Eggs and Apostles come in packs of 12

Perhaps because it was the week leading up to Easter, I had a dream that seemed to span 3 nights (3 different dreams on 3 nights) and which culminated in my final dream with me driving in a minivan with a bunch of chocolate Easter eggs.  

I was going to write about these dreams back during that week, but couldn't get up the energy for it.  And of course just now, when I was going to write just some quick summary thoughts now about WrestleMania, I suddenly feel like I'd rather dive into those dreams.  So, let's go with the moment, and give it a shot.

In my first dream, I was with my family and we were driving to the world headquarters of Unilever, which is a multinational company that owns some well-known consumer goods brands.  Apparently, in my dream Unilever had a Chocolate Factory, and we had been invited there for a tour that started on a specific date and time.  I believe the real Unilever is headquartered in the UK, but I am not sure if that was the case in my dream.  It wasn't specified, but we seemed to know where we were going as we were driving there.

Once we arrived on their campus, we went to the building where we thought the Factory was located.   We had arrived in plenty of time (the instructions we had been given said to arrive something like 15 minutes before the scheduled start), but ran into a snag as it turned out the building we showed up at was not quite the correct one.

An employee noticed that we seemed lost, and offered to help.  When he heard we were looking for the factory, he thought he knew where it was and led us over to a large directory map of the Unilever campus to point it out.  It quickly turned out that the employee didn't know where it was, which seemed to surprise him as he searched over the map.  A few other employees came over to help, and no one was quite certain which building the Factory was in.  Consensus was reached, however, that we were more than likely in the wrong area - the Factory was probably on the other side of the campus, and the suggestion was that we should head over there and ask around.

At this point, we began to be nervous as we were cutting it close on time.  The help had been taking long enough where we were almost at our 15 minutes cut-off period.  We still didn't know where the Factory was, and even if we found it, I was very concerned we would either arrive after the tour started, or late enough where our spot was going to be given to somebody else.

It was in this state that I woke up.

The next night, I had a dream that simply involved the word "Ghirardelli".  Ghirardelli is a brand of chocolate, that is at least well known as a higher-end brand of chocolate here in the US, but I am not sure if they exist globally.  Given the chocolate connection, and some thinking I had done based on the dream the night before, I assumed that perhaps this was related to my dream regarding a Chocolate Factory.

On the third night, apparently we must have found the Chocolate Factory and gone through the tour, because we were driving away from it in a minivan (we don't own a minivan in real life, but we were in one in the dream).  I was actually back in one of the captain's chairs (the mid row), with my wife up in front driving.  I looked around and noticed that there were several eggs of various colors scattered around me in the car.  I soon understood that these were chocolate eggs, that we had gotten them from the chocolate factory, and that they were extremely valuable.  Rich eggs, is how I thought of them.

But they were rolling all around the vehicle because apparently we had just tossed them into the van loosely as we were leaving.  I called up to my wife that it sure would be nice if we had some kind of container to put the eggs into.  She reached back and handed me something to put all the eggs into.  I didn't count them exactly, but I remarked that we had between 12 and 15, it looked like.  Somewhere in there.  After putting them all into the container, I woke up.

Thoughts and interpretations

So, those are the dreams, and now I am going to go through some of my thinking - as always, who knows if any of this is right, but why not try and make sense of a few things.

The first question is why Unilever?  It seemed strange.  However, I started with names, like I do these days, and came up with at least one answer.  I broke the word down into Uni and Lever.

Uni, in English usage, is based on the Latin, which means simply "one".  As in Unicorn (One Horn), Unicycle (One cycle or wheel), etc.   That seemed pretty straightforward.

Lever, according to Etymonline, comes from the French "lever" and Latine "levare", which means "to raise".

So, Unilever means "One to raise".  That worked out pretty cleanly, and is in line with the general theme being explored here, first articulated with Faramir-Eonwe being raised as part of these Stones, but we've also explored this having to do with others, as well, such as Peter-Marsh who was promised that he would be 'exalted'.

