Date: 2026-07-22
Time: 7:50 am
Just woke up from a dream that I partially remember.
In the dream, I was working for Tenstorrent. I had just started working there after previously working for Groq, and had also already worked for Tenstorrent before working for Groq, so it was actually my second time working for Tenstorrent. I felt depressed. I was not actually doing any work and I felt bad about the fact that I kept changing jobs. For some reason the Tenstorrent office was in an old house.
While I was in the Tenstorrent office, at one point someone told me that an announcement was about to be made about the Tenstorrent IPO. I started going to the room where the television was located in order to watch the announcement, though I never arrived there and instead the dream changed. I found myself at a computer in another part of the house, and I was showing people something impressive on the computer screen. It was some kind of visualization that looked cool. Even though I was showing it to people, at first I could not remember what it was, though I knew it was something related to work. People were acting like it was something impressive that I had made, which made me uncomfortable because I was not sure if I had made it. I started saying it was something impressive that I had seen at Groq, until I remembered that it was actually something that [redacted] had shown me after I had started at Tenstorrent. Since I had just started at Tenstorrent, I did not know the people very well, and I felt embarrassed about seemingly showing off something as if I had made it even though someone at Tenstorrent had shown it to me after I had started.
I went into another room, and in the room I saw someone and told them that I wished that the government was paying my salary, so that I would not be obligated to do any work, and was just hanging out with them as friends. The person I was chatting with seemed like they understood and thought it made sense, though they made a joke about the fact that I was referring to people as friends. I still felt depressed, so I decided that I wanted to go home. I saw [redacted] and asked him how I could connect to the work network using a VPN. We had a conversation, though he did not explain how to connect using a VPN.
After this, I went to the kitchen, and I started to realize that I was actually just dreaming. The kitchen had people in it from both Tenstorrent and Groq. [redacted] was there, and so was [redacted]. Since I had realized that it was a dream, I decided to try to take control of the dream. I told people that I wanted female friends. I left the house with a bunch of the women who were in the kitchen, and we started walking somewhere else. I think we were walking towards the place where I lived.
On the way, the people that I was walking with started walking quickly, and I lost track of them. I went around a corner, and walked through a bunch of trees. I could see the people that I had been walking with in the distance. Then, suddenly, as I emerged from the trees, everything looked different. The sky was red, with clouds that were tinted red, and it was very hot outside. I could see lots of dead trees without any leaves, and I could no longer see any living trees. In front of me was a hospital and some other official looking buildings. I could see ambulances driving to and from the hospital. There were large fans around the parking lot next to the hospital blowing air on people to cool them down. After this, I woke up.
In my description of the dream, I mentioned two specific companies, Tenstorrent and Groq, which are real companies that I have interacted with. There is some background information on my interactions with these companies on the page on my website which describes how I am trapped in my apartment.
Elements of the dream seem like they might have been metaphors for things from my real life. I suspect that the visualization that looked cool was actually a metaphor for a paper that Intel published on work that I had done while I worked there. There were two versions of the paper, and my name was mysteriously removed from the later version without any explanation, even though I came up with the core ideas described in the paper. This paper has been something that I have thought about a lot because it shows that there were people that I worked with who disliked me and did not want to give me credit for my ideas. After I found out about it, I started feeling a lot less trusting of people at work.
I was originally told about this paper, and the fact that my name was missing, when I visited the Tenstorrent office in January 2019. I think this is why in the dream it felt like it was something that someone at Tenstorrent had shown me. At the time, Tenstorrent was offering me a job, and they seemed to be putting a lot of effort into trying to convince me to join their company. However, after I spoke to my manager at Intel about it, and then made a counteroffer to Tenstorrent and asked for more equity and slightly more salary, Tenstorrent rescinded their offer and I had to stay at Intel. At the time, I was very unsure about leaving Intel and so I was actually somewhat relieved that I no longer had a choice, however I ended up feeling very stressed about it because I realized that I had to stay at a company where I had just learned that there were people who disliked me and had removed my name from a paper in order to avoid giving me credit. Tenstorrent had hired a bunch of other people from the team that I was on at Intel even though they rescinded my offer, and so for a long time I felt like I had a connection to the people at Tenstorrent because I knew a bunch of them, and I wondered what it would have been like if I had accepted their offer right away and joined the company. I think this is why in the dream, I felt like I had worked there before working for Groq.
Tenstorrent did actually contact me again a second time some time after that and tried again to convince me to join their company, however at that point I decided to stay at Intel. I liked the idea of joining a startup, however I was worried that the job at the startup might not be stable, and it felt like Intel was a safer choice, even though I was concerned about the fact that it seemed like there were people at Intel who disliked me.
After that, in October 2020, Groq ended up hiring a bunch more people from the team. When this happened, based on a few other things that were happening at the time, I started to feel like my job at Intel might not be stable after all. In addition to that, I had read a paper that Groq had published on their architecture and it did actually seem like they had an innovative idea. I decided to follow the people who had left the team to join Groq. Unfortunately, when I joined the people at Groq, I was joining a group that included the person responsible for removing my name from the paper at Intel, and so I found it stressful. I think the fact that, in the dream, I was working for Tenstorrent again after working for Groq came from feelings that the social group at Tenstorrent was the group that I actually felt more comfortable with rather than the group at Groq, because I did not have any reason to believe that the group at Tenstorrent disliked me.
