December’s Dream: AI, Luddites, the Future, the Past, the Now

The enigma of Consciousness seems to connect all unconsciously

Awoke Sunday morning on the 28th of December 2025 from a bizarre dream bridging a tangle of alternate timelines in parallel universes. My dream began in 1980s rural Virginia and ended in futuristic 2070s Chongqing, China.

My 3rd ex-wife (and still good friend) Kristina was in a my dream last night. Dreamt we were still married and living in a parallel multidimensional universe on a farm. This farm was my family’s Riverview Dairy in 1980s Prince Edward County, Virginia, but for us it was the 2030s yet she and I were both 30 years old. In real-life we are 9 and a half years apart in age, I’m 66 now, and we live in the Seattle, Washington metro area in the mid-2020s. Both of us have since remarried, although to other people.

In my dream, we walked around in a field of lush alfalfa and clover rimmed with wild grasses and honeysuckle. We were similarly dressed in work jeans, T-shirts, with open, unbuttoned flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Kristina’s T-shirt was bright blue. My hair was thick and wavy and my face clean-shaven. Kristina’s hair was long and hung loose around her shoulders. The white-painted, wood-plank cow barn, milk house, sheds and stables, and the old Bass farmhouse, all with silvery tin roofs, stood in the background exactly as they used to be in my prime universe. As was the old trailer below us on the edge of this field my first ex-wife Margaret Rose and I used to live in back in the early-to-mid 1980s when I was in my 20s. Yet Margaret wasn’t anywhere in this dream nor was my family of origin. I remember feeling slightly confused within the dream because I was self-aware within this dream the timelines did not match up. Only Kristina from Seattle was living on this 1980s Virginia farm. Not even my other ex, Gwen, and none of our children, nor my current wife Faithlyn, or Kristina’s current husband Brandon. In fact I didn’t see any other people on this farm in this particular universe/timeline. They were, however, still all in today’s Prime Universe. The Prime Universe, in this context, is the location of my current, awakened self-aware reality as I consciously live within it. My dream gripped my mind with its intense energy and vivid, even lurid details.

Continue reading

Deep Civilization and the Long View on Peace

Can we “deep think” our way out of our messes?

Apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and other forms of dystopian thinking seems to dominate both our fiction and our daily news cycle. “Fiction” includes movies, TV shows, poetry, photography, paintings, and music as well as prose. Such strains have run thru human thinking since Ancient times, of course, as one only has to look to the various holy books alone. Our obsession with all things “doom and gloom” as worldwide catastrophes, however, dealing not only with the global collapse of human civilization but with the extinction of our species, with omnicide of the biosphere, and with even the destruction of the planet itself seems to emerge en masse during the First and Second World Wars and the Great Depression. This fixation really took off during the Cold War and became even darker during the Global Long War on Terror, the Great Recession, and the unexpected rise of proto-fascist authoritarianism. The End Times have always been nigh, but never more so than at any time right now. What must we do then to deepen our thoughts, open our hearts, extend our minds, and expand our collective consciousness?

Continue reading