Troubling Abstractions
Part 8 - S3e8
Version 1.0

“Troubling Abstractions”
Part 8

This episode is a two-parter. The first ~15 minutes follows the structure of every other episode of “The Return.” The remaining time is more of a short art film. I really don’t have much of an eye for spiritual or philosophical insight, so I recommend reading “Our Collective Transcendence” for these aspects. (Direct Link) (Archive)

If an interpretation does not satisfy or something appears to be missing, remember that this is only Version 1.0. This version was written episode-by-episode, and I expect more clues to come to light after we’ve had a chance to examine each episode, step back, and look at the puzzle as a whole.

Some recurring motifs in this episode: the moon, taking right turns, the number 4

INSIDE A CAR, SD | 0

We concluded the previous episode with Mr. C blackmailing his way out of prison and riding away with Ray – and that scene may have been a re-staging of the Primal Scene between Leland and Laura in “FWWM.”
2 reflections of bright street lights passed between them before Mr. C took out his phone. Let’s take a closer look at his screen:

• It has a blue background, all buttons black.
• Mr. C claims that there are 3 tracking devices on the car.

The tracking devices:

• A button with “C” in green. He taps this and it vanishes.
• A button with “FIRE” in red, with a blue arrow on each side of the word, as if there were multiple options to scroll through. He taps it and it vanishes.
• A button that says D ( . ) X in green, with the shape in the middle resembling a target, a bullseye, or The Thing That You Don’t Ever Want To Know About. He taps it and it vanishes.
• A white bar, like a search bar, with a black arrow on the right side only. This is what he uses to record the semi-truck’s license plate: DEGWW 8. If we translate the letters to numbers, we also get 4+5+7+5+5 = 26 = 8.

Also of note: Daria’s “waiting for a phone call.” Remember that her murder is a re-staging of the train car Primal Scene, with her taking the role of Laura.

Ray knows time-space coordinates that Mr. C needs to find Phillip Jeffries and/or Judy, but Ray won’t give them away for free.
Ray has more awareness and knowledge of the situation than he appears, and we’ll see this when he makes a phone call to Philip Jeffries in a few moments. Remember: he’s a double agent for the positive forces in the Twin Peaks Dream. By demanding payment, Ray is trying to trick Mr. C into giving him jackpots/gold – the Truth Itself rendered in a way that Laura Palmer’s mind won’t try to bury it by vanishing a character or timeline.
This request made Mr. C suspicious and displeased, but he did not act on it in any way.

Back on the road: 2 lanes became 1 as the brainwave motif filled the screen, in the curves of the road itself and in how the streetlights rippled on it. A red light appeared behind the men as Mr. C directed Ray to take a right turn, and this is a small motif that we’ll see a few times over the course of this episode. Between the road chevrons on the curve, two red tail-lights glowed dimly in the dark. To me, this imagery suggests that Mr. C’s submitting the license plate somehow placed the truck into this black space between the chevrons on the side of the road. This may an instance of Quantum Physics/Quantum Entanglement at work.

Ray shot Mr. C 2 times, with that odd stuttering effect that we saw in the Phyllis Hastings murder.
Ray is a double agent working for the positive forces in Laura Palmer’s psyche. He is trying to help her by murdering Mr. C, the BOB orb inside Mr.C, and the delusions that they represent. But the stars are not aligned, and the co-ordinates are wrong. Laura isn’t ready. This is why the Woodsmen and flashing lights arrive keep the BOB delusions going. Ray can only manage two shots because three is the sacred number that represents all three Lauras: Red Laura, Blue Laura, and Odessa Laura/Carrie Page. However, Carrie Page has not been created yet, and these particular circumstances (co-ordinates!) are not the correct ones to create her, either. That comes much later.

