Led into the realm of Thingol and a Baptism in the Great Waters

This morning I had a short dream where I was given a 'quest', of sorts.  In my post "C'est Moi", I shared a dream that had murals in the exact style of "Zelda:  Tears of the Kingdom".  This dream was similar, in the sense that this quest was formally given in the imagery or animation of a Main Quest from that game.  Something like this:

As part of this Quest notification in the dream, there was a brief description that said:

 

To be led into the realm of Thingol
There to find that which you most desire

In the dream, I had enough presence of mind or I guess enough informational baggage I was carrying to be surprised at the mention of Thingol.   Once I had heard/ read (it seemed like both at the same time) the first part of that opening line "To be led into the realm of ...", I must have assumed this was going to finish off with "Tom Bombadil", because I was thinking this was along the same lines as France.  That has been a big theme here - that the Rose Stone and a Study containing Records is in France, so if someone is going to be led somewhere, it seemed like this was going to once again mention Tom's House in France.  That is what I was thinking in this dream state.

But it was Thingol that was mentioned instead.  It was a similar experience to the woman's voice I heard at the very beginning of this blog last year, where she started out by saying "You will become friends with the Sons of...", and I mentally started completing that phrase with the commonly known Book of Mormon group known as "Sons of Mosiah", before the voice very clearly overrode my thought and replaced it with "Alma".  Similar experience here, at least with respect to my surprise at hearing that name of Thingol rather than Tom.  It wasn't what I was expecting.

When I woke up, I thought about it a bit.  My first instinct, which I don't think was right (as I will show), was to assume this meant Doriath or some modern geographical area that represented it.  I mean, I had just written about Doriath yesterday, which was the OG realm or Kingdom of Thingol back in the day.  So, I first tried to think through, well, if Tom's House is in France, where would that place Doriath on a map of Europe?

I didn't stick with that train of thinking for long, though, as I landed on what I thought was a better path, and it seemed to open up some additional thinking on other topics, which is always a good sign for me.  Like a little bell that goes off and you find yourself thinking of something in a new way, but it also seems to make sense on a certain level, even if you can't quite explain why.

I remembered that Doriath was no longer Thingol's Realm, for starters.  And that was pretty clear in both Tolkien's and Pengolodh's stories.  And there isn't any such thing as Doriath anymore today anyway.  I do believe that Tom's House is still here, which is why the Stone Couriers brought the Rose Stone there, but Doriath hasn't been a thing for quite sometime.  I did give Gondor a quick think through, as well.  In this story, Thingol is Aragorn, and he was King of Gondor for a time, as well as Arnor, I guess.  Technically, Tom's House would have fallen within the borders of Arnor, so that could work.  But even then, I think I landed on something that works better.

In Words of Them That Have Slumbered, it is mentioned that Thingol was promised to receive a "realm" larger and grander than what he had established in Doriath.  In a conversation with Eru, Eru tells him this:

Greater still have I ordered thy realm, Thingol, than that held within the Girdle of thy Beloved [Melian], and yet to gain the greater things of light-realms, traded for darkness, one of you must stay, and tread not out away from Arda, but remain, to keep watch until I return to check again upon thy realms, and those given to others of kin and order

OK, so Eru (Jesus) tells Thingol that a greater realm is prepared for Thingol.  In order to receive this, he has to stay (the other Being mentioned was Manwe in this story, and between the two of them, Thingol got the job), and this pretty much foreshadows the ongoing role of John, the Apostle who tarries and works among all of the worlds of Arda (ours included) in preparation for Jesus' return.

A little later in the book, we get a little more detail in terms of Thingol-John's expectation of his future realm.  This is where it gets interesting to me, and where I started to piece a larger story or picture together.  Thingol is promised a "kingdom of waters" as his future domain:

Westward rowed Thingol-king, alone across the vast ocean Ekkaia encircling, traversing what would be - should Eru's promise not withholding - his own kingdom of waters, Ulmo not supplanting, but receiving of him vice-regency, in scepter, when the Vala retires;  As surveying prospective places for improvement in Eru's Original Designs, yet within its manifold layers, immeasured and without end... 

