And to you?
To the nurse in Pittsburgh, the teacher in Peoria, and the father of three in Flagstaff, the policy tremors may feel distant.
Until they don’t.
Until the reading list changes. Until your passport takes longer. Until your agency is gone. Until the Guard drives past your window.
That’s the dream logic. The shift happens.
Then you try to remember when it began.
When the jolt reaches your street, you count the signs. You listen to your neighbor. You watch the machine. You check the locks. You scan the mail. You weigh the hum of engines and the silence of ballots, the flags in the frost, the breath on your windshield before dawn.
The wind off the lot is colder now.
The crowd is thinning.
The machine still hums.
Dreams, Hoel reminds us, end only when we remember we’re dreaming.
Will you wake?
Bibliography
1. Federal Register. Restoring Accountability to Policy‑Influencing Positions, Executive Order 14151 (2025). This executive order reinstated “Schedule F” (renamed “Policy/Career”), reclassifying policy‑influencing positions as at‑will posts and stressing accountability over civil‑service protections.
2. Hoel, Erik. The Overfitted Brain: Dreams Evolved to Assist Generalization. Patterns 2, no.5 (2021): 100268. Hoel’s paper argues that dreams evolved to combat overfitting by generating corrupted sensory inputs, enabling the brain to generalize beyond daily experience.
3. Times Leader. “Wheeling Protests Project 2025 as ‘Economic Genocide.’” February 6, 2025. Local coverage of a protest in Wheeling, West Virginia, quoting a former state senator who described DEI rollbacks as “economic genocide” for Black communities.
4. Associated Press. “Trump Calls for Using U.S. Cities as ‘Training Ground’ for Military.” September 30, 2025. AP report describing Trump’s speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico, where he proposed using cities as military training grounds and framed urban unrest as an enemy from within.
5. Oregon Public Broadcasting. “Portland Leaders Push Back on Deployment Threats.” October 1, 2025. OPB report on Portland leaders’ response to federal deployment plans, quoting Chamber of Commerce head Andrew Hoan urging peace and calm.
6. Ibid. Same OPB source as citation 5, highlighting Governor Tina Kotek’s remark that the narrative of chaos in Portland was manufactured.
7. Chicago Sun‑Times. “Illinois Judge Temporarily Bars Guard Federalization.” October 13, 2025. News story reporting a federal judge’s injunction blocking the federalization of the Illinois National Guard, citing the judge’s statement that no credible evidence justified the deployment.
8. Technology Networks. “Dreaming, VR, and Generalization: A Conversation with Erik Hoel.” May 14, 2021. Interview in which Hoel elaborates on the overfitted brain hypothesis, noting that dream loss causes overfitting and emphasizing the role of corrupted sensory inputs.
9. American Civil Liberties Union. “Project 2025 Offers Dystopian View of America.” ACLU News, 2024. ACLU commentary describing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 as a blueprint for consolidating executive power and undermining civil liberties, warning that it presents a dystopian vision.