The Woodsmen danced as if in ritual while Ray literally twisted and turned in the glow of the flashing lights. In this moment they are all abstractions of the Bad Transformer at work as Laura’s mind twists and spins over itself to continue believing in BOB – to literally resurrect him in these deep abstractions of her mind. The Woodsmen smeared blood all over Mr. C’s face until he could barely be recognized, and the Orb was crudely shoved back inside. This is an inversion of the Experimental Model’s vomit that created BOB, this is like his un-birthing.
This scene may also be a re-staging of the orginal series’ finales, in which Dale Cooper is shot in the stomach and bloodies his face through a mirror, respectively. Through all this, Ray could only bellow like a terrified animal. This is a Lynchian motif that appears later in this episode, and has appeared in other Lynch works. The “incompetent hitman” scene in “Mulholland Drive” comes to mind.

A few notes on the BOB Orb itself:

• The Orb is a means of portraying BOB following the death of actor Frank Silva, and so it only appears in “The Return.”
• The Orb bears a resemblance to the cores of nuclear weapons. BOB is the core, Leland is the shell carrying it.
• It also resembles a seed.
• It’s another reminder that BOB is linked with the color black.

Returning to the episode, The Split happened again when Ray shot Mr. C.

• A traumatic event occurs
  - Ray murders Mr. C/The Woodsmen arrive. I would say both/either could be considered the traumatic event.
• One character is made unconscious and ignorant of events, casting them as the Dead Scapegoat
  - Mr. C is dead/unconscious.
• Another character is the sole witness to the traumatic event and flees/is exiled, casting them as the Living Scapegoat
  - Ray is the sole witness to the murder and the Woodsmen that follow it.

What makes Ray different than the other Living Scapegoats is that he has the means and the knowledge to discuss what he knows.
Red Room Laura and American Girl are exiled to a world of spiraling abstractions and broken speech. Ronette, even after waking from the coma, is a character with low awareness and has no frame of reference for what she saw that night.
Ray, however, is working directly with Philip Jeffries; an abstraction of the forbidden knowledge itself. This is why he’s able to tell Jeffries that he saw “something” in Cooper, even though he doesn’t quite understand it.

This could be reflected in the half-moon in the sky of this night; it’s his half-understanding. Or maybe it’s Laura’s, with one half of her still dead and in the dark while the other half shines with awareness and knowledge. As it’s swept over by clouds, we’re left wondering about the Log Lady’s “what will be in the darkness that remains?”

THE ROADHOUSE | 13

This is my favorite performance in the series.
This is Nine Inch Nails’ “She’s Gone Away,” a song that was written specifically for this show. These are the lyrics, courtesy of The Unofficial Twin Peaks Wiki. I’ve bolded some words of interest and _{(added notes.)}

You dig in places, till your fingers bleed
Spread the infection, where you spill your seed
I can't remember what she came here for
I can't remember much of anything anymore

She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away
She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away _{(said twice)}
Away
Away _{(said twice)}

A little mouth opened up inside _{(‘Secret Diary’ reference)}
Yeah, I was watching on the day she died
We keep licking while the skin turns black
Cut along the length, but you can't get the feeling back

She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away
She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away
She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away
She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away _{(from twice to four times)}

Away
Away
Away
Away_{(from twice to four times)}

(Are you still here?)

Mr. C, alone and soaked in his own blood, sat up and stared blearily into the darkness before we faded into the next portion of the episode. Does this suggest that we’re looking into his mind, and his recollections? The song’s closing line creates an interesting variation on a previous scene.

• Mr. C looks into the mirror and sees BOB’s face merging into his own. “Good, you’re still with me.”
• The song ends with “are you still here?” as Mr. C stares silently into the night.

---

This begins the “art film” half of the Episode. It contains many layers of abstraction and symbolism, so I’ve decided it’s probably best to begin with a summary before going over each sequence in more detail.
Surface Layer
- The abstractions and realities they represent

