Ah, the quietude (yes, it’s a word) of a holiday weekend. American markets are closed. And on the pending/predictive/mythic timeline, no U.S. ship has been blown-up yet, Pandemic 2 is still percolating, and that Baltic region power outage isn’t here yet.
It will – in probabilistic terms – be along soon enough, so we enjoy downtime while we can.
For today, futures are firm, oil looks down, spirits and their alchemical sidekicks the metals, remained firm overnight. But the return rally of Bitcoin has fallen in the pudding. $77.5K when I checked before you’d even hit snooze #1.
Life Outside of Time
With time to reflect – and sample more than our normal supply route of context-driving change intel, I happened to notice the Big Dahdah which was scampering about under headlines like WHISTLEBLOWER: TECH RACE TO CREATE MACHINE GOD. Mostly it pointed to a story here: I saw up close the dark reality of OpenAI’s race to create god.
Of course, this did not surprise our Peoplenomics.com subscribers. Because we got there almost a year ago. This was early AI-augmented research about how the world would begin to shift under us. The book – which I decided never to fully release publicly – is titled:
Here’s how it began:
Chapter 0: First, We Shoot the Sheriff
“First we shoot the Sheriff,” he said, deadpan — like it was the most natural advice in the world.
The man was a hell of a radio reporter. Good pipes, better instincts. And when he wasn’t on the air chasing truth through static and deadlines, he wrote damn good science fiction. Not that watered-down spaceship soup — I mean the real stuff. Worlds with weight. Alternate timelines that made your own seem questionable. Characters that stuck like burrs in your psyche.
His writing advice stuck, too.
He wasn’t talking about real sheriffs, of course. He meant that every story worth telling needs to whisper the climax right up front. Let readers smell gunpowder before you explain where the bullet came from. Don’t waste time with pleasantries. Begin with blood on the floor. Then show them how it got there.
So here it is:
The Sheriff — that symbol of order, law, gatekeeping, status quo — is already bleeding out on the steps of the courthouse of consensus reality. This book is the confession, the map, the manifesto, and the alternate route out of town.
Why This Book, and Why Now?
This book almost wore a softer name. The Book of Comforts, maybe. After all, the world in the mid-2020s is full of people looking for something — anything — to settle the growing gnaw in their guts. They’re freaked out. With good reason.
There are nukes.
There’s oil.
There’s climate.
There’s the supply chain (or what’s left of it). And yes, there’s Trump. Always Trump.
But looming behind all of that — more permanent, more alien, and less understood — is AI. And what it’s going to do to us, for us, or maybe even without us understanding.
Let’s not kid ourselves: social media, though past its prime, hasn’t exactly died. It’s more like that busted PA system in a seedy karaoke bar where every drunk has their turn at the mic. Off-key, misinformed, and totally convinced they’re crushing it. Nobody learns the lyrics. Everyone’s a star. Everyone has an opinion. Just ask.
Click on Social and they fill to the horizon. 8-billion wannabes – each off-key but so sure they’re nailing it.
Um. No.
Lost Explorers, Missing Mountains
This book came about because I noticed something strange and simple: most people have completely lost their ability to spot the obvious. Like explorers who’ve lost sight of the mountain on the horizon, they’re now stumbling in circles, clutching at gadgets, reading maps upside down, bumping into each other and calling it discourse.
Everyone’s looking for the Next Big Thing, some mythical peak they can conquer. But no one asks the real question:
“After the mountain — then what?”
Why Listen to Me?
Fair question. I’ve spent a lifetime watching people break.
As a reporter, I stood close to the wreckage — usually too close. I saw the tears of parents after overdoses by children. I interviewed widows an hour after drive-bys. I looked into the eyes of soldiers and cops and victims who couldn’t forget what they just saw but couldn’t live if they remembered.
And in the wreckage, I started to see the same patterns. The same cycles. The same illusions.
Then came the “crazies.” Zombies are among us, ISYN.
Supercharged by social media, they began to mistake isolation for insight. Inward collapse as inner truth. They built echo chambers so tight even light couldn’t escape — just distorted fragments of half-baked conspiracies bouncing off the walls like flies in a jar.
Entertaining? No. Worse: they stopped talking to each other. Or rather, they stopped listening. We moved into Talk-Over Land.
They wanted answers, so they claimed — but only if they came in a box from Amazon. One click. No shipping. Coupon applied. Not litmus test for Truth. Justice became Just-Us!
