The Blind Spot of the Sane

I had a dream last night.

The Dream

In the dream, there was a residence school for the extremely gifted run at the highest levels of society.   Generals and CEOs and Senators were all involved in or interested in the school in one way or another.  The school included teenagers and young adults and even some adults.  K through Postpostdoc.

The most unusual feature of the school was that students would abruptly become “sane.”

This was what everyone there called it.  Becoming “sane” meant experiencing some kind of sudden enlightenment.  The student becomes vastly more intelligent, but their intelligence changes not only in degree but in kind.  They are not exactly human any more.  At least, they are mostly unintelligible to ordinary humans, even quite bright and gifted ones, and their motivations and purposes become opaque.  Becoming sane is something like a worldview shift to a worldview we do not grasp.  It something like waking up one morning to find that you have an alien’s intuitions.

Being sane appears to happen when someone extremely smart with a deep knowledge and skilled at creativity and connections suddenly hits upon some kind of re-orienting idea that suddenly shifts everything they know into a new configuration.   Best evidence is that it is basically the same for all the sane, because they appear to understand each other. But they also appear to be completely unable or unwilling to explain it to us, or even to grasp that there is anything that needs to be explained.  “Sane,” however, is their term.  They appear to view the rest of us as deeply mentally ill and as best we can tell, find us hard to understand.

The purpose of the school was to study the sane.  They remain in school without being schooled.  Working with the sane was extremely frustrating and mostly extremely unproductive, but occasionally they casually dropped some amazing new insight or technology.  Hence the high-level interest and funding for the school.

The current  suggests that the sane retain some human elements in their thinking, including the occasional blind spot, certain cognitive errors and motivated cognition, and some pre-existing goals and orientations.

There was a weird kind of Spanish class at the school.  Students dropped in and out at will and people from the outside also attended.  There was a mousy, weedy, genius Hispanic girl in the class.  Also in the class was a young man.  Extremely gifted, but marginally so as far as the school goes, but he was let in because his dad was an administrator there.

He was tall, athletic, sandy brown hair, decently handsome except for a slight touch of gargoyle in his face, and was well socially-adjusted.  He was what passed at the school for a jock and an extrovert.

He is sitting next to her. One moment she is hunched over in her seat writing notes. The next moment she stiffens and her eyes go different. She is sane..

The school as a whole is very informal.  There is no fixed procedure for handling someone who goes sane.  But in the first few days of sanity, people tend to have some pretty wild emotions and reactions and do crazy stuff and generally act bewildered.  The theory is that a person’s emotions and mental architecture need some time to adjust to the sanity event.  So usually the sane person is given quiet and space.

The young man takes it upon himself to help the girl.  He interrupts the class to let everyone know she’s gone sane and speaks soothingly to her and helps her to a room, something like a hospital room, where she will be allowed peace and rest.

He is visiting her the next day as one visits a hospital and is simply holding her hand.  He is idly thinking about the holes in human cognition, the blind spots, when he has something like a vision of the geometries and higher geometries and the ordered shapes of the holes.  At the end of the vision, he is sane.

The girl sees the instant transformation in his eyes, like anyone could, but being sane herself also sees the thousand other signs.  They instantly are able to communicate, not in the back and forth of words, but in whole blocks of concepts at a time, communicated by a couple of words and body posture and by deeply, deeply understanding each other.  There is something very tender about that moment.  They are both instantly able to calculate (in my dream, it was actually something like a mathematical calculation) that they will not pair bond and are not meant to be in love, but they do make love to each other right then, tenderly.  (There was no real moral valence to this act in the dream, one way or another, and the dream never made it clear if there was a point or meaning to it.)

Afterwards, he decided to conceal that he was sane.

His purpose wasn’t clear to me in the dream, I suppose because he was sane, but in the dream I understood that the closest I could come to understanding his goal was something like “taking over the world.”  He pulls off the imposture.  His vastly advanced cognition allows him to minutely analyze the patterns of normal gifted student behavior, aided by his own memories of his prior self, to sufficiently fake not being sane.  (I had a sense that being sane was the highest status thing one could be in the school, so apparently the idea that someone would fake non-sanity was not even on anyone’s radar).

