JHW tells me that I’ve been talking in my sleep with increasing frequency lately – aparently last night I was having a full-on conversation when he came to bed, even the cats were unsettled by the weirdness of it. I don’t doubt him: My dreams have been intense, wild, and entirely new since we’ve moved here – and they’ve deeply illustrated the conceptual shifts I’ve been experiencing, heavily incorporating images from our hiking and, now after this weekend, camping. I feel convicted that our world is headed on a crash course – that the cars of the roller coaster are just over the crest of the highest peak and the downward descent is just about to begin. How far and fast we fall, what the scenery will look like as we go down, what the bumps and spins are like before we land, and how we will recover after the ride is over – if at all – has yet to be determined.

Two nights ago, I had a particularly remarkable dream:

As the dream opened, modern society had collapsed four years earlier and JHW, our friends ESR and Katie, Maureen and Ken, and about 200 others had formed a village in the mountains of Oregon. We were a commune, setting out to establish a functioning self-sufficient society that could build on stronger intellectual, social and ethical foundations than our capitalist forbearers. We had meant to establish a charter and constitution early on, but getting the town’s basic infrastructure established, meeting survival needs particularly during harsh winters, and keeping people informed and active in their own governance took precidence over ideological examination and reassignment. Moreover, we had a paper shortage, and the paper we did have was being used to manage communal work loads. That said, people were happy after four years, the town was stable and we were starting to innovate in meager, rustic sorts of ways – figuring out how to make better soaps, get better crop yields, and get along better with each other. Life was hard, but prosperity was improving, and with it our spirits.

The village rejected the outside world, in part because we’d established a successful communal mentality in which labor was the standard tender – if you wanted something, you worked for it, and if you wanted something more, we all worked together to make it happen – and we didn’t want to incorporate outsiders’ with capitalist self-serving views into our society. The bigger reason for staying hidden and not accepting most outsiders was that human beings in the outside world had become poisonous: Plagues were running rampant with no infrastructure to manage treatment for them, and armed conflicts were breaking out everywhere over scarce resources; we were healthy, and we had just enough resources for ourselves and weren’t interested in fighting others for what we worked so hard to acheive. We kept a low profile, then – living remotely, thriving quietly – and tried to go unnoticed.

In the fourth year, I was elected chief of the village, and my job was to manage workloads, improve civic infrastructures and services, and manage disputes – namely, the marital variety. I also implimented weekly parties that had a really positive effect on civic cohesion. The village thrived under my management – I developed long-view work timelines that allowed people to do their own things 50% of the year and come together at various other times throughout the year to work quickly through the bigger chores – harvests, cannings, smokings, and bulk manufacture of items such as clothes, shoes, and soap. We still hadn’t figured out how to make paper, and we were running low. This was concerning me greatly as we appeared to be losing sight of what happened to larger society – or, really, that people’s memories were distorting as time away from modern conveniences elapsed, and some things were becoming more significant while others were being forgotten. We still didn’t have a constitution, and it was really beginning to get to me, but everyone else seemed to agree that it could wait. I pushed the issue when I could, but usually any progress made toward arriving at a constitution was derailed by some other more immediately pressing community concern.

Jump ahead a few more years, and I’m nearing the end of my first term as chief. I’m about 45 now and have developed a limp from a farming accident a year or two earlier; I’m quieter, mellower, more inclined to show up first to work on an proposal than politic for weeks at a time in its favor. Everyone really respects and likes me, and they all feel really good about where the village has gone since I was first elected; generally, if I show up to work on something, people trust me enough to help and see what happens. The village now had a large population of school-aged children, and educating them had become the village’s top popular priority. Again, our paper shortage was concerning me: Not only did we not have a clear charter and constitution to guide the longterm goal of our education, but our kids wouldn’t have basic resources to practice and learn valuable skills like arithmetic and reading/writing. There was also a debate about what should be taught: village elders and I wanted to teach political history and civics as much as basic intellectual and societal skills, but most parents were in favor of simpler and more basic skills – largely because the parents themselves didn’t have a ton of time to support more advanced studies. My term was nearing an end; it was obvious we needed a school, and it seemed to me that we should take the simpler option first, work up to the more complex option later. I wanted to devote myself in my life after public service to figuring out how to make paper, and then write a history of our recent societal collapse, write the history of our tribe, and work with our elders and leadership to – finally – draft our charter and constitution.

Unfortunately for me, but fortunately it would seem for the tribe, I was re-elected by a wide margin. I didn’t want to be cheif, but almost everyone wanted me to run again, and even my opponents in the election – who were advancing more radical platforms – agreed that I was a very good choice and that the tribe would benefit from a second term of my management and vision. I was very flattered, but very exhausted. The demands of the tribe were increasing as our population grew and grew more and more interested in life improvements. I wanted to take a more laid back approach to governance, manage problems and let the villagers make proposals and initiatives for improvements, but my advocacy was saught in almost everything. It seemed like the end of my second term was a long, long way off, and while I loved my village and was happy to do the work, I could see where it was taking it’s toll: I was aging hard, and JHW and ESR, particularly – both of whom encouraged me to run again – were getting worried.

