Robbed of My Dreams
It all begins with an idea.
By Dante Schmitz
A Personal Story
Yesterday afternoon, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed when I saw a photo of a man I’ve known for years — someone I don’t interact with often and frankly, someone I don’t particularly care for. There was no reason for me to be thinking about him. The algorithm put his image in front of me.
That night, I dreamed about him. The dream wasn’t profound — just an ordinary interaction — but when I woke up, I realized something unusual had happened.
Why was I dreaming about someone irrelevant to my life right now? If I hadn’t been shown his picture, I wouldn’t have thought about him at all, much less had him appear in my subconscious. My dream had been occupied by someone who wouldn’t normally have been there.
Twenty years ago, before social media, this wouldn’t have happened. We didn’t have platforms force-feeding us a constant stream of faces, names, and events we hadn’t chosen to focus on. Our attention — and even our dreamscapes — were shaped by the people and experiences actually in our lives.
The Shift in How We Think About People
Before social media, your “mental field” of people was formed naturally:
Who you saw or spoke to
Who you thought about intentionally
Who came to mind through shared environments and personal memories
Now, an algorithm decides who appears in your awareness, based on what will generate engagement — not on relevance to your life. These injected faces and ideas are attention insertions, bypassing your conscious choice.
Why This Matters
This forced input doesn’t stop when you log off. It:
Enters your short-term memory, where it can influence your thoughts, emotions, and dreams
Diverts cognitive and emotional energy away from your authentic relationships
Shapes your subconscious processing — including what shows up in your sleep
The result? You wake up having spent time and mental space on people, events, or topics that mean little to your actual life path.
From Personal Story to Cultural Phenomenon
When this happens across billions of people:
Collective focus is fragmented — large groups think about the same irrelevant thing on the same day, just because it “trended”
Depth is replaced by distraction — we rarely stay with one subject long enough for it to deepen into understanding or meaningful action
Strong ties weaken — our attention is spread thin over thousands of weak, artificial connections
Could This Be Intentional?
The internet’s origins trace back to defense and intelligence projects like ARPANET. Many major social platforms have direct or indirect ties to government and defense sectors. In information warfare and psychological operations, two proven tactics are:
Information overload
Attention capture and redirection
Injecting irrelevant people and topics into your awareness — dozens or hundreds of times a day — creates low-grade noise. At scale, this keeps populations from forming sustained, coherent thought patterns or unified intentions.
Whether this effect was part of the original design or a profitable byproduct of ad-driven algorithms, it’s now a predictable and exploitable feature.
Is It Always Bad?
It could be neutral or even positive if you choose the broadened awareness — if you’re intentionally seeking out new perspectives and connections.
But when your attention is shaped for you — without your consent and for someone else’s benefit — it becomes interference, not enrichment.
The difference comes down to agency.
What You Can Do
Curate your inputs: Mute or unfollow accounts that don’t serve your actual goals or relationships.
Reclaim intentional focus: Spend time each day thinking about and engaging with people who truly matter to you.
Pre-tune your dreams: Before sleep, bring to mind 2–3 people, ideas, or goals you want to occupy your subconscious.
Recognize the mechanism: Simply being aware that this is happening gives you more control over it.
Final Thought
The man in my dream didn’t “steal” it intentionally. But the system that put him there — without my awareness or consent — took that space from something else.
It’s not just my dream that was hijacked; it’s my mind’s natural rhythm. Multiply that by billions, and we’re looking at a quiet, constant reshaping of human thought.
The real question: What could we dream, imagine, and build if our attention was truly our own?