Pulling Ourselves Back to Real Life

Back in my October 2025 newsletter, I wrote about a Star Trek: Voyager episode that raised some interesting questions about organizational design and where fresh ideas come from in your organization. I again want to use a Star Trek:Voyager episode as an aid in exploring a topic, although I promise the Borg will not be involved beyond a passing reference in this blog article!

The episode I want to discuss is called "Waking Moments" from the fourth season of the show. The episode begins with what seems like real-life scenes with the crew as usual. However, we quickly find out that although this seems like real life, individual crew members are having what can only be described as nightmares, including one crew member who dreamed that he reported to the bridge in his birthday suit.

In these nightmares, the crew members catch a glimpse of an unfamiliar alien from a species they had not yet made first contact with.  At first, the nightmares just provide a scare with a few crew members missing appointments and duty jobs as the sleep state encompasses them.

Once they compare notes, they realize they all had nightmares and they all saw a similar alien in their dreams.  The very strange part is that the only place anyone has ever seen this species is in their dreams.

As time goes on, the crew members start to be stuck in the sleep state, appearing catatonic.  The leadership team believes that the mysterious aliens appearing in the dream are behind the dream state enveloping almost the entire crew.

Commander Chakotay suggests that he might be able communicate with the aliens by using "lucid dreaming" techniques he learned in the vision quests he participated in as part of Indigenous spiritual training growing up.  The hope is that this will allow him to communicate with the alien.

While the rest of the crew ultimately are stuck in the dream state, unable to awake from their dystopian dreams or to even realize they are dreaming, Chakotay, through his training, is able to distinguish when he is in dream state versus awake state, at least better than anyone else in the crew.

It turns out that the alien species lives their reality in the dream world. They attack other species while they are in the sleep state so that the aliens are not attacked by other species in the real world where the aliens are weak and powerless.

Only the Doctor, who is a hologram and doesn't sleep, and Chakotay remain conscious.  They determine that the sleeping crew members have the same brain wave patterns meaning they are all having the same dream transmitted to them, made by the aliens to seem like reality.  In other words, the crew members are interacting with each other in the dream that is controlled by the aliens and have no idea that they are asleep or being manipulated by the aliens.

At one point, the crew’s state is coined as "collective unconsciousness", the analog to the Borg's "collective consciousness" state.

Thanks to Chakotay, the Captain, in her dream state, gains the knowledge that they are all in the same dream state. When she confronts one of the aliens with this revelation, the alien tells her, "What do you think is happening to your body in the real world, without nutrition or physical activity?"

I won't spoil the ending for you in case you want to check out the episode yourself. However, I do want to tell you that as I was watching this episode, I started to have a nagging feeling that we, as human beings, are going through a similar type of experience. It occurred to me that just as the crew was pulled into the dream world by aliens, we have been pulled into the virtual world of social media, into our own “collective unconsciousness”. Just as in this episode, the descent into the world of social media started slowly, then quickly became second nature. Many people spend more time on social media and their phones than they do interacting with people in real life. While there are no aliens that I am aware of running the social media platforms, the algorithms are designed, by other humans no less, to keep us highly engaged, perpetually interacting with the platform. Like the crew in the episode stuck in their dream state, we are suffering real consequences in real life. There are psychological difficulties, polarization, and dehumanization when we interact too much in the virtual social media world as opposed to real life.

In the episode, Chakotay, with some difficulty, was able to distinguish between real life and the dream state, only because of a lifetime of training and experiences with "lucid dreaming." While the parallel is not exact, those of us who spent our formative years without social media thanks to our age may be in better position to stay grounded in the real world than those who do not know of a world without social media. At the very least, we know enough about the dangers of social media on young brains that we can do something to protect our young generation and all future generations.

Australia was the first country to establish a law prohibiting the use of social media by children under the age of 16. Now, several more countries have followed suit. That still leaves the rest of us, 16 years and older to find the right balance in our lives between real life and the virtual social media world, to be present in real life, and to teach our children how to stay grounded in the in person world. The first step in that battle is being aware that it is in fact a battle, which we need to face "eyes wide open" and with great determination, just like Chakotay and the rest of the Voyager crew during the "Waking Moments" episode.