We live in stupid times.

Maybe everybody has always lived in stupid times, and we are condemned to think that it is only use because it is only our times with which we have experience.

But whatever the case, I can definitely say that right here, right now, we are surrounded by stupidity. Pure, unadulterated idiocy.

According to a new study, over a third of people in the U.S. have dreamed about climate change at least once in their lives.

How climate change is changing how we dream: https://t.co/0NbFGy2eCP

— TIME (@TIME) July 27, 2023

Really?

REALLY? Is there anything climate change can’t do? Changing how we dream.

As I said, we live in really stupid times.

I readily admit that it doesn’t surprise me that people dream about climate change, since people dream about nearly everything, and we certainly get bombarded by enormous quantities of climate change propaganda. And since that propaganda is almost exclusively about how humanity is facing an apocalypse in the next 5 minutes, there is nothing shocking about climate change and anxiety dreams being linked.

In fact, I was kinda shocked that fewer people don’t describe having dreams about having to do a bit of public speaking while naked out in a hurricane while standing in a frying pan. Throw in some ghosts, a visit from the IRS, and Phoebe Cates exiting a pool in a bikini and you cover a lot of the bases.

Martha Crawford started having climate change dreams about 11 or 12 years ago. Unlike many of her previously remembered dreams, these were not fragmented or nonsensical—they were “very explicit,” she recalls. “They didn’t require a lot of interpretation.” In one, she’s reading a textbook about climate change and then throws it behind the back of her couch, pretending it doesn’t exist. In another, she’s sitting in a lecture given by a climate scientist. But the professor starts yelling at her for not paying attention, and she fails the course. The meaning was pretty clear, says Crawford, a licensed clinical social worker: “You’re not paying attention, and you need to pay attention.”

The dreams eventually inspired her to start the Climate Dreams Project in 2019, and since, she’s been facilitating a space where people can share climate dream anecdotes, mostly anonymously.

One dream submitted to the collection was of people digging holes in the desert so that the rising seas would have somewhere to go. In another contribution, a Flood Football game was underway, and in the second half, players were floating on inner-tubes. Another person, who shared four climate dreams, recounted one in which billions of people were funneling into a giant room that looked like a video-game sports arena, but large enough to hold the world’s population. “At the end of the dream, the entire face of the earth was different,” they wrote. “It was completely icy and the only habitable part was a giant plateau with a city on it.”

It would seem that climate change has woven itself into the “fabric of dreaming” as Crawford puts it.

None of this, though, is really about climate changing anything about “how we dream.”

The article should have said “Climate change propaganda has invaded our dreams,” which is something else entirely.

Climate alarmist strikes me as similar to many other moral panics, with the difference being that there is a formal communications infrastructure pushing the panic for political reasons. Every elite institution is dedicated to fomenting fear and panic in order to convince people to hand over vast sums of money and power to themselves.

COVID showed that fostering hysteria works. Trillions of dollars were transferred from ordinary Americans and small businesses into larger corporations and to wealthier individuals. Freedom of speech was abandoned, and even freedom of movement was circumscribed.

Climate change is being used as an excuse to further this project. And hysterical dreams are just one more tool to use in furthering this project. And, of course, just talking about these dreams will inspire more of them, furthering the panic.

Younger folks have simultaneously the least experience with how weather changes over time and the most dreams and panic about climate–they only know what they have been told, and haven’t learned to be skeptical in the least. So what we are seeing in these anecdotes and poll results is nothing more than a measure of how successful the propaganda campaign has been.

Unfortunately the lesson of COVID is that propaganda works, even in societies that have traditionally been free. People can be convinced to give up their most cherished values if you scare them enough.

Soon enough we will have our version of the Salem Witch Trials, with Hillary Clinton blaming MAGA Republicans for every hot day in summer and every tornado and hurricane that gets hyped on TV.

Perhaps not, but then again, we live in stupid times.