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196 the touch are so real that he suspects Enkidu of doing that; but after Enkidu firmly denies calling or touching Gilgamesh, the king realizes that it was the god in his dream that had touched him so realistically that his flesh became numb. And finally there was the dream-vision of the launched rock- etship—a "dream" in which Gilgamesh sees an object the likes of which he had never seen before, a launching the likes of which no one in Uruk had seen (for it was neither a Spaceport nor a Landing Place). He did not end up holding the object in his hand once the vision had dissipated; but we could still see it depicted in the Byblos coin (Fig. 49). The dream-visions of Daniel, a Jewish captive in the court of Nebuchadnezzar (king of Babylon in the sixth century B.C.), contain even more direct parallels to the physical as- pects of the Twilight Zone encounters of Gilgamesh and Gudea. Describing one of his Divine Encounters at the banks of the Tigris River (the Book of Daniel, chapter 10), he wrote: l lifted up mine eyes, and behold, I saw a sole man clothed in linen whose loins were girded with Ophir gold. His body gleamed like topaz, his face shone like lightning, his eyes flamed like torches, his arms and feet were the color of bronze, and his voice was a booming one. "I alone could see the apparition," Daniel wrote; but though the other people who were with him could not see it, they felt an awesome presence and ran away to hide. He, too, felt suddenly immobilized, able to only hear the divine voice; but As soon as I heard the voice of his words I fell asleep face down, my face touching the ground. This position was akin to that described by Gudea; ensuing is the similarity to the awakenings that puzzled Gilgamesh, DIVINE ENCOUNTERS