• Nearly all of this portion is in black-and-white
  - Monochrome is Laura’s experience of memory.
• The first Nuclear Test in White Sands
  - The incest-abuse is nuclear explosions, the destruction of the “nuclear family” unit. Leland is the device/shell that carries BOB the dangerous nuclear core within.
• The Convenience Store, Woodsmen Appear
  - Woodsmen have a function for Laura as agents of denial and suppression, their appearance is the start of Laura’s mental illness following the abuse AND/OR an abstraction of her “dirty, bearded” “world of truck driver” customers that she serviced as a prostitute.
• The Experimental Model Appears
  - The EM is an abstraction Laura’s dissociative disorder itself; a faceless, voiceless woman with her arms bent back in order to become numb.
• The EM vomits up frogmoth eggs/diseased corn and BOB
  - Laura’s dissociative disorder spawns new delusions; the “badness” inside her father is no longer an unseen, radioactive core but a whole new person. She literally assigns him a human face in this scene.
• Alarms sound in the Mauve Zone, the Fireman witnesses BOB’s creation and stops the playback there
  - The Fireman is a high awareness, protective entity in Laura’s psyche. Dido is an aspect of Laura as a whole, and she’s uncomfortably close to her waking consciousness. By stopping the film on BOB, The Fireman protects Dido/Laura from the truth. She never sees the nuclear explosion or where BOB really came from. To her, he just came into existence one day.
• The Fireman creates the Golden Orb and releases it into the film
  - The Fireman creates an idealized world for Laura/Dido to watch instead of reality, just like the end of “FWWM”: a world where BOB had been around the entire time and is to blame for everything, including her own deeply self-loathing fantasy murder that causes an entire town to weep for 25 years about failing to save her and an idealized father figure that breaks the rules of spacetime itself just to reach her.
• Back to New Mexico: the frogmoth egg hatched
  - Leland is the seed/shell/egg carrying the disgusting core payload of BOB/the frogmoth. This is the delusion being “seeded” into the soil of her unconscious.
• The Head Woodsman and several others appear, kill 2 people in the radio station, put the rest of the unnamed town in a coma
  - The Woodsmen exist in Laura’s psyche to act as agents of repression. By silencing the radio station, they stop anyone for calling for help or leaking the truth. By replacing the music with the white horse of denial, the whole town sleeps through The Girl becoming infested.
• The Girl is orally infested by the frogmoth and has dreams/nightmares
  - We’re not sure who The Girl is, but she could be Laura or Sarah. Both interpretations are discussed below.

White Sands, NM | 16

Our first scene is an overhead view of the Trinity nuclear weapons test in New Mexico. The slow zoom into the heart of the explosion recalls the slow zoom into Laura’s homecoming portrait in the opener of the first episode of “The Return.”
As established, nuclear explosions are an abstraction for the incest that destroyed Laura’s concept of the “nuclear family.” Why Trinity? Trinity was the first such explosion in human history. It’s likely that this episode is an abstracted recollection of the very first incident of abuse.

The slow crown-zoom of the camera brought us to multiple scenes of swarming atoms and debris clashing through plumes of fire and flashing lightning. This is an origin point for multiple pieces for symbolism: fire, flashing lights, Black Orbs, frogmoths/insect imagery, and the Black Dot as The Thing You Don’t Ever Want To Know About.

THE CONVENIENCE STORE | 21

The convenience store was empty until the fog/smoke and flashing lights started to roll in, stuttering. Only after that did the Woodsmen appear. Is this an implication that they were created by fire-smoke and the flashing lights of the Bad Transformer? Their function follows this genesis: help the Bad Transformer make sense of these horrific things that are happening to Laura. They are black angels of reality-denial itself.
It has also been theorized that the Woodsmen represent the “world of truck drivers,” they are the “dirty bearded men in a room” that Laura would have serviced as a prostitute. I think both interpretations have merit, and are not mutually exclusive.

The store seemed to be rattled by an unseen explosion and more flashing lights. My first thought was that this explosion was another nuclear detonation, but the fading of the convenience store lights suggests problems with ELEC-TRI-CITY, such as an exploding transformer. Regarding the lights themselves, there are 4: one for each gas pump, and two on the corners of the rooftop. As of this version of the writing, we have yet to discover a numerology meaning for 4. One idea: it could be a reference to 4 Lauras that existed before the end of Season 2.