However, I had an interesting experience when I looked up Unilever to see if there was something else about them.  One of Unilever's brands is "Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream".  Ben and Jerry's is well known ice cream brand in the US that has a bunch of unique flavors.  They were also founded in Vermont.  Burlington, the town it was founded in, is just a little northwest of where Joseph Smith was born (Sharon, VT).

The name held my attention for whatever reason.  "Ben" has come up before on this blog, and is a name I have associated with Faramir-Eonwe, since Ben means "Son".  Jerry was a new name, however, and a riddle I couldn't pass up looking into.  I had a hunch, since I had been exploring the Faramir and Peter-Marsh connection, that perhaps Jerry might relate to the other member of that duo.

It turns out Jerry is one of those nicknames that is associated with more than one name.  Jeremiah, for example.  Or Gerald.  Even Jared.  Lots of options.

I started with Jeremiah.  Want to know what that name means?  "God will exalt".

Jackpot!  Recall, that the promise to Thomas B. Marsh (Peter) is that he would be exalted, and that his path "lieth among the mountains" (refer to D&C 112).  And here we have a name referring to just that - a Being that God will exalt.  It also seemed to pair nicely with the Unilever name itself:  "One to raise".

So, I thought this was all pretty cool, and things were clicking.  In the language of my past few posts, in Ben and Jerry I think we have our two Gim G's (Gim Githil and Gim Goru).

I also looked into Gerald:  that name means "spear ruler" or "brave spear".  This is obviously a bit more cryptic since spears haven't really come into play yet with any characters or story elements explored on this blog (I don't think so, at least).  I have a few different thoughts about this, but let’s just leave it at this for now.  The reason why I think Gerald might also be relevant, or something worth holding onto, is because of that name that came the next night.

Night 2 brought Ghirardelli, an Italian variant of Ghirard, or Gerard.  I had gone through this whole Ben and Jerry's tangent that day after my first dream, and so this predated the Ghirardelli dream.  Thus, I had taken the reference of this name to mean that perhaps I was on the right track in going down that path (with Unilever's Ice Cream brand), as well as that Girard was perhaps also a relevant name to consider here.

In any case, for those who have been to San Francisco, you may have been to a place called Ghirardelli Square.  I was born in San Francisco, and my wife and I lived there before moving to Minnesota.  This Square is the historic site where the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory once was.  So, besides a connection to Jerry's name from the ice cream, I took the Ghirardelli word in my dream to relate to this Chocolate Factory from Night 1 of this 3-part dream.   Now when you go to the Square, there isn't a Factory anymore, but a collection of shops, one of which is the Ghirardelli Chocolate Experience.

As an aside, I just realized a couple days ago that Francisco is a Spanish form of Francis, which has obviously come up before with Francis Scott Key and Francis Bakin'.  I am not sure why I didn't see that before.

Recall that I have related both Faramir (Willy Wonka) and Marsh (Charlie) with a Chocolate Factory in past analogies (whether it is WWE or Willy Wonka, it seems like we can find a story somewhere).  And here we have a Chocolate Factory that was named after Ghirardelli, or Jerry by nickname.  The 'one who God exalts', or Peter-Marsh-Charlie Bucket.  Charlie's Chocolate Factory.  I don't know - I thought it was kind of cool.

Anyway, so that is where we stood at the end of Night 2.  Some interesting connections, with Faramir and Peter represented on the side of Ben and Jerry Ice Cream pints located at your neighborhood grocery store, and a strange visit to a Chocolate Factory that seems one must be exalted (uni-lever) in order to reach, but which nobody seems to know where it is.

Night 3 put any concerns to rest that the Chocolate Factory would remain hidden.  I had found it somehow, though I didn't remember how, and in my dream now had these amazing and really expensive chocolate eggs from the Factory I was returning with.

This took a bit more thinking, but I think I have something that makes sense.  It actually hit me as I was in fact walking down a grocery story aisle.  In my dream I had asked for a container to keep the eggs all in one place - this was really emphasized.   As I passed the egg section, I observed that eggs there don't go all over the place because they are in containers.  No duh, right?  They aren't just lying loosely in the fridge like they were in my car - they have been places in a container.  The most common container of eggs has 12 eggs.