In the dream, I remember wondering why the girl wouldn’t betray him.  I didn’t and don’t know why she didn’t.  I did know in the dream that he wasn’t concerned about her and in fact that his imposture was successful. At the time, while dreaming, I speculated it had something to do with the tenderness they had had together.

(I didn’t wonder in the dream why he didn’t have the few days of transition that most sane had.  I now think it may have had something to do with the lovemaking and with the fact that he was abnormal in being a socially adjusted, confident, genial and happy person before he went sane.  It may also be that aping the non-sane was just his particular form of expressing the initial post-sanity event craziness.)

(I didn’t wonder in the dream why he could so minutely analyze and imitate normal people if the sane normally had trouble understanding the rest of us.  Based on the impressions and sub-conscious understandings I had in the dream, I now think it was partly his unusual background, partly that mostly the sane didn’t care enough to go through the necessary mental contortions, but partly also that he was imitating normal human behavior without fully understanding it any more.)

The Dream Shifts

Now the dream shifted.  I was now looking at a high-end dining hall at the school in a second story glass-and-aluminum atrium looking down a piny slope.  All very slick, all very pretty, students of all ages eating and chatting along with administrators, teachers, CEOs, generals (there were a couple in full uniform) and a couple of homeless people huddled in the corner.  I wondered about the homeless people, so I got their story.

The original architect of the grounds and buildings was smart, but not ridiculously genius enough to go sane himself or even be a student at the school.  He was a short, stocky, barrel-chested, broadfaced, bearded man.  But he was very talented at his work, and after the place was built, he was asked to stay on in an advisory capacity. Maybe he taught some too.

After a few years, he quit.  He told the administrators that he had seen their whole project in a gestalt, laid out like it was a building, and he knew it would not work.  He could not explain.  He had just seen it and knew.  The best he could do was an analogy.  If you saw a machine, he said, you might be able to tell at a glance that it was broken without understanding or being able to explain the mechanics of it.

He had experienced something like a limited, partial sanity event and he was able to pass it on.  The homeless people were his kids or grandkids (it wasn’t made clear in the dream), a brother and a sister, who had the same intuitive vision as their progenitor.  They couldn’t function outside the school but refused to participate in it, to the extent of not accepting housing or a meal pass, which the school was willing to provide them.  Instead, they huddled in corners and took gifts of food and clothing from the people at the school.

A Second Dream

I then had another dream.  I was in a hallway in the second story of an apartment somewhere, accompanying a couple of elders tracting.  They knocked on the door and then I didn’t see exactly what happened, someone opened it slightly or else it opened a little when they knocked, and they just pushed inside.  I remember thinking with bemusement, wow, that is extremely aggressive missionary work, guys, slow your roll, but they then backed out and were pale.  Through the now open door I could see through the front room, down the hall, to where a corpse was slumped in a chair in the kitchen with obvious signs of violence.  It looked like it had been stabbed or axed. The elders said something distressed and I took over the situation.  “Calm down,” I said, “come away, we’ll tell the police, its OK.”  Maybe I said it was a murder, I don’t know.

The Dreams Merge

Because suddenly the camera(?) on that dream pulled back, back away from me and the missionaries, back past the apartments behind us, away down a cross hall, to a landing and a set of stairs going down to a large common room.  The apartment building was a residential building at the school.  It wasn’t a separate dream after all.

At the top of the stairs, frozen, was the sandy-brown haired youth.  He had happened to be in the area and from some combination of subtle clues, something of what he had glimpsed in our postures, something in what he had heard me and the elders say, he knew with his advanced cognition to a certainty that the person in the apartment had been murdered.  And he also knew to a certainty that the murder meant that there was another hidden sane person out there orchestrating events.

He was frozen because he was stunned at the enormity of his own blind spot, that he had never thought to wonder if there was another one besides himself.  Because he now realized that there were a thousand minute indicators, things that would be meaningless to you or I or any non-sane mortal, but that would have been instant and obvious proof to him if he had ever thought to wonder.  And he was furiously calculating, with his massive superhuman mind, whether he had already given himself away as he very much feared he had.

That is where the dream left me.