• Black/Nighttime/Bad/Doppelganger Laura – the selfish, drug addicted teenage prostitute, the shadow self that becomes integrated and disappears before “The Return.”
• White/Daytime/Good Laura – the straight-A homecoming queen, volunteer, and private tutor, becomes integrated and disappears before “The Return.”
• Blue/Dead/Ignorant Laura – the Dead Scapegoat that lives in the Twin Peaks Fantasy where BOB is real and everything was his fault, not Leland’s
• Red/Living/Knowing Laura – the Living Scapegoat that knows the truth about Leland, but is exiled to the Red Rooms where she can’t contaminate the Twin Peaks Fantasy with this knowledge

Suddenly, we were taken through a black hole, or a black tunnel, and this brought us to the Experimental Model.
Some maintain that the being in the glass box in NYC and this being in Episode 8 are two different entities. I do not agree with this position.

• They are visually identical, or at least extremely similar
• Both are actors of repression: the NYC entity uses the Losing Your Head motif to repress Sam and Tracey’s sexual passion, the Episode 8 entity spawns delusions that repress the truth inside Laura’s head.
• I am not any kind of film student let alone an expert, but having two of these entities with nearly-identical appearances and actions but less than 90 seconds of screentime and two separate functions in the narrative is… just too cluttered and unnecessary, and it doesn’t seem something David Lynch would do.

THE EXPERIMENTAL MODEL | 24

”Listen to the sounds.” Unlike the glass box scene, we can hear that the Experimental Model has a distinctly female voice as it gags and chokes. This is a crucial piece that might just tell us what the EM truly is.

• It has a female voice.
• It has no face, no mouth: no identity, no true voice to speak with (or call for help)
• Its arms are bent back → same position Laura used to go numb and dissociate
• Sexual passion attracts its attention and causes it to violently destroy heads → sexual passion causes Laura as a trauma survivor to lose her head by intensely dissociating.

The Experimental Model is Laura’s dissociative disorder given form, or perhaps a reflection of how she sees herself in those moments. Now that we have this key, let’s look at this sequence more closely. I apologize for the repetitive nature of this writing, but the abstractions of Episode 8 are very dense and it can be difficult to keep all of these layers in mind.

• The first nuclear weapon explodes in White Sands.
  - Laura is sexually abused by her father, possibly for the first time.
• The Woodsmen appear
  - Laura begins to deny and repress what really happened to her AND/OR engage in dangerous sexual practices with strange men.
• The transformer explodes/becomes a Bad Transformer and four lights fade in and out.
  - The coping mechanisms of the Woodsmen aren’t enough, and Laura performs so many mental gymnastics trying to make sense of her life that something “snaps.” Her identity begins to fragment, possibly into four pieces.
• After the Bad Transformer explodes, we fall through a dark hole/tunnel to the Experimental Model.
  - The Woodsmen weren’t enough, the Bad Transformer wasn’t enough, so it’s now up to the Experimental Model to help Laura make sense of her situation. As we just established, the EM is an abstraction of dissociation itself AND/OR how Laura imagines herself in those moments.
  - The black hole is an inversion of the white hole in the Mauve Zone, and an abstraction of the hole in the roof of the Pink Room where Laura danced and drugged to escape her life.
  
• The EM vomits up frogmoth eggs/diseased corn and the BOB orb
  - In the deepest parts of her subconscious, Laura Palmer has invented another solution: It Was Someone Else. She convinces herself: “my Dad doesn’t have a rotten core that he hides from the daytime world, I was actually hurt by a seperate man entirely, and this is what he looks like.” Again: she is literally assigning a face to him The frogmoth eggs and corn will be covered in more detail further down.

We ended this sequence by slow-zooming (again) into a liquid glob of golden light, beating like a heart, and this suddenly became drops of blood showering the camera. The liquid light is an abstraction of the golden orb that is given to Senorita Dido. The golden orb is an abstraction of the Twin Peaks Fantasy itself. By abruptly turning gold to blood, we’re reminded that the Twin Peaks Fantasy cannot exist without Laura Palmer’s sudden and violent, bloody murder.