I suspect that the reference to the government paying my salary, and therefore not being obligated to do any work, was probably because I have been thinking about economics and the impact of artificial intelligence lately. I have a page on my website which I created recently where I have been trying to describe ideas for an economic system which makes work optional. Creating a system like this is something that seems necessary to me if artificial intelligence and robots are able to automate all work. This seems required due to the fact that many people would not be able to compete with automated systems for jobs in order to justify receiving money in order to pay their living expenses.
In real life, I have been starting to suspect that it may be the case that, over time, corporations have increasingly become social clubs in which many people are not actually doing useful work, and are instead engaged in complicated rituals designed to fill time and make it appear that their work is required. This seems like it would naturally occur as more and more work is automated over time. It seems like this would be particularly likely to occur for executives and higher level managers, as they have an incentive to hire people to perform all job functions, which from their perspective is similar to automation, however it seems like it could occur for any employee in the corporation. In particular, due to recent advancements in artificial intelligence, it has become much easier for individual employees to automate their work, particularly if their work primarily involves writing computer code. Even if individual employees choose not to use AI to write computer code, the fact that they could and are choosing not to means that technically they are doing something that is not necessary, and so manually writing computer code could be something that could be considered to be an unnecessary ritual being used to fill time.
These rituals designed to fill time seem like they would inevitably start to emerge as a way for people to continue to justify receiving salaries in order to pay their living expenses. In some cases, for example when writing computer code or artistic works that could be generated using AI, it may be that the person or group paying for the work prefers that people engage in the ritual even though it is unnecessary. However, there are many situations in which this is not the case. If a person writing computer code is working on something that is very time-critical, for example if they are working on computer code for the purpose of improving the technology to provide medical treatments, completing the work slowly using a manual process may result in people actually losing their lives unnecessarily. In extreme cases, if the ritual involves not actually doing any labour at all, and an employee is instead fully pretending to work while making it appear that significant labour is required, many people would view this as unfair given that there a lot of people in difficult circumstances who need money to survive, are unable to obtain the money they need, and who would be able to do that job if they were aware that no labour was required.
Unfortunately, due to the incentives of the current economic system, people who have been able to find employment doing work that is secretly automated or is otherwise not difficult to complete have an incentive to keep that fact secret as they depend on the income to pay their living expenses. In addition to that, it is much easier to keep that fact secret if they are part of a social group of people inside a corporation who are all keeping the secret together. As a consequence of this, I personally suspect that there are large groups of people inside corporations that actively work together to mislead people outside of their social group, and that when they are "working from home", they are actually doing no work at all. As technology improves and makes it easier to automate more work, these groups then have an incentive to try to eliminate the people from their corporation who were previously completing the labour that used to be required before the automation was available, if they do not believe that the person who was completing the work previously would agree to keep the secret that the work was now automated. This means that over time, the only people who are left with jobs are people who have a psychology and an ethical system that causes them to be comfortable with misleading people outside of the corporation and pretending to work while they are actually not doing any work.
The solution that I have come up with to solve this problem is to create an economic system which provides everyone with the basic things that they need to live, like shelter and food, for free, so that they are not being threatened with being physically harmed if they do not have a job. It should be possible to provide these things for free if we have sufficient automation, so that no human labour is required in order to provide them. If we had a system like this, it would be possible for people to be more honest about the nature of corporations and the fact that many of the employees at corporations are actually treating the corporation like a social club rather than a place where people are rewarded based on merit and actual productivity. If a person was then excluded from a corporation due to social reasons, they would not be physically harmed, and would have unlimited time to find a new social group.
With the system that I have been envisioning, even though work would be optional due to the fact that many things had been automated, it seems likely that people would still want to be included in some kind of social club. It is possible that corporations could still perform the function of being social clubs. Some of the employees might still be doing useful work, however many of them could just be there just for the social aspect, and be expected to generally support the corporation in its activities without having any specific expectations of doing work. They could still participate in the rituals that they were used to, almost like the corporation was a kind of voluntary cult. One way to support this system might be for the government to actually pay corporations for providing people with a social environment. This is something that I have been thinking about recently, and I suspect that this is why in my dream I referred to the government paying my salary and therefore removing the obligation for me to do any work, while still being considered part of the corporation and still able to socialize with the people in the corporation.
Personally, I feel that CAMH, the psychiatric facility that I was recently forced to visit, is a good example of a corporation that has evolved in such a way that many of their employees appear to be engaged in rituals rather than doing useful work. Theoretically, I was supposed to have been brought to CAMH for the purpose of trying to improve my mental health. However, no attempt was made by CAMH to do anything to improve my mental health. Instead, they only engaged in the ritual of forcing me to visit and keeping me confined for multiple days before releasing me. I am starting to suspect that, rather than assisting people with mental health issues, CAMH has evolved to become a place where people are arbitrarily confined in order to meet a quota and allow CAMH to justify continuing to receive government funding. It seemed like the unpleasant nature of the experience was intentional, and was designed to provoke people into responding violently, which would then allow CAMH to justify their confinement. I suspect that I was only released because I remained calm during the experience despite being provoked.
