When the human body is sick and fighting a foreign disease element or injury, and body temperature increases as the fight for survival commences, the likelihood of a person experiencing fever dreams increases. In the past, fever dreams were tied to hallucinations, bizarre or surreal experiences, and, of course, divine visions. All of this is easy for us ontological materialists to dismiss in our time as the meaningless speculations of the uneducated and the backward, particularly because post-modern science attaches no more meaning to the occurrence of fever dreams than it does to the presence of gravity.

Which is to say, “Sure, you’ll dream when you’re ill, and those dreams will seem weird and crazy, but they possess no deeper meaning.”

And yet.

At the individual level, humans insist not only on getting fevers, but also on dreaming. And at scale in society and culture, systems get fevers and systems dream.

Such as it were.

There is meaning to these phenomena and connections to be explained and explored, particularly as we are currently in a several-trillion-dollar fever dream with new tools–a new disease element against which we have not been inoculated–being introduced by the wizards and soothsayers of Silicon Valley into our cultural, technological, economic, and even psychological systems.

Our current societal fever dreams possess significance up and down the meaning hierarchy that goes beyond the banal or the easily dismissed. It’s up to leaders to have the wisdom of the sages and the ages, to explain the significance of our societal fever dreams to us. And when they can’t, we all wake up collectively confused and mistrusting the next time another disease element is introduced into the larger body politic.