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186 other aspects of the imagined and unreal episode, the object too had to be imagined and nonreal. But as the viewer and the hero are certain that all had faded into its nonreality, the hero finds the object in his pocket or on his finger—a reality left over from the unreality. And thus, Rod Serling has shown us, between reality and nonreality, between the rational and the irrational, we were passing through a Twilight Zone. Four thousand years earlier, a Sumerian king found himself in such a Twilight Zone, and recorded his experience on two clay cylinders (that are now on display in the Louvre Museum in Paris). The king's name was Gudea and he reigned in the Sumer- ian city Lagash circa 2100 B.c. Lagash was the "cult center" of Ninurta, the Foremost Son of Enlil, and he dwelt with his spouse Bau in the city's sacred precinct called the Girsu— hence his local epithet NIN.GIRSU, "Lord of the Girsu." At about that time, owing to an intensification of the struggle for supremacy on Earth that pitted primarily Enki's Firstborn Marduk against Enid's clan, Ninurta/Ningirsu obtained the permission of his father Enlil to build a new temple in the Girsu—a temple so magnificent that it would express the rights of Ninurta to the supremacy. As it turned out, Ninurta's plan was to build in Mesopotamia a most unusual temple, one that would emulate the Great Pyramid of Giza on the one hand and that, upon its vast platform, would hold stone circles that could serve as sophisticated astronomical observa- tories. The need to find a reliable and faithful worshiper to carry out the grandiose plans and to follow intelligently the designs of the Divine Architects served as the background for the ensuing events recorded by Gudea. The series of events began with a dream that Gudea had one night; it was a vision of Divine Encounters. And it was so vivid that it transported the king into a Twilight Zone; for when Gudea awoke, an object that he had seen only in his dream was now physically on his lap. Somehow, the bound- ary between unreality and reality had been crossed. Utterly perplexed by the occurrence, Gudea asked for and received permission to seek the advice of the oracle goddess Nanshe in her "House of Fate-Solving" in another city. Reaching the place by boat and offering prayers and sacrifices DIVINE ENCOUNTERS