When I remembered and look this phrase up, I figured I was on the right path.

Ekkaia has been mentioned on this blog before, and I gave it a very specific definition:  Outer Space.  In my post titled "Treasure Planet", where I went through some symbols from that Disney animated movie of the same name, I indicated that I interpreted Lehi's commentary on "Isles of the Sea", as actually referring to planets, with the ocean representing outer space.  In defining this, I pulled in Tolkien's Elvish word of Ekkaia:

Since rolling with this theory of interstellar travel in the Book of Mormon, I have read 'isles' here to mean the same thing as 'planets'.  With planets being analogous to islands in an ocean, but now just separated from other worlds by outer space, or in Tolkien-speak, the Outer Sea, or Ekkaia.  Quite literally islands, just on a much bigger scale.

OK, so now I had something, or some clarity to the riddle of those dream words.  What was Thingol's Realm as mentioned in my dream "Quest" from this morning?  Outer Space.  So a restatement of that first line of the dream phrase would be "To be led into Outer Space".   And this would be perfectly consistent with the story we have explored here so far - that Beings would go on a Sky Walk, of sorts, into or through Outer Space, to arrive on another world and place (Tirion).  As crazy as that sounds, it seems to keep coming up and being reaffirmed.

Great, but that was something I've already guessed (but, again, I don't mind some reconfirmation since these are, after all, guessed) but the specific phrasing mentioning "Thingol" in this way had me think about travelling into the "Waters" of outer space a little bit differently, and that is where my mind started going next.

I believe Thingol is John the Baptist (who is also the same Being as John the Revelator or Apostle, as brought up above).  His important role is emphasized in obviously not only the Bible, but in the Book of Mormon as part of not only Nephi's vision, but his closing prophecies and statements before he hands the record to Jacob.  About John the Baptist (Thingol), Nephi has this to say:

Wherefore, I would that ye should remember that I have spoken unto you concerning that prophet which the Lord showed unto me, that should baptize the Lamb of God, which should take away the sins of the world.

And now, if the Lamb of God, he being holy, should have need to be baptized by water, to fulfil all righteousness, O then, how much more need have we, being unholy, to be baptized, yea, even by water!

And now, I would ask of you, my beloved brethren, wherein the Lamb of God did fulfil all righteousness in being baptized by water?

Know ye not that he was holy? But notwithstanding he being holy, he showeth unto the children of men that, according to the flesh he humbleth himself before the Father, and witnesseth unto the Father that he would be obedient unto him in keeping his commandments.

Wherefore, after he was baptized with water the Holy Ghost descended upon him in the form of a dove.

And again, it showeth unto the children of men the straitness of the path, and the narrowness of the gate, by which they should enter, he having set the example before them.

Baptism in actual water is a funny concept to me.  It is clear its necessary, though, regardless of my confusion about it.  Nephi is saying in these words that it is imperative, actually, at least for whomever he is addressing.  Later, when Jesus visits those at Bountiful, the first thing he does is give Nephi (a different Nephi... Gandalf-Nephi of Bountiful) the power to Baptize and very clear instructions on how it ought to be done, which involved people going down into an actual body of water and being immersed in it.  So, it is not just a pre-resurrection thing, but was intended, at least for a certain group of people, to be performed even after Jesus' resurrection.

Faithful Mormons have been baptizing using the method and (very close to the same) wording that Jesus gives those at Bountiful since the days of Joseph Smith.  But I think it largely remains a mystery as to why it is important - it does for me.  And it still does even thinking on it more now, but what I am thinking through is that it perhaps was a precursor or introduction to what would later be the 'real thing', in that Beings will be 'baptized' in a different kind of Water.   For those who go on this Sky Walk, or whatever it is we are calling it, they will, in a very literally sense, I suppose, be immersed in the Waters of Space, in whatever form that takes (again, I don't have the best mental picture as to what this Walk will entail).  Those Waters, as is described above in Pengolodh's story, are John the Baptist's realm, given how I have identified him.  His Waters, in other words, in which Beings will be Baptized - immersed in and surrounded by.