Cue the light bulb and a potential meaning of my dream.

The number 12 is also represented by the number of Apostles.  Besides being the classical number found in the Bible, this number is also represented in Lehi's vision (12 shining stars, plus the baker's dozen addition of the 13th bright Being), as well as the pattern Jesus set in Bountiful by calling 12 disciples, and referencing 12 other disciples in Jerusalem-Tirion.

I then felt that the dream-eggs in my van were representative of 12 Apostles, or at least numbered after them, and the container was just kind of a specific call out to bring attention to that fact, in some creative way.  My guess is the scattered and loose nature of the eggs in the minivan represented the scattered state of the apostles in their present condition.

But, if these eggs had something to do with Apostles, then what was the meaning of them being in my minivan on the way back from the Chocolate Factory?

My best guess is that these eggs represented something that was intended to be given to these 12 apostles.  In this interpretation, whomever I was viewing the dream through had been to the Chocolate Factory (Xanadu, Tirion, etc. in this analogy), and was now bringing something back from that place.  Perhaps they were literal Stones for each of the apostles, or perhaps just symbolic of some really good things for each of them.

The implication here then, just to be clear, is that all 12 of these Apostles are now here on this Earth, but have forgotten who they are, like all of us.  They need to be reminded of who they are, so they can then back to work doing the things that they need to be doing (i.e., becoming a travelling group of messengers called to gather out all who will come).

I had to think about this for a bit, but this seems to at least be consistent with something I wrote before regarding Faramir and one role of the Holy Ghost.  Before I had linked those two specifically, in my post The Holy Ghost:  John 14 - 16  I summarized what I took as some specific tasks given to the Holy Ghost based on what Jesus said in John 14 - 16 (or recorded as saying, at least) as well as his words at Bountiful.  These were the jobs I highlighted:

• Be sent by the Father in the name of Jesus
• Teach the disciples of Jesus all things
• Bring everything that Jesus taught the disciples to their remembrance
• Testify of Jesus
• Reprove the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment (what these mean are mentioned)
• Guide the disciples to all truth, including things that Jesus wanted to teach them during his mortal ministry but the disciples were unable to bear
• Speak only what he hears (will not speak of himself)
• Show the disciples things to come (i.e., show the future)
• Receive what Jesus has, and then show it to the disciples
• Glorify Jesus
• Bear record of both the Father and the Son

Hard to explain, but re-reading this list helped me make sense of the Chocolate Factory dream.  I was perhaps viewing the dream once again through the eyes of Faramir, who I have somehow linked with the Holy Ghost, and whose story involves returning to Tirion.  There he would have received some things meant to be given to Jesus' apostles, which was represented by the Easter Eggs rolling around in my minivan.  Jesus promised the disciples that he would send the Holy Ghost to remind and teach them, and that will happen through Faramir going and returning with these things.

Strange, I know, but that is where my mind is.  

At that point, then, Peter and his fellow Apostles will be restored and probably commence or continue with their work.  I can't guess at what that looks like, but at least Peter's path it seems will be in the sky among other worlds, and perhaps that will also apply to the other Apostles.  Who knows.  

I am not sure if Peter would have also been along for that initial visit to the Chocolate Factory (or maybe before or after?) - it is a bit confused in my mind, honestly, how that all goes with him and Faramir, so I am leaving it kind of fuzzy as to who goes where and when.  I don't know.  My guess is that he will have visited Tirion at least once before going on their respective voyages, as several things seem to point strongly to that.  For him, at least, his visit in person before gathering others back would be consistent with his earlier role as Ingwe Gim Githil.  And it seems that if the 12 are to gather out people to return to Tirion, then it would have been good for all of them to have seen it so they can speak with firsthand knowledge about what they are bringing people back to.

Anyway, that is what I have for right now:  Chocolate eggs delivered directly to forgetful apostles on this world straight from a Heavenly Chocolate Factory.