About a year into my second term, three stranger men showed up – one of them was very clearly the leader of the other two. They entered the village and asked to see its leader. I don’t remember what they wanted specifically – the village’s concern quickly became about what they were bringing with them, and what they say about us if they left. They seemed rough and untrustworthy to me, and I didn’t like the leader at all – and I was quietly encouraged by the village elders to kill them as quickly and quietly as possible. This was contrary to the principals of ethicality we’d been founded on, and just as many citizens encouraged me to have the strangers stay as elders who’d encouraged me to kill them. When it became clear that the men weren’t bringing any illnesses with them, I invited them to stay and become part of the tribe – my instinct told me to kill them, but I’d run on a platform of principal and I’d been a principalled cheif in my actions – I wanted to continue to be a man of principal to my people. The men agreed to stay, and became regulary contributors to the community – although they were often disrespectful and seditious… I spent a lot of my time managing them, keeping them in line. They were huge headaches.

Several years later, I was nearing the end of my second term, and greatly looking forward to retiring. I was almost 55, and our first generation of children were growing to adulthood. Our education system was modest – because we’d never managed large scale paper production, we couldn’t offer more than the basic skills to our kids – and the new generation as well as their parents had taken the village’s status quo for granted and grew up with little factual knowledge about the society we left. Their parents’ memories were even more blurred, and it didn’t help that the Strangers were spreading some out right lies about “the truth of human life” – they were trying to bring religion into our group, and they were encouraging the idea that personal wealth was the virtuous reward for people who worked harder and smarter than anything else. The new crop of young adults were becoming competitive and argumentative and superstitious, and they wanted more say and power in the direction of our society and it’s ideals. Most parents agreed that this was a failing of our education system – that we should’ve taught history and civics. The damage was done, and society was straining under competing pressures – parents of adult children as well as parents of young children wanted revision to the education system and incorporation of history, there were strongly voiced arguments about what exactly happened in history (most of the most vocal dissenters from the truth were pupils of the Strangers), social unrest was increasing and there were calls for a police force to be formed, and the young adults were calling for an economic redistribution that was “fairer” to those who worked hardest. The leader of the Strangers often tried to get into private discussion with me, and encourage me to take a moderate ideological position and bring the separatists together with the traditionalists – basically, advance the economic principals the young adults were agruing in favor of. I remembered clearly the failings that moderate positions permitted in prior society – giving in a little to extreme factions placate them invariably meant giving in more and more to them as time went on – and told him that I’d take his opinions into consideration. I started to crack down on ideologues, and I repetitioned the tribe to draft, at last, it’s charter and constitution, and agreed to form a police force – hopefully temporarily. These were a wildly popular measures.

Unfortunately, it was during this time that certain survival crises were beginning to befall us. Rats were somehow getting into and contaminating our granaries, cisterns were mysteriously being shattered so water was in short supply, and many of the young adults were not showing up to group work functions yet demanding their share of the labors’ yields. I knew sabotage and sedition were afoot, as did the elders, but no one could prove anything – especially since the young adults were threatening to leave and find another society to join. It was after a violent storm that damaged our rain water collection system (which was deployed against by the young adults against my instruction not to – they thought they knew better and wind so badly damaged it that we lost all of the water we collected and had to rebuild the thing entirely from scratch) that social unrest reached it’s peak. The young people were calling for new leadership, openly blaming me for the mishaps befalling the tribe (including my homosexuality in their accusations and suggesting that we had displeased “higher powers” by letting a sinner lead us), and the tribe’s people were beginning to wear down and agree. I learned there was a plot to kill me, and immediately called a town meeting. I was shouted down left and right, and eventually said, “Look, don’t threaten to kill me if you don’t like what I’m doing, just ask me to step down.” The young people and Strangers got the crowd worked up and they demanded in unison that I leave. The elders attempted to fight the crowd, but I decided that I would go. It was a painful blow, but I was confident that, once the village suffered enough under new leadership and new economic and religious rules, they’d come looking for me to help them set things right. I left and moved into the woods a few miles away.

A month later, I was cooking my breakfast at my campsite when I heard a twig snap. The Strangers were coming down the wooded path to my campsite, armed with rifles. I knew this was no hunting party. The leader laughed smugly and asked how I liked my new digs. I smiled and told him that I knew he wasn’t here to inquire about my well being, that he’d come to kill me as he’d intended all along. “Can’t have them finding you after things start to go my way and they start grumbling about how they’d like things to go back the way they were, can I?” he replied. “Well,” I said, “I guess humanity really is forever condemned to itself, after all,” I said.