Apprentices and Allies

Here are my notes about the society I observed in a series of dreams 2019-2021. This society was based on overlapping pair-wise relationships in networks of pairs.

The basic pair consisted of two allies, each of whom had a project that was complementary to, or parallel to, a project of the other. It occurred to me that they needed no system of control, no punishments, no contracts, no hierarchies. People who independently have common interests are going to work together. A suffragette is going to work with another suffragette, even if the other gets more attention. To withdraw from the alliance is to jeopardize the shared goal.

Alliances may be ad hoc — for a particular task for a limited time, or they may be strategic.

An ally might or might not be a friend. Unlike friendships, an alliance is not dissolved due to personal disagreement. They are dissolved due to operational disagreement. This is the management of similarity concept. One stays with one’s allies, as long as the allies are effective and reliable. Personal disagreements are to be resolved after the goal is reached.

The other type of relationship I observed was the apprenticeship. An inexperienced person agrees to participate in a senior person’s project in exchange for mentoring. The senior person gets free help. If all goes well, the two later become allies. The hope of an alliance is what makes the mentor circumspect. She is careful to avoid being overly-critical. She does not want her student and potential ally to consider herself incompetent. The mentor also avoids molly-coddling the student because she does not want her future ally to become overly-sensitive or overly-dependent. The mentor constantly asks herself, what must I do with my apprentice to complete the task at hand, and how is that experience going to provide me an ally next year? The desire and the need for alliances creates self-regulating apprenticeships.

It occurred to me that bad mentors would earn no allies and therefore have limited presence in the dreamscape. This might have been what made the dreamscape seem so beautiful and harmonious. What was dysfunctional could not be amplified. It was perhaps present, but marginal.

Each person may have multiple allies. Each mentor may have multiple students. I believe that each student had multiple mentors, although this makes no sense to me. It seems more natural that a student should not want multiple mentors pointing at each other when the student is in need.

A pair might be working in a complementary fashion to another pair, and form an alliance of pairs. I think it was more often the case that each member simply participated in both pairs.

Regions of pairs seemed to be federated in some way. Similar things (and people) were drawn to each other. There was diversity in the dreamscape, but there was some fluid organization that lacked fixed borders. The federations were poles of attraction.

I have written much about this fascinating dreamscape — The Salt Island Diaries is a curated and fictionalized presentation of my dream diary from that time. Now that other people have begun reporting to me similar dreams, I am more convinced than ever that what I stumbled upon is an echo of primordial human society. It is something that evolution designed my brain to do.