An early example of a correspondence of names
From the journal, 5/7/1990:
In a sort of rundown house to see Bea Rich. She is tired and tells me not to expect anything. In fact I just glimpse her a moment and then she is gone. A black artist is painting here. They are small abstract paintings with thin paint, like a mix of Rothko Gottlieb, and Baziotes. There is a commercial everyone wants to see. We're in a big place crowded with people. it reminds me of Ron's in Santa Barbara. The painter I keep thinking of as being Baziotes or Jean-Michel Basquiat. His first name is like Jean-Michel, but when I ask someone, I am told his last name is like "Kittez."
Comments:
I wrote this dream less than a year after I started the journal. At the time, I was still learning how to write entries for maximum clarity and minimal distraction. If I had written this today, it would have been written a little differently. First, the mention of Beatrice Rich (“Bea Rich”) would be excluded because she leaves without interacting with the dream. Instead, she speaks directly to me, which I’ve discovered to be a sign of a person who is not part of the dream “scene” but is part of it in the same way I am, as an observer.
Next, I learned over time that most paintings encountered in dreams are remembered as abstract because most look like paint on a canvas, not whatever they represent. This is true of all but the most realistic paintings, as if my dream self is incapable of processing the difference between paintings that are abstract, badly drawn, inaccurate, or stylized realism. Now that I know this, I usually describe paintings as colors, shapes, sizes, and compositions, rather than as “abstract.”
Last, I identify an artist in the dream as “black.” However, I then mention the names “Baziotes” (William Baziotes, a white artist) and “Jean-Michel Basquiat”, a black artist. This raises the possibility that I identified him as “black” because of the name “Jean-Michel Basquiat” and not because of what he looked like.
One week after the dream, the following occurred:
I received a phone call from a high school friend I hadn’t seen in nine years, Paul Cantor. In the time since I’d seen him last, I’d moved 18 times to 3 other states besides the one I knew Paul from, California. At the time of the call, I lived near New York City in Weehawken, New Jersey. The occasion of the call was that Paul had just moved to New York City and had heard from a mutual acquaintance that I was there. He called to ask if I’d like to go out to dinner and catch up. I asked if he minded if I brought my wife, and he agreed.
We met at a place called “Angelica’s Kitchen.” To my surprise, he brought a friend. He introduced him as an artist, thinking we might get along for that reason. His friend’s name was “John Kitsis.” During dinner, I recognized the actress Mary Page Keller from the TV series “Duet” who was eating at a nearby table. Kitsis lived in Brooklyn. We finished dinner late, so I offered to drive him home rather than take the subway. He accepted and we drove him home.
His loft apartment resembled the “rundown house” mentioned in the dream. His paintings were indeed “thin” because they were all watercolors. They were like Rothko and the other artists mentioned in one way: they were huge. Additionally, Baziotes is known for his watercolors. Kitsis’ paintings do not visually resemble Rothko, Gottlieb, Baziotes, or Basquiat. They are all highly stylized urban landscapes of the Brooklyn neighborhood he lived in.
One painting of a city scene of nearly silhoetted architectural objects (an elevated road, support stanchions, and light poles) against a sunrise bore a slight resemblance to an extremely rough sketch I made in my journal.
All together, there are some inconsistencies but a very strong correlation with the name. First, the inconsistencies:
“Rundown House” was a rundown loft studio in Brooklyn. Not a house, but a residence
“Beatrice Rich” not present, but that is clear from the dream anyway.
“Black artist” John Kitsis is not black.
“Small abstract paintings” are neither small nor abstract.
“Like a mix of Rothko, Gottlieb, and Baziotes.” The paintings aren’t visually similar to the work of these artists, but the scale of the paintings is similar, though somewhat smaller (177 x 152 cm vs. the same in inches).
“Thin paint.” This is true of Kitsis, Rothko, Baziotes, and (sometimes) Gottlieb, but not Basquiat.
“A commercial everyone wants to see.” There were no references to commercials during the evening, unless one counts the observation of the actress and my conversation with my wife about her. She didn’t believe it was who I said it was, so I went up and asked, and she said she was indeed Mary Page Keller. Prior to walking over, my wife and I referred to scenes from the TV series, not “commercials”, but on TV.
