Ilmare (Eowyn).

In the music video, it is the magician that makes the rats reappear with the woman.  The magician here, then, as also related elsewhere, is Faramir and those working with him to hunt and gather the jewels and bring them home.  Faramir, Peter, and others' magic will consist in bringing the Family home.  Then other magic, perhaps, is brought to bear as Eowyn, Asenath, and others heal and transform their family back into their true selves.

Thus, my dream might have been from the perspective of Faramir and those working with him.  They came looking for children, but found rodents.  They would need to look past the outward appearance (and even behaviors) and see their family even through the terrible curse that is on them.  This curse, by the way, would also extend to Faramir, Peter-Marsh, and these other Beings called to gather out the Family.  They are also now mice, rodents, etc. who are in need of healing.  In fact, one layer of the dream might be through the eyes of other Heavenly Messengers (such as the 3 Disciples) who find Faramir himself, now transformed into a rodent.

Going back to the Nutcracker Fantasy, it is loosely based on the Nutcracker story itself (with the additional flourishes such as the Ragman and transforming children into mice).  The Mouse King in that tale I would of course place as Saruman himself.  We here on this earth are under his domain, and somewhat in his image in our current state.  My guess is that there are real rodents in this tale, meaning Beings who are Rats through and through, much like Saruman.  But, among these, are many, many Beings who would be otherwise if they were shown a way, I think.  And that is what this story is about - the magic that brings them (us) back both spiritually and physically.

A couple other interesting notes about the Nutcracker Fantasy.

First, Christopher Lee, who played Saruman in the LOTR movies, actually has the leading role in this film.  He plays Uncle Drosselmeyer, Street Singer, The Puppeteer, and The Watchmaker.  There is actually a scene where Clara wakes up from what she assumes was a dream to see Uncle Drosselmeyer step through the door, but at first Drosselmeyer has the appearance of the Ragman.  Another potential connection of the Ragman to Saruman through the actor.

Second, the name of Clara's love interest, and the Nutcracker, is named Franz.  Franz is a form of the name Francis (and therefore France), which has come up recently.

Anyway, to conclude, Bruce Charlton asked the question about who should go through the "immense trouble and inconvenience - even danger - of capturing and treating these unfortunate rodents?"

I know he was asking the question about physical mice, but I find myself taking contrarian positions to or disagreeing with much of what he writes these days, and so even though I know he was joking and speaking specifically about physical mice in our world (which I share his sentiments about), I figured why not find a reason to be contrarian on this also.  So, I will answer his question in the context of what I have covered in this post:  to the extent that any such rodent, who is sick and needs help, is a member of this Family of Light, it is their own Family who will go through the trouble, inconvenience, and danger to come and rescue them (taking upon themselves the same afflictions in the process), and find a way to heal them from whatever their sickness is, hayfever or otherwise.