Ahh... Tiaka... you have discovered my secret! I have the power of The Cookie Song. No-one can defeat the mysterious magic of the cookie song. After all: "It's made with coconut!"

Seriously though. Paul, you say you think it was a dress rehearsal. I don't think you are far wrong. I shall tell you how I have come to see it by way of a little story:
Some time ago a friend had a still-born child. She was obviously pretty hurt by the experience. She wondered what it all meant and how to make sense of this little life that was promised but that never expressed itself. I asked spirit for some meaning. What I got was that she and her husband were way too "pressured" about this. There was too much energetic stress on the whole event and the baby could simply not express itself into that environment. The soul of the baby therefore chose to terminate the life. This caused the the parents to release some of all their pent-up emotions around this as grief. They shed some of their expectations, etc. I cautiously told my friend what I had received (worried that she might take this the wrong way - that I was saying they were to blame). She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said how strange it was that, before this child's coming, she and her husband had its whole future mapped - the schools, the achievements, the careers... everything. They had it all planned down to the finest detail. And then, when the foetus had died, all of that died with it. Now all she wanted was a baby. She just wanted a little person to love, as it was, for what it was. I'm sure I don't need to tell you the ending of this tale. She did indeed have another baby and she is the most wonderful contented beautiful mother. And the baby is perfect. A perfect baby. She is perfectly what she is. With no expectations that she should be anything OTHER than what she is.
And it strikes me that we - planet earth - have had a sort of a still-birth of that type. We have expected the birthing of our new golden age. The Lightship was to be the midwife. But it just didn't happen. And with the death of THAT new beginning I truly do begin to believe that we actually prepare ourselves for another one. For one without all the intense and impossible weights of expectation that we all placed on it. All of us that looked forward to this event pushed and pulled at it with our desperate need of what it would mean to us. Too much pressure in too many disparate directions! It would actually be impossible for this thing to manifest without hurting us and itself given all that emotional weight. So it seems to me we have had the opportunity to release some of that. Now that all of that is released... it seems to me that if it just appeared in the sky tomorrow that we would accept it with a lot more equanimity and just let it be what it IS rather than needing it to be what we demand it must be.
Sometimes, it seems, we need to lose something before we can correctly appreciate it.
And THAT is what I think has happened to us. Anyone that now says "a lightship is coming" is going to get a far less fevered response than Blossom did. Less intensity. Less pressure. Less conflict. And so now, slowly, this event can dawn upon us and just be what it really is. AND I believe it will be a far more personal experience than we have been expecting. AND now we all know it is really okay to doubt. We know it is a counter-productive and probably pain-causing thing to try to cause this to happen by our raw faith. What will be will be. So let's just let it BE what it will be. Not try to push it into one or another box of our creation.
That's where I am at this moment.