9.ZZZ -- Abstract Dream Analysis Solution

The solutions to the Wacky Wordies appear to be:

That's beside the point
 Higher education
 Every dog has its day
Mixed nuts
 Increase Mather
 Top of the morning
Vacant lot
 Back in my day
 Upside-down cake
Three little pigs
 Tree pruning
 Out of Africa
"Nothing left to do but cry" by Lulu

The "to do but cry" part of the title of the song by Lulu is not clued, and perhaps the title was abbreviated to the first two words somewhere. And the last two boxes just tell you these are Wacky Wordies. The initials spell THE MITV BUTTON. This refers to a button from a Java applet described here which once let people at MIT select programs from a list to play on MITV student cable channel 36.

Then we have the blanks:

  1. 2------ --- -5----4
  2. --------1 ---- ------6--
  3. 4--- --- --1--
  4. --7--5- --- -- --- 6----
  5. --7----- 6-----5--7
  6. -1- --- 2-- --5 -- --- ---
  7. ---- -3-- --7 2-4--
  8. 3--7-, -6---- --4 ----
  9. -3--- -- --7-
  10. -5--- --- ---6-
  11. --- ---3 -- -45----
  12. ---6-5--- -1---
  13. 3----7- --- --- 5---- ---- -- ---2

There is an HTML comment at the bottom of the page which says What are you doing reading this? Go watch the movie!

The page with the blanks was discovered in 2021, and a thread on Reddit has a comment from a member of Palindrome saying she found this page on her computer, suggesting it was meant to be part of the Hunt. Probably, there was a program Hunt makers added to the selection on MITV which directed people to the blanks page and provided some more wacky wordies or other puzzle content to put on the blanks.

Some of the enumerations are difficult to match, such as #6 (3 3 3 3 2 3 3) and #13 (7 3 3 5 4 2 4). #8 is given with a comma and most sensibly matches the phrase "shake, rattle and roll" and #6 only reasonably matches the phrase "let the cat out of the bag." Prior to having the printed page of wcky wordies, and given the HTML comment, an attempt was made to match this against script text, DVD chapter titles, etc, in some dream-related movies, and against movie titles in general, but the difficult ones again generally had no matches. One of the Wacky Wordie answers is a movie: Out of Africa. I didn't find matches for #6 or #13 in its script.

The extraction from these numbers is probably meant to work the same way as in 19.7 Cryptography from freshman year of this hunt; that is, we take all the letters that fall on the 1s and anagram them into a word, then all the letters on the 2s, and so forth. That means we are extracting a seven-word phrase with enumeration 4 4 5 5 8 6 7.

We are told in the metapuzzle solution supplied with the new archive documents that the final answer is AL.