THE MAUVE ZONE | 25

We now get a good look at this building from the outside: a massive electrical transformer with two black holes-as-windows. It resembles the glass box fortress in NYC, or is it the other way around? One of these windows is a triangle, the other is a rectangle. We enter using the latter - 4 angles instead of 3. Inside, Senorita Dido sat on the couch with another transformer, swaying gently to the music.

An alarm and flashing lights sounded as the Fireman walked out from behind this smaller transformer. This action is another iteration of the Lost Highway Corner Shots that we’ve been noticing. Senorita Dido looked between the alarm and the Fireman with concern. The Fireman stopped to stare directly into the audience instead, with the White Hole Ceiling prominently behind him.
The last character to stare directly at us was MIKE speaking of “The Gifted And The Damned.” However, this episode as not directed by David Lynch, and it is therefore not relevant to “Find Laura.” What IS relevant is the idea that the camera is Laura, just like everything else in the series after “FWWM.” It’s her dreamscape, her psyche, her perspectives. The Fireman is not concerned for the audience, he’s concerned for Laura.

He goes upstairs into the theater after this, taking the right side as Mr. C and Ray also took “the little road to the right.”

THE THEATER OF THE MIND | 33

A quick review on the role of The Fireman in “Find Laura:”

• The Fireman is a high-awareness, protective figure for Laura. He is the paternal equal to the Grandmother.
• He creates the golden orb for Dido to give her a filtered, more comfortable view of reality.
• He wants to help Laura but cannot speak or act plainly. He is bound to riddles, magical items, and bizarre ‘plot twists.’
  - The Fireman is the Bad Transformer. Gordon Cole is the Bad Transformer. Gordon Cole is the Director of the F.B.I and played by Director David Lynch. The Fireman is the Director of the Twin Peaks Dream.

Inside the theater itself, we saw an alcove to the right side (our right) decorated by Dr. Amp’s hat, with 2 black doorways inside. These doorways had a strong resemblance to the black hole-windows on the outside of the Mauve Transformer. The doorway on our left – that is, the right side of anyone standing in the alcove – had an oddly umbilical pipe coming from it.
We saw the Fireman watching the same apocalyptic footage that we just watched, up until the point of the BOB Orb appearing on screen. At that, he stopped the playback and started to float upwards, assuming the same straight-limbed supine position that Laura did in the train car. The flashing lights intensified as Senorita Dido approached, backlit, her shadow curiously emphasized before her. As soon as she touched hands with her shadow, the Fireman began to emit golden light.

Lou Ming wrote that the Golden Orb is The Fireman’s creation of a more comfortable alternative reality for Senorita Dido. Let’s examine it in more detail.

• The Homecoming Photo
  - There are two versions of Laura Palmer’s homecoming photo. Here is an archived image that contains screenshots of both.
  A: This is the version of her homecoming photo that we are most familiar with. It first appears in the Palmer’s living room in “FWWM,” but after “FWWM,” it’s the only one we see. This is an abstraction of Laura’s inner space/”living room” taking over and superseding her external space/”real life.” (This symbolism is even more loaded if we consider Lou Ming’s interpretation that Maddie’s murder in the Palmer Living Room is an abstraction of an early incident of abuse/molestation – perhaps the very day that we’re seeing abstracted in this very episode.) This is the version used in the Golden Orb, the introduction sequence, official art/photos, merchandise etc.
  B: This is the alternative version that’s glimpsed in Laura’s ‘waking life’ throughout “FWWM” and never appears again. Her smile seems much more strained in this photo.
  
• The Kiss
  - The original context of The Kiss is Laura’s whispering “my father killed me” into the ear of Dale Cooper in the Red Rooms. Senorita Dido may be ‘whispering’ the same into the Twin Peaks Dream, programming it with the basic premise that she needs to feel comfortably disconnected from her life.

