Last night I dreamed that I was being fired from my job at IBM. A group from there, led by a woman, showed up at my house on a weekend afternoon to search for items I might have taken and to reclaim their property and proprietary information.

I woke shortly after this dream and remembered it vividly. It was clearly a dream–I was in pajamas while the people were there and couldn’t seem to find my clothes, and among the things they confiscated was a shriveled human arm. Yet I found myself torn on the answer to the question, Do I work for IBM? I thought it unlikely, yet I could easily recall a black binder, a desk, and even a problem I was struggling with. I finally settled on the answer No because there was no day during the past two weeks during which I could have worked there.

Why did this confuse me? Perhaps I had an earlier dream that included all those details that were altering my ability to determine reality. Even though I did not consciously remember that dream, it was lodged somewhere in my brain. On this fragile scaffolding of dreams and surmises about dreaming I will now reach for some conclusions.

If I am so easily confused by reality based on a dream, why haven’t I been drawn off by the massive campaign to make the country more conservative over the past few decades? (If you don’t know what I mean by this, read at least a review of  “Dark Money” by Jane Mayer.) Two answers: One is, I have been; I believe I have became more disdainful of government and slower to recognize corporate malfeasance, though in a comparative rather than a superlative way. The second answer is more complex, and has to do with seeking information from multiple sources; being able to differentiate between journalism and faux journalism and science and faux science; and being skeptical of anyone who tells me to do something that will make him or her wealthier.

I am very grateful for having both the education and the leisure to be this way. That I could easily have turned out the opposite is clearly true, and frankly horrifying.

Postscript: From the New Yorker I would like to recommend: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/aftermath-sixteen-writers-on-trumps-america