What A Dream I Had! – CleanTechnica

Last Updated on: 22nd June 2025, 12:31 am

No, this is not a story about a Simon and Garfunkel song. It is a story of a dream I had this morning in the precognition interstices between deep sleep and wakefulness. That is a place in our sleep cycle characterized by researchers as REM sleep, named for its rapid eye movements. Some people think this is when the brain reorganizes the compartments in our minds, casting out the old and integrating the new in an effort to make sense of the events of the past days, weeks, or months.

When most of us say we had a dream, it is this period of REM sleep they are referring to. It can be an unusually creative period. Many well known authors and musicians keep a notepad and pen on the nightstand so they can write down the flashes of insight that occur when our brains are active but our bodies are asleep. Often, those dreams fade fairly quickly once we wake up but this one has lingered for hours. Does it have something to do with cleantech? It might. See what you think.

The Dream

In the dream, I am in the checkout line at a grocery store with my wife. I hand the clerk a credit card, but after he inserts it in the card reader, he takes my card and says, “I’ll be right back.” When he returns, he is with three men with their faces covered who arrest me and cart me off to jail. I remember thinking, “I should have paid cash.” It seems my credit card was somehow linked to everything I had ever written on the internet, including all the stories I have done for CleanTechnica over the years.

My wife comes to visit me in detention with a thick folder containing printouts of every one of my online posts with the most egregious and offensive parts highlighted. I am, in a word, doomed — done in by my own words. Like those in Dante’s Inferno, I am led by my captors deeper and deeper into the nether regions of a large prison built of heavy granite blocks and lit by torches. As I pass by, other inmates who are suffering all sorts of indignities themselves avert their eyes, knowing my punishments will be much worse than theirs.

In Dante’s Inferno, the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. I consider my country — which should properly be known as the Disunited States of America — to be in a moral crisis. That makes it my duty to speak out. Elie Wiesel, who chronicled the horrors of the Third Reich, always maintained that “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but we must never fail to protest.” That is one of my core beliefs.

I discussed all this with my wife over breakfast, and, of course, being the eminently practical person she is, she suggested the dream was a warning to tone down my attacks on the idiots and incompetents committed to returning America to its Golden Age, when wealthy white men ruled with impunity and everyone else — women, people of color, and anyone who dared depart from the straight and narrow — were ostracized or incarcerated.

That is certainly one possible option. I could just do “rip and read” reports devoid of my usual banter and badinage. I know there are some readers who would applaud such self restraint. Well, funk that! I am very concerned about how America is tuning into a nation of slavish know nothings.

The Girl With Seven Names

I read a book recently entitled The Girl With Seven Names about a young woman born and raised in North Korea. Her descriptions of her native country are horrific. Each home has a speaker that can’t be turned off that broadcasts government propaganda all day every day. People are encouraged to denounce their neighbors for having impure political thoughts and the military roams the streets like the Taliban in search of anyone who is a potential enemy of the regime.

It sounds very structured and strict (and a lot like 1984), but two things about her narrative struck me. The first was how she recalls having a happy childhood despite the restrictions. The second was how similar the US is today as the party currently in power attempts to shove its dogma down everyone’s throat.

Palantir

Am I being paranoid? I don’t think so. I was reading Robert Reich’s Substack post this morning in which he describes what is happening between the government and a company called Palantir, named after a character in Lord Of Rings. “Draw a circle around all the assets in America now devoted to Artificial Intelligence,” Reich says. “Draw a second circle around all the assets devoted to the U.S. military. A third around all assets being devoted to helping the Trump regime collect and compile personal information on millions of Americans. And a fourth circle around the parts of Silicon Valley dedicated to turning the United States away from a democracy into a libertarian dictatorship led by tech bros.

“Where do the four circles intersect? At a corporation called Palantir Technologies and a man named Peter Thiel.” Reich says that in March, an executive order required all agencies and departments of the federal government to share data on Americans. Palantir was “chosen” to get the job done, helped in large measure by a recommendation by Thiel’s former business partner, Elon Musk.

“Palantir is now busily combining personal data on every American gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security, Defense Department, Department of Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration, and Internal Revenue Service, including their bank account numbers and medical claims,” Reich adds. “Will the Trump regime use this emerging super database to advance Trump’s political agenda, find and detain immigrants, and punish critics?” And you thought I was just being paranoid!

Faceless, Nameless State Actors

Heather Cox Richardson today writes, “Individuals in plain clothes with their faces covered and without badges or name tags are snatching people off the streets and taking them away. Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), claimed that such measures for anonymity are imperative because ‘ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.’”

“On Tuesday, masked, plainclothes ICE agents assaulted and arrested New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander, the city’s chief financial officer. Lander was accompanying an immigrant to a scheduled court hearing…. Lander asked the agents to produce an arrest warrant for the man they were arresting, and was himself arrested. Homeland Security said it would charge him with impeding a federal officer and ‘assaulting law enforcement.’”

But Philip Bump of the Washington Post reviewed the video of the incident and wrote that Lander “assaulted the officers in the sense that a bully might accuse you of having gotten in the way of his fist.” Oddly enough, those masked people who came to arrest me in my dream were exactly like those real-life ICE agents. I envisioned them before I read Richardson’s column today.

What sticks in my craw is how the current party in power refers to Democrats as a form of vermin, polluters of society who deserve to be exterminated. How similar are those words to those of the Nazis who said the same things about Jews, Gypsies, and anyone else they deemed inferior? Just last week, Utah Senator Mike Lee used the assassination of two Democrats as an excuse to blame them for the tragedy. He was joined by several other Republicans who couldn’t wait to put their rampant hatred and cruelty on display.

This is not the America I grew up in. The America I know and love is better than this — much better. Almost 2000 years ago, a person walked among our forebears spreading a message of love and tolerance. The party in power today knows nothing of those teachings, despite its members beating their breasts and proclaiming how pious they are. God gave his only son to show humans the way to salvation. Looking back on how things turned out, He must wonder if his gift was squandered on the people of Earth. Surely there are other planets where His message would flourish, aren’t there?