Even though I have mentioned Tenstorrent and Groq in this description, I am not trying to imply that I have any specific reason to believe that they have an above-average number of people engaging in unnecessary rituals and pretending to work. They may have people doing that, however at least in their case they are not unnecessarily confining people against their will to preserve their jobs as CAMH appears to be doing.
The end of the dream, after I emerged from the trees and I saw the hospital, is a vivid memory. At that time, I was aware that I was dreaming, though I did not feel like I was controlling the dream. The dead trees without any leaves were prominent and very noticeable, and the red-tinted clouds were very detailed. The feeling that I had when I was looking at the scene was that I was looking at an image of the future, after climate change had caused the weather to permanently become warmer and caused the trees to die. It seemed like the hospital was there because the harsh environment was bad for the health of humans, and was causing people to have health issues requiring hospital visits.
After I woke up and thought about it, it seemed like there were a few things that probably influenced the end of the dream. For one, I actually have a fan in my real bedroom which I usually leave turned on while I am sleeping. I might have been partially aware of this during my dream, which might be why I saw the large fans at the end of the dream. The weather in Toronto has also actually been unusually hot recently, and this might have been a reason why the dream ended with concerns about climate change. In addition to that, my recent involuntary visits to psychiatric facilities without any justification or explanation, which were unpleasant experiences that I have been thinking about, might also have influenced my dream and caused me to imagine a hospital.
The fact that I was thinking about climate change right after thinking about people at corporations participating in unnecessary rituals and pretending to work is interesting in another way, as well. One side effect of the current system seems like it would be that it would slow down technological progress. It seems like it would cause a lot of people who could otherwise work on technology to address climate change to instead be forced to find a job from an existing corporation, which might not be doing anything to address climate change, in order to pay living expenses. There would also be employees at corporations that currently depend on receiving revenue from work that is harmful to the environment to have an incentive to continue that work, similar to how CAMH appears to have an incentive to arbitrarily confine people. If people had the flexibility to quit their jobs without worrying about paying for living expenses, it seems like there would probably be more people working on solving the problem of climate change.
The fact that I was trying to find female friends in the dream seems pretty clearly to be because I am trying to find a female friends in real life. At the point in the dream when I told people that I wanted female friends, I was aware that I was dreaming. I was trying to take control of the dream and have a positive experience.
When I wrote the first version of the description of the dream, I actually referred to the women that left the kitchen with me as "people who were female". I decided to change the phrase to the word "women" because I wanted to emphasise that they were actually women and that the group did not include males that just had feminine qualities in some way. However, for the last paragraph I decided to refer to them as "people" because by this point in the dream, the fact that they were female was not being emphasized. I also did not want to make it seem like the negative description at the end of the dream was associated with the fact that they were women, and make it appear that I have negative emotions that are associated with women. I was not sure where the women had gone at the end of the dream, and I was actually not thinking about them at that point. I was mostly thinking about the scene that I was looking at, and in particular I remember looking at the clouds, and thinking about how vivid and clear they looked with their red tint.
In retrospect, even though I was not thinking about it during the dream, it may be that this part of the dream was actually also a metaphor for my concern that my recent involuntary visits to psychiatric facilities, like CAMH, might be something that could harm my reputation, and make it more difficult for me to make female friends. Perhaps this is part of why I found myself looking at a hospital rather than being with the women that I was trying to walk with after I left the kitchen at the Tenstorrent office.
I also suspect that the fact that in the dream I told former coworkers that I wanted female friends might be related to the fact that I personally find it frustrating that engineering is a male-dominated profession. It is difficult to find a girlfriend when you spend most of your time working with men.
I still really want a girlfriend, and to be honest one of the main things that I have been thinking about while writing this description is how what I have written might be interpreted by any women that might read it. As I mentioned above, I am worried about my reputation being harmed as a consequence of the visits that I have been forced to make to psychiatric facilities, and I am also worried that the fact that my name was removed from the Intel paper might be a sign that my former coworkers have been harming my reputation as well. I would like to improve my reputation. I am pretty sure that I am completely sane and do not have a mental illness. In addition, I feel that I am an easy-going, laid back person. I have a dating profile on my website. I also eventually want to find employment, preferably working somewhere where I would have female coworkers.
I am obviously a bit frustrated right now about a few things that have happened to me recently, as I described on the page about being trapped in my apartment. Even though I have described my situation in detail on the webpage, and many people are aware of it, most people, including former coworkers, are either ignoring my messages completely, or even if they are answering, do not appear to be concerned about the fact that I am effectively trapped, nor that I have been forced to visit psychiatric facilities. It would be cool if I had a girlfriend who was also frustrated about the same things and with the same people that I am frustrated with. It would be nice to have someone that was on my side.
Dream description last updated: 2026-07-22
Dream interpretation last updated: 2026-07-25