The Golden Orb was sealed with a kiss, sent into the golden record-needle machine, and released into the screen, losing a bit of vibrancy as it drifted into the world within. The flickering and flashing light of the screen on Senorita Dido’s face is a re-staging of Laura watching TV at the end of “FWWM,” and they both express the same idea: Laura Palmer stepping out of her own life.
We only need to remember that Senorita Dido is not Red Room Laura. RR Laura knew exactly what had been done to her, and by who. Senorita Dido only understood that BOB just existed one day; she doesn’t know where he came from or his true purpose. If Episode 8 is a heavily abstracted re-telling of a much younger Laura and her early versions of these unhealthy coping mechanisms, then RR Laura simply wouldn’t exist yet*. Senorita Dido may represent this sort of fundamental “young Laura” that doesn’t have a place in our present-day “Find Laura” framework.

*neither would the Red Rooms themselves, so it follows that they don’t appear in this episode. Given how symbolic and surreal this episode is, their absence sure is strange isn’t it?

NEW MEXICO AUGUST 5 1956 | 40

I have seen people assume that this is in White Sands, but this town is never named.
Between the Trinity test and this time, 4038 (becomes 6) days passed.

The Second Convenience Store

Here we saw the frogmoth hatch and start to make its way across the desert. The frogmoth and its egg are a symbol with three layers.

• The first is defined by Lou Ming: Leland is the egg, BOB is the foul animal that he carries.
• The second is defined in terms of fertility symbols: the ruined corn/seed is a symbol of familial bonds destroyed by incest, BOB is associated with the black disease that grows on it.
• The third is defined in terms of garmonbozia: creamed corn is an abstraction of guilt and responsibility as later consumed by MIKE+ARM in the Red Rooms, the logic being “BOB wants me [Laura] therefore it’s my fault for making this happen.” The frogmoth seed represents the same “sowing” of guilt and responsibility.

We also saw the brainwaves here as ripples of moonlight on the sand, and the full moon itself being covered by black clouds. As with the half-moon in the start of the episode, this may be a symbol of understanding and clarity. If the appearance of the frogmoth seed is an abstraction of growing delusions and self-blame, it follows that its hatching would literally darken Laura’s sense of clarity about the situation. And again, it also brings to mind the Log Lady’s speech about the darkness that remains.

We saw a second convenience store here, similar but not identical to the first. It still had 4 lights in matching sets of 2, and the Jailing Bars appeared in its windows.
We heard the young couple discuss a song, but we never find out what it is. The way their shadows were emphasized recalled Senorita Dido just doing the same in the Theater of the Mind.
The lucky penny is another instance of the coin motif and the number 1. There’s a connection here between the penny and the appearance of the Woodsmen: the Head Woodsman only appears in this episode, and he is portrayed by Abraham Lincoln impersonator Robert Broski (or is it... Bob Broski?)

Lonely Roads

With an [ominous woosh], we saw 2 Woodsmen coming from the sky. Maybe this is what the painting in Gordon Cole’s office was referencing? We saw 4 lights again. This time, they’re headlights on 2 empty cars. We can’t see the drivers but there is an implication that they were killed by the Woodsmen.
Remember: cars are an abstraction of bodies, and their drivers are an abstraction of the consciousness driving them. The Woodsmen kill their targets by destroying their heads. This stretch of highway could be an expression of how Laura Palmer feels and sees herself at this point: an empty body, the consciousness separated.

As the Head Woodsman approached the couple, we heard a heavily distorted version of the “diary tearing” sound. As the lights flashed, he asked for a [flame] 6 times. The Wife bellowed in animal confusion just as Ray had, and as they swerved away, a 3rd Woodsman seemed to appear out of the darkness.
This couple are the only characters in this ‘art film’ that escape unharmed. We will keep an eye open for repeating imagery and scenarios – the repeated motif of a man and a woman in a car together comes to mind: Dougie and Jade, Dale and Diane, etc. But I digress.

Returning to the young couple: we saw brainwaves again in the dirt road they were walking on. The shed lit by a single bulb was interesting, and it caught my eye how it was framed behind the Boy as he asked for 1 kiss. Is it a re-staging of the Mauve Zone Transformer? Dr. Amp’s Shack? The radio station?