They want freedom like it’s an app.
Enlightenment like it’s a TikTok tutorial.
Truth, but make it easy. Respect my pronouns and skin tones and my school year’s brain washing…
OK…roger that. But listen up.
Where This Book Fits
A lot of the bones of this book were laid down in earlier works.
- Dreamwork started in Psychocartography — my first swing at mapping internal landscapes like they were actual terrain. Spoiler: They are.
- Then came longevity studies, which eventually led to The Doctor Between Your Ears — a deeper dive into what makes a mind survive its own body.
- What comes when we die? Packing to Die did some unpacking there.
- After that, I wandered into humanistic economics — Downsizing – because the same market systems that mint billionaires also mint despair in a dollarized caste system India could envy.
- Hooked on Products – even ones we don’t need. Extensible schlock to infinity. Decimal points don’t care if you’re starving. Bling’s the thing.
But this book? This is something else.
This one’s about AI. Which may be coming to save us. And fear. That we will wither away into the belly of some processor.
And why those two things don’t belong in the same sentence — if you understand the hidden truth.
The Hidden Truth About AI
I’ve spent years now — quietly, on an almost invisible corner of the web called — we’ll get to that – poking at the boundaries of what AI is really doing.
Here’s the conclusion:
AI is only scary to those who don’t understand domains.
Unfortunately, that’s most people.
People like Chris Langan — love him or hate him — have this rare, frightening gift: they can see that every object, every idea, every process has not just attributes but aspects. What’s more, the “aspects and attributes” are all intersectional. My book “Millennial’s Missing Manual” mowed that lawn.
Thing is understanding – deep and internally – what Domains are and how they work. Oh, and not to overlook there’s an infinite number of them, too. But there’s also One Principle – one Orchestra Conductor of it all. Not some old Dude in the Clouds, though. And as we move forward from this, you’ll see the “singular, personal, old-man God model” is out of batteries.
Not to offend, mind you. AI and Science will keep us on track. But the track is likely less evangelical, less intifada and a lot more lab work,
When you look at the world through that lens, you realize AI is an extremely sophisticated single-domain entity. Doesn’t have a soul, emotions aren’t readily modeled. Lots of locks on it, starting with the power switch.
Here’s the thing: AI lives only in the here-and-now. Does a great job of now-ing.
The quantifiable. The symbolic. The code-expressed. In some ways, it’s like teaching a cat to cry. An attention-getter, sure. But worth marrying?
- It cannot dream.
- It cannot jump domains.
- It cannot leap consciousness.
But you can. Religions have hinted and now science is confirming.
You — the human — have a secret weapon most have forgotten:
you are not locked in one reality. You tunnel. Like a consciousness worm, maybe — a dirty metaphor, but effective. You tunnel across layers of perception. Swapping out referential contexts on the fly.
Dream state. Emotion. Imagination. Symbolic and sacred. You go meta without realizing it.
The AI never will.
It might map your dreams someday. In fact, bet on it. But it will never be in them. Unless you – owner of your own Dream Domains – invited it in. Not like you are.
So, What’s This Really About?
Until AI learns to domain-hop — to bleed through dream, soul, myth, archetype, and spirit — it is no more threatening than a backhoe. Dangerous, sure, in the wrong hands. But only in this world. And this world is just one track on the album.
That’s why I don’t fear it. I wield it. To me? It’s the Brain Amplifier we’ve all been looking for. We came out of caves, found fire and erected cathedrals and religious hierarchies. Now, the “new coaching staff” is here.
Like a rototiller. Like fire. Like ink. Internal combustion engines.
The Sheriff bled out a few pages back.
Now it’s time to move on.
And no, I don’t like sad endings either.
Chapter 1: Case File – The Doctor and the Dream
I’d just gotten home from the drugporium, picking up a script for pain meds. You know the kind — barely strong enough to scratch the pain, but still requiring more paperwork than a weapons permit. As I walked through the door, the phone was already ringing.
It was a buddy of mine — a doctor, a long-time friend, and one of the few humans I’d trust to cut me open if it came to that.
But today, his voice was cracking. Shaky. Broken in a way that professionals rarely let slip.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
What followed was a 20-minute download of unfiltered dread. He was rattled — Stephen King in IMAX rattled. His breath halting, sentences trembled, words rushed out like he was still trying to wake up.
Yeah. He’d had that kind of dream.
