June 21, 2026

Unsweet Dreams

At risk of sounding like a psychologist, “Do you ever have recurring dreams?” I’m not talking about the exact dream over and over again. I’m talking about having a dream with similar settings and the same plot on a regular basis.

At risk of sounding like someone who needs a psychologist, I had a nearly identical — and consistently disturbing — dream from my mid twenties until somewhere in my late forties. The same dream recurred two or three times a year and always left me filled with a pending sense of doom.

I dreamed that I was back in college and about to take the final exam for an important class. Unfortunately, just as I began to read the first question, I remembered that I’d skipped most of the classes that semester and couldn’t understand the question, much less, BS my way through an essay-style set of answers.

Now, if you were the psychologist sitting across from me, I could quickly interpret that dream for you. My very first semester at the University of Texas, I was so gung-ho and over-confident that I signed up for eighteen credit hours. That resulted in me having four back-to-back morning classes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

If you know anything about U.T., you know the campus is huge and classes can be as much as a mile apart. The result was that I often skipped that 10:00am Sociology class and opted to have a glass of wine and scrambled eggs at the student union instead.

When I showed up for the final exam — also a 10:00am session — I had the option of spending the next two hours filling an empty bluebook with nonsense answers, or simply writing, “This is all meaningless horseshit”, and going for breakfast instead. I chose door number two and flunked the class. Since my parents were paying for everything that first year, I was deluged with guilt at my irresponsibility.

Don’t look down your nose at me. You know damn well you’d have done the same thing at that age.

I’m Baaaackk!
Last Tuesday, for the first time in nearly thirty years, the dream I thought I’d outlived, popped back up in my sleeping psyche as one of those vivid and realistic and disturbing episodes. I was at the final exam of a Molecular Biology course which I couldn’t even remember ever having attended.

The final exam was to use clay, sand, and some tools to create a model of how the body converts protein into energy. As I looked around at the impressive models all the other students were building, I realized I was clueless. Fortunately, I woke up. Unfortunately, I woke up in a state of depression, suffering from a worse inferiority complex than Rossie O’Donnell.

Returning to sleep was out of the question so I got up, fired up the old computer and put that same test question to ChatGPT. The smart-ass little shit came back in less than two minutes with a sixteen-step process which was so far over my head I didn’t even understand the acronyms — so I challenged it to turn that answer into an info-graphic. It did. See below.

So, What’s the Point?
The point is that within the solution to the question, there are multiple steps and any one of those steps would take you or I a lifetime of study to master. Someone (in fact, many someones) apart from us had the curiosity, stamina and determination to conquer those challenges.

Then, all those someones got together and compared notes and created the complex explanation which ChatGPT deftly plagiarized in the middle of the night. That simple graphic represents multiple careers devoted to study AND collaboration.

If we’re all too busy on social media cancelling people for their political affiliation, the church they attend, or their failure to adhere to our PC vocabulary standards, how do we ever hope to benefit from shared learning?

Cancel me if you must, but I’m far more interested in what intellectual wisdom someone has to share than I am in their social preferences. And I’m guessing when the big final exam comes, it will be about how much we learned from each other, not how much we agreed with each other.

Sweet dreams

We enjoy being outraged. We respond to it as a reward.

― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine

Let’s talk. I’d really like to hear what you have to say, and it might even give me something to write about. Email me at guy@lawsoncomm.com.
I’ll buy you coffee and we can compare notes. I promise not to steal your ideas without permission.

The Chaos Machine:

The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

— Max Fisher

Admittedly, Social Media — the modern opiate of the masses — is my favorite target but Fisher goes far past my simple disdain. He explains in detail how Social Media’s engagement algorithms amplify division and create a self-reinforcing system that fragments culture, undermines trust, and destabilizes society by rewarding herd mentality over civic identity .