The Radio Station KPJK

If we translate KPJK to numbers and add numerology rules, we get 4. The clock inside is stopped at 10:16, and this becomes 8. The building itself is a bit reminiscent of The Mauve Transformer – perhaps the doomed pair within are versions of Dido and the Fireman. The short road leading to the station is a brainwave, and the front door shows us The Arch.
What do these clues tell us about the nature of the radio station? What is it an abstraction of? It must be a source of truth for Laura Palmer, because the primary function of the Woodsmen is to protect her from pain by silencing the truth, and that’s what our Head Woodsman is here to do.

The first man-woman couple of this episode got away unscathed, but the receptionist and the operator won’t be so lucky. The Head Woodsman asks them “Got A Light” 2 times each before forcing them to Lose Their Heads. He then reads this poem an unknown number of times, and it seems to plunge the entire town into a deep coma.
This is the water
and this is the well
drink full
and descend.
The horse is the white of the eyes
and the dark within.

The white horse isn’t discussed much in “Find Laura,” so let’s gather what we know about it:

• ”White Horse” is a slang term for heroin, cocaine, or any pale and powdered drug.
• White Laura is the “good Laura” that ignores the dark truths about her life – the hardworking homecoming queen, volunteer and Straight-A student.
• ”FWWM”: the White Horse appears as Sarah Palmer reluctantly drinks the drugged milk and sleeps through Laura’s rape. There is an implication that this a regular, ritualistic behavior.
• S2e14: the horse appears again when Sarah Palmer is rendered unconscious and unable to stop Leland from murdering Maddie.
• S3e2: Red Room Laura kisses Dale and is scream-torn into the air, blowing away the curtains to reveal darkness and the white horse. _{This is the weakest point in my understanding.}
• S3e8: the horse does not literally appear, but is referenced in this poem as a metaphor for eyes sliding closed in the same way that a horse bends to take a drink. Its neighs will be heard in the darkness at the very end of this episode.

What does this tell us about the white horse? The white horse is an abstraction of turning away. To ride the white horse is to know that you have pain but choose to run from it. White Laura does not acknowledge her pain, that’s Black Laura’s job. Sarah Palmer knows what happens in her home at night, but plays along and ignores it.

Lou Ming wrote that Judy is “a personification of the white horse.” We haven’t gotten to Judy yet, but we will make a note of this for later.

COMATOSE

Two people are dead and the entire town forced to sleep, but there is only ONE character that we see being infested by the frogmoth: The Girl

Who is The Girl?

• A very young Laura. If Lou Ming is correct in theorizing that Maddie’s murder is an abstraction of an early instance of abuse in the Palmer living room, than this is an abstraction of the same: the sweet music of the record player being replaced by feelings of fear, dissociation, and horror – perhaps this became abstracted into Dido’s music being interruped by the alarms. The white horse of Sarah’s drugged milk became sounds and poetry with the same end result: nobody knows what’s happening to The Girl, and nobody is coming to help.
• Sarah Palmer. I don’t entirely agree with the exclusion of Laura Palmer’s Secret Diary. In it, a much younger Laura wondered if her mother had to endure the same treatment from men and concluded that if she had, she would never speak of it, because her generation just didn’t speak of these things. The Girl’s silence even while being orally infested by a disgusting creature is an abstraction of this realization.

These are just two possible interpretations, and hopefully more clues will come to light as I keep working and writing. Regardless of identity, the shadow of the billowing curtains on The Girl’s bedroom wall imply that the frogmoth came through the window just as BOB did to Laura. The Head Woodsman, having accomplished his goal, walked out of the radio station. There was a flash of light and the sound of neighing horses as he walked into the dark. The Girl could only dream on to the sound of an [ominous woosh], her eyes rolling as the credits began to play. We will never see her wake up again.

The BOB delusion has been seeded, hatched, transmitted, and re-planted. All dissenting voices have been crushed. Many people have described Episode 8 as “the origin of BOB,” but it’s more than that. It’s the origin of the entire Twin Peaks Dream itself.