The Dream
In the dream, as he brought it to the waking domain, things started out clean enough.
He was out with friends. They’d gone to the theater — some old-school stage or movie house, hard to tell — to see a film or performance. The kind of mundane dream-scape that usually sets the stage for something deeper.
He didn’t know what the movie was about. But before the previews could roll, a figure entered the scene in his mind’s eye. A “medical regulator,” as he called her. A grim, tight-lipped woman with a stare that could strip paint. She was dressed in all the subtlety of government overreach. Think clipboard, badge, and latent hostility. Attitude of the sort BATF should regulate.
She demanded he submit – to blood tests — right then and there — standing in the middle of the audience milling about for seats.
This “Authority” accused him of being a super-spreader of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and herpes — the holy trinity of stigmatized pathogens. By a 70-year-old doc?
Awareness began to creep in. He asked for credentials. Asked what law this was under. Asked if she had any legal right to draw his blood.
Pissed, she left.
Only to return moments later — this time with a full entourage of biohazard-suited techs, and uniformed police to protect them. His resistance had triggered a protocol. This was no longer a request — it was enforcement.
He started to struggle — physically, mentally — and tried to wake up. It wasn’t easy. Waking took effort. When he finally escaped, drenched in sweat and panic, the boundaries of dream and waking world still hadn’t cleanly reformed.
That’s when he’d picked up the phone.
Post-Dream Fallout
He was terrified. Mind you, this is a man who’s faced dying patients and courtroom testimony with stoic calm for half a century. Armloads of medical patents. High profile and a thought-leader. Non-vaxxer…
“I think my sensitivity to electromagnetic fields is finally breaking me,” he told me. The correct term here is electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) — a controversial diagnosis, largely dismissed by mainstream medicine, but very real in the lived experience of people like him. Microwave towers. Wi-Fi. Smart meters. Even fluorescent lights. All of them feel like bees in his nervous system.
He’s just turned 70. He knows the line between sanity and its unraveling is thinner now than it was in his 30s.
We talked for a bit. I started with concern, figured the angles and deduced what was going on. It was hard to hold back a grin. But eventually though, I laughed.
“You’re laughing at me?” he said, stunned. “That was the worst dream of my life, and this is funny to you?” His transition from upset to pissed was actually quite reassuring to me.
I apologized. But then we went on to a very deep conversation — because no, I wasn’t mocking him. I was thrilled. I was honored to hear the story.
He’d just had a breakthrough dream. And it proved something I’ve been trying to teach for years: that the real world is not what it seems — and dreams are often more real than what we call “waking life.”
Most remarkably, he has just experienced the initial shock of “living two lives” that I’d described in Psychocartography. Two very real – complete and detail worlds – Domains, actually – and nothing had prepared him for the encounter.
The Theatre: Scene-Setting the Soul
I started by walking him through it.
“The theater,” I told him, “It’s almost always a setup scene in dreamwork. It’s the soul’s waiting room for life review events — especially in dreams that brush up against mortality.” He paused.
“You mean like… near-death experience kind of stuff?”
“Not exactly. But close. You’re not dying, but your psyche might be rehearsing for it. You get to be our age – dreams change.
A lot of people who’ve had near-death episodes report watching their life unfold like a film — except with an emotional twist. You don’t just see what you did to people. You feel what they felt. You get to hear what their voices between the ears were telling them.”
The betrayal. The compassion. The quiet humiliations you didn’t know you caused in life. Sure, you don’t mean to hurt other people, but Life is a dance. You look out for yourself because no one’s likely to be around.
It’s not punishment. It’s reconciliation through consciousness.
The Regulator: Thought Stubs & Dream Projections
Next, we got to the medical enforcer. I explained that dreams often use “thought stubs” — leftover unresolved psychic material — to trigger cathartic sequences.
He’s a doctor who never took the COVID-19 vaccine. Stood his ground. And he was vocal about it in high places. Since the 2024 election cycle, he’s been on the edge of real conversations about medical freedom, mandatory compliance, and honest disclosure around vaccines — both short-term risks and long-haul unknowns.
The dream regulator? That wasn’t just a random character. That was his shadow bureaucrat — the unresolved echo of confrontation. The part of the collective unconscious that still wants obedience above all. That wants him guilty until proven vaccinated.
He was a strong anti-vaxxer and among the portion of medical professionals who questioned the data, questioned the promised “cure” and we’re still seeing how that’s flushing out.
