Distant Early Warning

Or maybe not so distant. Who can say?

I'm loathe to talk about anything approaching current events or even the outside world here on this blog, because...well, don't we all get enough of that already? Everybody has their own opinion, and mine carries no more weight than any other. I'd rather write about my own small but mysterious world.

Sometimes the two intersect, however, in ways that demand attention.

Such was the case on the night of January 2, when I was startled from sleep by a dream-that-wasn't-quite-a-dream. Without so much as a pardon the interruption, the pastel wonderland in my head was replaced by a picture of a bright, shining, but completely empty city.

What happened next was rather unsettling. 

"Soon, the human societal structure will no longer be capable of supporting human biological needs," a voice - calmly, almost soothingly, neutral - announced. "The seeds of this have already been planted. The imbalance of power and the transfer of resources from the real to the unreal have made the situation untenable."

I knew, somehow, that the cities I was looking at were places where the residents had been forced out, leaving most of the property in the hands of a few.

''Soon, the ability to access shelter, medical care and even to reproduce will be limited" the voice continued, and I understood that when this last thing came to pass - interpreted by me as not only infertility, but the avoidance of childbearing due to lack of safety and no functional society to support childrearing - this would be a point of no return.

Again, I was shown vistas with no people, this time filled with bitcoin mining facilities instead.

"An event will occur that will skew the balance of power even further," said the voice, along with a tumult of images: office blocks of malfunctioning computers, a financial crisis, money losing its value or becoming somehow "unreal." It all felt desperate and grim.

Another, more distant voice began to shout from the desolate landscape: "There is no one at the helm. There is no one at the helm."

I'd been half awake through most of this but came fully awake with this phase in my mind. It had been so vivid and realistic. At first, I thought maybe I'd overheard some apocalyptic tv program, but no, all was silent - everyone else was asleep. 

I lay there for a long time, eyes closed, mulling it over. 

There were many things understood but not explicitly stated about this quasi-dream. The importance of the real vs the unreal, for one, the massive amounts of energy being used in bitcoin mining, the extremes to which the balance of power would be skewed due to the "event," the impact of societal breakdown on the climate, and more. The emptiness of the cities I interpreted as a metaphor, but the sense of a few haves and many millions of have-nots felt very real indeed.

"There is no one at the helm." I lay there with that phrase echoing in my mind and understood that this - should it actually happen - would be a so-called black swan event that the canny would use to their advantage while there was no one to stop them.

I'm not one to stake everything on a dream or even a non-dream; I'm taking it with a few grains of salt. But when these articles crossed my path last night, I had to raise my eyebrows a few inches. This one from January 3 talks of the potential for a situation much like the one described in my vision, and this one from January 7 even more so, with a darker and more conspiratorial turn. Called, most intriguingly, The Unreality Of Money

It's worth thinking about at the very least.