Gloria Sturzenacker
“Tide Saw”
This image is my rendering of something I created in a dream on the morning of July 30, 2008 – a dream with both clear day residue, and connections to the previous days’ events that I could not have interpreted on my own, but needed considerable searching to understand. That roundabout type of association, which happens to me often, seems to demonstrate the dream mind’s ability to reach for and select information in ways that defy mechanistic cause and effect. Those ways seem, at various times, to be clairvoyant, telepathic, or precognitive.
The dream itself is extremely brief. It’s from 6:15 on the morning of July 30, 2008, a Wednesday:
“Very persistent image: I’m cutting out a Partner saw blade from the side of a box (already collapsed) of Tide laundry detergent, giving it widely spaced teeth that angle forward. The Tide swirl is at the center.”
IMMEDIATE ASSOCIATIONS (ALMOST UPON AWAKENING):
Normal day residue: Partner is a brand name of a line of power tools, but to me, a Partner saw is synonymous with “circular saw,” because that was the case in the New York City Fire Department (FDNY), where I was editor of the training magazine for six and a half years.
http://www.columbussupply.com/products/?productid=435&price=886
Partner saws are used in forcible entry (getting through locked doors and such to get at a fire) and venting roofs (cutting them to let smoke escape a burning building). Two days before the dream, I’d talked with some friends from an FDNY unit about one of their retirees, who used to teach classes on forcible entry.
Normal day residue: Both the word “Tide” and the hurricane-like swirl of the logo made me think of forces of nature, which are sometimes destructive. Besides the fact that we were now in hurricane season, that association made me think of two things: (1) that weather seems to be getting more severe, a fact that has been attributed to global warming, and (2) the high level of involvement that the fire service has in disaster response. (It took me quite a bit of Googling to realize that Tide’s logo never has been a hurricane-type swirl, but always a bull’s-eye type of pattern with clean-edged circles.
http://www.tide.com/en_US/index.jsp
This meant I would have to draw the image myself, which I did in Adobe Illustrator.)
ASSOCIATIONS LATER THAT DAY AND THE NEXT:
2nd-level association identifying more day residue: In connection to the disaster response connection I made right away, I recalled that the night before the dream, I had been watching ABC’s Nightline news program, and it had had stories about a strong earthquake in Southern California.
Day residue via psi (or at least synchronicity): One of the occurrences of a Tide detergent logo that I found in my search was in an old grocery ad on NewspaperArchive.com – and the same Web page contained the front-page news of Pearl Harbor. This reminded me that, the day before the dream, someone had mentioned Pearl Harbor when we’d been briefly discussing the September 11 terrorist attacks. Other NewspaperArchive.com “special collections” linked to from that page: September 11, hurricanes, and earthquakes. link
Echoing an earlier event: Three things made me think of IASD’s Montreal conference earlier in July and the paper I presented there, “Tiuken, Jorbor, Beseta”: (1) The fire service connection: On that same trip, I met up with a fire service friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. (2) Drawing the Tide saw the night of the dream, I searched online for pictures of Partner saw blades. I discovered that the company named Partner is now part of (and renamed) Husqvarna, headquartered in Jönköping, Sweden.
http://us.husqvarnacp.com/node1667.aspx
Trying to understand a dream from 2006 in which my mother told me, “You are a jorbor,” I had found “jorbor” on a Swedish Web site about the paranormal. (3) Partner saw > I partnered with someone in the workshop in the “Tiuken” dream in 1998 > Days after that dream, I synchronistically came upon the Hebrew term “tikkun olam,” meaning the Jews’ partnership with God to repair and perfect the world.
AUGUST ASSOCIATIONS:
Pun: This occurred to me when I wrote the dream, but oddly, it wasn’t the most prominent thought: a blade from a cereal box isn’t going to be very effective. In fact, it wasn’t until I told the dream to my dentist on August 4 that a metaphorical application of that fact came out. She said, “That won’t cut!” and I thought she was going to say, “That won’t cut it”—an American English idiom for something inadequate.
Synchronicity: A week and a half after the dream, I saw a bumper sticker for Husqvarna on a passing pickup truck. At the time, I was riding with my best friend from grade school, whom I was visiting for the weekend. We had both lived in Quincy, Massachusetts, during grade school.
SEPTEMBER ASSOCIATIONS:
Complex synchronistic connections to the dream and earlier associations, via Googling:
I wanted to see if the term “tide saw” means anything, and sure enough, there were saw mills in the 1700s and later that were powered by tides. Tidal power seems like a promising form of sustainable energy, one way to fight global warming. Global warming had been one of my immediate associations to the hurricane swirl of my dream Tide logo. And tidal power as a sustainable energy source is a fourth connection to my “Tiuken, Jorbor, Beseta” paper that I hadn’t thought of earlier: I had identified two themes that occurred throughout each of the dreams I discussed in the paper. One of them was sustainability.
(A fifth connection to “Tiuken, Jorbor, Beseta” now occurs to me: the other theme I spoke about in my paper was boundaries. The visual difference between the Tide logo in the dream and the actual logo for Tide detergent is that, on the actual logo, the boundaries between the orange and red concentric circles are clear-cut, whereas in the dream version, the color boundaries are very mottled and blended.)
The first reference to “tide saws” that I found was from the Maine Historical Society. link
The state of Maine is famous for its rocky, very irregular, and extremely beautiful coast, with lots of bays and inlets that might lend themselves to tide-driven turbines. However, I also, disappointingly, found a 2006 article in the Portland (Maine) Press Herald titled “Tidal Power in Maine? Not for Many Moons; With the Technology in Its Infancy, It Will Be Decades Before Our Homes Are Lit By the Tides.” link
The tide saw mills in Maine had operated in the 1700s. Tonight (September 14), searching further for the term “tide saw,” I found that a tide saw mill (and a tide-powered grist mill) had operated in the 1800s – on Mill Street in Quincy, Massachusetts, my childhood hometown (mentioned above)!
http://www.geocities.com/richardsouther/stm.history.html
http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Quincy&state=MA&address=[1-42]+Mill+St&zipcode=02169&country=US&latitude=42.24975&longitude=-70.98895&geocode=STREET
There are even photos from Thomas Crane Public Library in Quincy, one of my favorite haunts when I was growing up.
http://thomascranelibrary.org/shipbuildingheritage/warrenparker/parkerfiles/tidemill.html
Usually when I record a dream, I also record what had been on my mind the night and day before, to help me identify day residue. Looking back at that section now, I saw that not only did I anticipate visiting my one grade school friend the following week, I had also received, on that day before the dream, a Facebook invitation from my other best friend from grade school. In fact, we’d been a threesome, and it was already synchronistic to be in touch with both of them at the same time, because other than a Christmas card, I hadn’t been in touch with the second friend for a year and a half, and there had been a period of several decades when we’d lost touch altogether.
This month, she visited New York City, and we saw each other face to face, over lunch, for the first time in 40 years.
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