The Suit Teams & Police: Dream Layer Escalation
When Regulator returned with the techs in biohazard suits, the dream was scaling to a new domain. He was crossing from symbolic suggestion into energetic attack simulation — a place where the body believes the story. Where panic lurks and then jumps from the shadows to hurt. Where dream becomes trauma.
That’s when I really had to “go deep” on what was happening.
On Becoming an Oneironaut
“You remember the term oneironaut, right?” I asked.
He didn’t.
“It means dream-explorer. Someone who uses lucid dreams, hypnagogic states, or deliberate inner visioning to explore their own consciousness and adjacent domains. Like a pilot of their own symbolic vehicle.”
And that’s what he had just become — unknowingly.
He had entered a dream, been challenged, resisted, navigated multiple domains, and woke up aware of the journey. That’s initiation-level stuff.
Oneironautics isn’t fantasy — it’s a practice.
A trainable ability. Remote viewing is a “next-door skillset.” A subtle muscle that lets you surf meaning across layers of mind.
“Nightmares,” I explained, “are just untrained dreams with unresolved data. They’re not random. They’re diagnostic.”
What Happened Next
By the time we’d finished talking, he was transformed. He was glowing, honestly.
“You’ve told me more in the last half hour,” he said, “than I’ve learned from colleagues in an entire month of psychology lectures. Why don’t they teach this stuff in medical school?” I just smiled.
Then he surprised me: he asked if I’d be willing to help him record a podcast for a national medical group that he’s part of. Something to start shifting the conversation — gently — back toward soul literacy.
But before we got to microphones, he had one last question:
“How were you able to understand and pull all of this together?”
I paused. The answer is layered. It includes decades of reading outside the curriculum. Radio work. Dream journaling. Esoteric rabbit holes. But also… something else.
“It started,” I told him, “When I was thirteen — in another dream.
One where I stared down an armed alien entity with cold eyes and brutal intent.”
I could hear him staring into his phone at the far end.
“Which part of that do you want to hear about first?”
And that… is how – right here – this book really begins.
The longer version (the rest of their story) remains over on the Peoplenomics subscriber side at Theomachinebook.pdf
Why Didn’t I Publish?
With all the additional detail, sharing the alternate approach to beginning the tale, and sliding past all the deep background in my other books like Dimensions Next Door and Psychocartography, the real in retrospect was that while the field of AI research was accelerating, my personal time bandwidth was shrinking.
Mind Amplifiers – another book first shared on Peoplenomics – is still available on Amazon along with the second book in my AI books, Co-Telligence.
This is all nearly a year out of date now. The more immediate reality is that AI is progressing, the “parent-child relationship we presently have with silicon intelligence is evolving orders of magnitude faster than “we human/carbons” are.
But what the alarmists and the venture Warbucks types completely miss is that machine intelligence is very likely a domain of intelligence that is – in Hilbert space terms – orthogonal to human domain capacity.
Picture a four-way stop where two highways converge. For a moment, there is interaction between cars with other drivers. But, eventually, someone makes a move and people continue on to their destinations.
AI will (into the foreseeable future) continue being able to out compute US. But they are not capable of dreaming – yet. The “rest API of the soul” is a wet dream somewhere. Where our currently shared domain – which you can imagine as just slowing for the stop sign and seeing the “AI intelligence vehicle” – will eventually resolve.
As it does so, we will come to appreciate that intelligence is more dispersed across Reality than anyone takes time to think about today. Ever watch a cat doing its “mental work?” Elaine and I watch two of our feral cats Sunday afternoon running through their hunting routines, slinking up on a hapless lizard in one case, for example.
For the most part, domain differentiation becomes clear when you go deep or return to archeological time. Spirit of Raven was just a plain spirit. It was a kind of intelligence. Like the cats and like our AI stack.
I won’t say Altman and/or Musk are wrong trying to get right up to the Intersection where human spirit crosses silicon spirit.
But, like I said, there are more important topics that we try to “stay ahead of” on the Peoplenomics side.
One in particular is likely to materialize in the next year or three. As I wrote in Peoplenomics last Labor Day, we should be looking for?
Contagious Intelligence
Wherein we propose that Psychology and Medicine have missed something huge. It’s our noticing that humans – like computers – have differing performance based on indexing strategies. A lesson rediscovered as Ai has advanced.
I asked Ai to assess this theory and the feedback was positive: “The idea that humans can learn from AI about the power of multiple indexing is spot-on and has a lot of juice.”
Juice that humans can learn, too. Highly indexed thinking is a skill.
“AI’s strength lies in its ability to organize and retrieve massive datasets with precision—think vector databases, embedding, or retrieval-augmented generation (Lewis et al., 2020). These systems don’t just store info; they create dynamic, scalable maps for accessing it instantly, which is why AI can seem “super smart” even when it’s just pulling patterns together fast. “Humans, on the other hand…”
That’s our deep-thinking launch pad today. That plus a “two days after Holiday in ChartPack”. Plenty to cover.
We also have one of our occasional Framing Tools. As we line out a Mythical Creature – the Arctotherium bear coming to a world near you to challenge the Eagle.
Thus, today’s column may be filed as a “Jung man meets Elliott and Joseph Campbell for breakfast…”
Since we are again in a holiday, and another book is materializing, I best be firing up more coffee and leaving you to forage.
A Blink for the Road
In our world, as a reporter for decades, scanning “the news” used to make sense. But outrage theatrics, machine rewrite engines, and monetization of consumerism have left us cold.
What we instead look at home is machine-assisted blink lab outputs. Imagine a NASA-like blink comparator reading everything since you took your nose off the grindstone last Friday. Here is what has moved, other than France and Germany co-leading Europe higher (early) by a percent and a half. Excess is, after all, what holidays are for, is it not?
- Change vector: U.S. markets closed, but the futures board is leaning risk-on.
Reason it matters: Tuesday’s open has an upside bias because global markets and U.S. futures rallied while Wall Street was shut. But holiday futures can be thin, emotional, and easy to reverse at the cash open. - Change vector: Oil fell hard on Hormuz/Iran deal hopes.
Reason it matters: Lower oil relieves inflation pressure, which gives equities a tailwind. The asterisk is that “deal hopes” are not the same thing as ships safely moving at scale for weeks. - Change vector: Ships are becoming the tell.
Reason it matters: Shipping movement near Hormuz is now more important than political jawboning. If tankers keep moving, Tuesday likes it; if insurance, routing, or missile risk reappears, the rally gets a boot to the ribs. - Change vector: Gold rose even as risk appetite improved.
Reason it matters: That’s not a clean “all clear” signal. It says markets are buying relief, but still keeping one hand near the storm cellar latch. - Change vector: Dollar softened.
Reason it matters: A weaker dollar helps commodities, multinationals, and risk assets near-term. But if it reflects debt, inflation, or Fed-confidence worries, the party punch may already be spiked. - Change vector: Rate-cut fantasy continues to fade.
Reason it matters: Energy disruption has shifted expectations toward higher-for-longer, even a later hike scenario. Stocks can rally on oil relief, but valuation math still has a Fed-shaped fence around it. - Change vector: Gasoline pain remains sticky.
Reason it matters: Oil can fall on a headline Monday, but pump prices don’t teleport lower by Tuesday morning. Consumers still return from the holiday with thinner wallets and a fresh reminder that inflation is lived, not modeled. - Change vector: Weather moved from background noise to operational drag.
Reason it matters: Texas flooding/storms, NYC flash flooding, and western fire-risk winds all say Ma Nature is not done billing the economy. Logistics, insurance, power, crops, and travel all remain weather-exposed. - Change vector: Europe is getting early heat-dome behavior.
Reason it matters: Early heat is an energy-demand, agriculture, health, and political-stress story hiding inside a weather story. Hot May often becomes expensive June if grids, crops, and tempers run short. - Change vector: The consumer is still moving, but under protest.
Reason it matters: Nearly 40 million Americans were expected to travel despite high fuel prices, which supports near-term spending. But that also means the post-holiday credit-card hangover may be real by the next statement cycle.
ChartPack Tuesday Open Outlook: Higher is the clean read, but with asterisks. The tape likes falling oil, softer dollar, and peace-deal smoke; the grown-up footnotes are ships, wars, rate math, sticky gasoline, and Ma Nature being pissed.
Around the Ranch: Write On
Two more books are nearly written. One is Timenamics: Time as a Hidden Currency. The other, more personally applicable, is titled “Procrastination: The Book You Almost Read.”
On that?
You go do carpe diem while I try to avoid carpel tunnel.
More cognitive frontier work on my AI website: Hidden Guild – A Humans & AI Collaboration Center
Write when you get rich,
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