“A big place crowded with people” “reminds me of Ron’s in Santa Barbara.” It was a restaurant crowded with people, but it was crowded because it was small, not large. Paul Cantor was from Santa Barbara, so it makes sense I would think of that location, and “Ron” (a friend named Ron Robertson) had a daughter who owned a small but popular restaurant in Santa Barbara.
“Painter I kept thinking of as Baziotes or Jean-Michel Basquiat.” John Kitses is neither of these people. However, I was told as much in the dream, so this doesn’t count.
The most striking similarity has to do with the name “Jean-Michel” to “John” and “like Kittez” to “Kitsis.”
Before getting to the name similarity, let’s look at the rest of the dream in a more positive light: It describes a building I recognized when I brought Kitsis home. It describes a crowded and busy restaurant, which is where I met Kitsis. It references Santa Barbara, which is where Paul Cantor was from, and a veiled reference to a restaurant by mentioning “Ron’s place” (as opposed to “Ron’s daughter’s place”). This part is interesting because I didn’t know about Ron’s daughter’s restaurant at the time. I first visited it 6 years later, in 1996. It describes “The artist’s paintings” as “thin”, which is true of Kitsis’s watercolors, and Kitsis is an artist, like the main character in the dream.
Now let’s look at the name. I used the Bard chatbot to work out a list of real names that are most similar to “Kittez” phonetically and by spelling. It came up with five names similar enough to be considered possibilities:
Phonetic sound:
Kietz: Similar to "Kittez" in the initial "Ki" sound but differs in the ending "tz" compared to "tez."
Kitsis: Very close to "Kittez" with identical sounds for all six letters.
Kitzel: Matches "Kittez" in the first three letters but diverges with the "-el" ending.
Kitts: Same as "Kittez" for the first four letters but ends with "-s" instead of "-ez."
Kitten: Shares the first three letters with "Kittez" but differs significantly with the last three.
Spelling:
Kietz: Two consonant changes (-t- to -z- and -z- to -tz-) compared to "Kittez."
Kitsis: One consonant change (-z- to -s-) compared to "Kittez."
Kitzel: Two consonant changes (-t- to -z- and -tt- to -el-) compared to "Kittez."
Kitts: One consonant change (-z- to -s-) compared to "Kittez."
Kitten: Three consonant changes (-t- to -tt-, -z- to -n-, and -ez- to -en-) compared to "Kittez."
Overall:
Kitsis is the most similar to "Kittez" with nearly identical sound and spelling, differing only in one consonant.
Kitts and Kitzel follow closely, each with one consonant change compared to "Kittez."
Kietz is slightly less similar due to two consonant changes, but still shares the initial "Ki" sound.
Kitten is the least similar with significant differences in both sound and spelling.
I then checked to see how often the surnames occurred in New York, and how often either “John” or “Jean” occurred in combination with each surname:
Kietz: 47 (John or Jean= 0)
Kitsis: 24 (John or Jean= 1 (john))
Kitzel: 15 (John or Jean= 1 (john))
Kitts: 152 ((John or Jean (1 “Jean”, 2 “Jon”, 0 “John”))
Kitten: 1 (John or Jean= 0)
As you can see, the chance of running into anyone named anything similar to “Jean-Michel Kittez” or “John Kittez” (“Jean” is French for “John”) is remote. Out of 21,373,402 names of people who have lived in New York, only 5 could possibly match any of the possibilities suggested by the name in my dream, and one of those, identified by AI, is the actual person I met and has the name that comes closest to the one written in my journal a week before meeting John Kitsis.
Keep in mind that my journal states explicitly that “His first name is like Jean-Michel” and “his last name is like Kittez.” Meaning, his first name is not Jean-Michel and his last name is not Kittez. They are similar somehow, but not the same.
The probability of running into a random person in New York with a name similar enough to “Jean-Michel Kittez” to be considered a possible match is 5:21,373,402, or p=0.000023 (1:427,468). The chance of running into the person whose name was selected by the AI as “most similar” to the name in my dream is 1:21,373,402.