In Nephi's remarks above about John, the Lamb of God, and Baptism, he will directly link Baptism with a strait and narrow gate and path.  Just recently, I referred to Top Gun and Makten (Mach 10), Hermes and his Sticks, and everything else in various posts that seem to coincide with both establishing and then following a gate and narrow path that leads to where we might want to go, and this path cutting through the Waters of Space.  In fact, just looking back on my follow up post on Makten, titled "The importance of "Ten", and the Strait-Straight line home", I also used Nephi's words from that same chapter (2 Nephi 31) to reference this strait path that baptism seems to bring one to.

There is something to this, I think - that a future "Baptism" will involved the literal immersion of Beings into the Water of Ekkaia, or Outer Space, as they enter a path that leads them home and to Eternal Life.  I'll just leave it there for now though, or I will just keep rambling and repeating the same thing.

Moses has been on my mind the last few days.  And there are some descriptions of his own passage, and even a baptism, through the "Red Sea" that has me further thinking I am on to something here, but I will save that for another post.

I did want to end with a few winks, though.

The first couple are from Zelda.  You'll notice in the picture above it is a "Closed Door" this is the objective given to Link.  I had originally picked the example image that has "Find Princess Zelda" because I thought that fit as well (I will get to that in just a second), but I liked this example because when I saw the image it reminded me of this concept of a closed door or gate that needs to be opened - this being the Gate or the Path that leads Home.  Even more interesting, in the actual game, when Link first attempts to open the Door, a giant X appear over it.  Readers of my blog know very well that "X marks the spot", and in fact in the "Treasure Planet" post I linked earlier, there is a nice image of a planet with two rings surrounding it that form an X.

Here is a screenshot of when Link first tries to open this Closed Door (which leads to the Temple of Time):

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A very clear X spans the door, and also of interest, at the center of it is the Hexagon, or Bee, symbol, in the same orientation that we've seen recently on the medals of the Paris Olympics, for example.  

Going back to the "Find Princess Zelda" Quest image I was going to use before replacing it with the "Close Door" image.  I thought that was an interesting tie to both this morning's words (with the same use of the word "Find" in that second line) but also if you remember those words from a few months ago, where I had a dream with a message written down that said "Take U Body, Find Peace".  In the post where I thought through those words, I determined that Peace represented Tirion.  I have also strangely linked the name Zelda to Eowyn, who I have guessed that it will be in Tirion where she is reunited with Faramir (see my post "Meet in In-N-Out", which also specifically references a doorway, as I was interested to go back and see), which will also serve as a meeting place for much larger family reunion.  In my C'est Moi post linked above, I wrote this:

Another little nod to Zelda is that name means "Grey fighting maid".  In Words of the Faithful, Izilba (Eowyn) is called the "Grey Lady", which I mentioned at least once before in my post "Suspended in Time: Loosening girdles and deepening weights, and the Grey Lady of the New York Times", and if you were to think of a fighting maid from the Tolkien storyline, Eowyn would be it (as she was also as Izilba once she got her hands on Makmahod).

So there were a couple little winks I saw in the looking up these Quest examples after having my dream this morning take the form of a Zelda quest.

Lastly, this morning I had to drive my oldest son to a hockey workout.  I spend a lot of time in hockey rinks these day - it is like a second office for me, and as long as I have wifi I am good to go - and I can tell you that I do not remember having seen a dog in a hockey rink in all my various trips and stays, and this is going back years.  I mean, like never.  I am sure they aren't allowed, but this morning I was out in a rural Wisconsin rink and it didn't seem like rules were that big of a deal, from what I observe.  One of the skaters had brought her dog with her, and it was hanging out in the lobby.  Again, this is a first, as far as I can remember.  I snapped a quick picture as it was running around because the dog had a striking resemblance to another pied dog that I brought up again recently: