dream, Hoel reminds us, is not safety. Sleep loss, specifically the loss of dreams, leads to an overfitted brain that fails to generalize.⁸ The very weirdness of dreams is what makes them useful. Disruption teaches flexibility. Repetition calcifies.
Behind the scenes, the structure was hardening. The Project 2025 blueprint, published by The Heritage Foundation and more than 100 conservative organizations, outlined a plan to concentrate executive power, eliminate entire departments, and rewrite the legal spine of government.⁹ Its precision, with every clause and contingency, reads like policy overfitted to ideology. Kevin Roberts, the group’s president, said it clearly: we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it.¹⁰ To the rallygoers in Macomb County, that line never arrived. Their America wasn’t built from blueprints.
It lived in dinner‑table stories, Saturday errands, the half‑truths of Facebook scrolls. It lived in belief: raw, urgent, unexamined. 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 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.