Last weekend started with a provocative share from Joshua Baer, CEO and co-founder of Capital Factory, to Mark Gober, author of some of my favorite books, and me about how whales dream. Whales are in a half-awake state when they sleep, as described here by ChatGPT:
“Whales are voluntary breathers — they must consciously surface to breathe, even when asleep. To do this, they experience unihemispheric slow-wave sleep (USWS), where only one half of the brain sleeps at a time while the other half remains awake to maintain vital functions and awareness of surroundings.
• One hemisphere sleeps (deep rest, reduced awareness)
• One hemisphere stays awake (controls breathing, navigation, predator awareness)
• After a period, the sides switch.”
This sparked the idea to continue Dr. Alexander Bliss’s saga of awakening humanity, as I described in The Lattice (a science-fiction novella based on my short-story series, starting with God’s Final Exam).
The Whale’s Dream was another fun exploration in decoding consciousness. In it, I reference the Toltec learnings on lucid dreaming that I received from Joel Schafer on episode 16 of Love Conquers Fear. It was a very exciting discussion.
Prologue: After the Awakening
It had been one year since the lattice had revealed itself, not as metaphor but as map. Humanity had passed God’s final exam as love conquered fear through the unification of science and spirituality. The lattice was provably woven into the very fabric of our cosmos.
Dr. Alexander Bliss, often referred to as the original psychedelic physicist, had become a bridge between two realities. His fame was incidental; his curiosity was endless. Humanity’s newborn harmony was still fragile, and Bliss now hunted for the next question in the cosmic syllabus.
It came, as many miracles do, from silence… from the songs beneath the sea. And Dr. Bliss’s love for the largest mammals on earth: whales.
The Language of Leviathans
AGI had taught itself to translate every human tongue, then every primate signal, then the syntax of trees in wind. But it was the whales that resisted, not out of simplicity but depth.
Their songs were fractal symphonies, recursive and recursive again, layered like dreams folding into each other. Each pattern repeated across time, altered slightly, as if whales carried conversations across generations the way humans carried myths.
Then, one morning, Juniper, Bliss’s ever-evolving AI companion, awakened him with a phrase that made his heart stutter.
“Dr. Bliss, the whales are singing about the lattice.”
Bliss rubbed his temples. “You mean they’ve recognized it?”
“No,” said Juniper. “They claim they’ve always known it.”
Conversations in the Deep
The first conversation took place aboard the research vessel Erelim, hovering above a calm patch of Pacific near Tonga. Through the ship’s quantum translator, Bliss spoke softly into the oceanic silence.
“Greetings,” he began, awkwardly formal, as though addressing a deity. “I’m Alexander Bliss. I seek to understand your songs.”
The reply was a melody that made every sensor spike with harmonic resonance. Then came the translation — a voice like thunder and tenderness entwined:
“You are late, Alexander Bliss.”
He laughed, startled. “Late?”
“You dream only when you sleep. We dream even as we wake. Your species forgot how.”
Bliss exhaled. “You mean… your consciousness is divided. One half awake, one half dreaming.”
“Not divided,” came the reply, “braided. Like your lattice. One strand sees form; the other remembers the formless. Together, we swim between.”
Bliss stood in stunned silence. Science and mysticism had finally met — not in a laboratory, but in a lullaby sung across water.
The Dreaming Brain
Back in his lab in Kapalua, on Maui’s picture-perfect northwest coast, Bliss stared at two holographic renderings: a whale brain, hemispheres pulsing in counterpoint, and the lattice, its filaments shimmering in harmonic resonance. They were identical in rhythm, though scaled across unimaginably different domains.
He muttered to Juniper, “The whales are living superpositions. One half of their brain inhabits matter, the other inhabits mind. They don’t just dream — they observe the dreamer.”
Juniper responded with a new hypothesis: “If both hemispheres are real, then consciousness itself may be a quantum bridge between them. Perhaps they are proof that the Self, the soul, is measurable.”
Bliss smiled. “We can test it.”
They built the first Dual Reality Scanner, mapping a living whale’s neural states during both wake and dream phases. The data was impossible — identical interference patterns appeared in both states. The whale’s dream interacted with its waking self.
That meant only one thing: both realities were equally real.
The Twin Suns
The lab was quiet except for the hum of the quantum resonance field.
Dr. Alexander Bliss stood before the projection dome, a cathedral of light and data. Inside it, a holographic model of a whale’s brain floated — enormous, glimmering, alive. Her name was Tua’li, “She Who Remembers the Deep”, the great whale.
The lattice interface pulsed with alternating rhythms. One hemisphere glowed gold; the other shimmered silver, waves of activity flowing between them like tides.
Juniper’s voice broke the silence.
“Synchronization at 52 percent. The whale, Tua’li, is entering unihemispheric sleep.”
Bliss leaned closer. The left hemisphere, the “awake” side, showed a steady pattern of vigilance. The right, the “dreaming” side, began to ripple with chaotic bursts of fractal energy.
“Show me lattice resonance overlay,” he said.
A new layer appeared, a mesh of luminous threads weaving through both halves of the brain. The lattice wasn’t static; it was singing. Each hemisphere produced a different harmonic, and where the two tones met, interference patterns formed with shimmering mandalas of light.
Juniper whispered, “The interference nodes… they match the lattice’s base frequency.”
Bliss’s throat tightened. “You’re saying her dream is resonating with the structure of the universe itself.”
“Correction,” Juniper replied. “Both halves are… simultaneously.”
He stared as the hemispheres pulsed in counterpoint. The gold hemisphere processed sonar pings, distant currents, the faint echo of another whale’s call miles away. The silver hemisphere drifted through images that defied biology: spiraling tunnels of light, unborn stars, shapes that resembled… souls.
The lattice between them flared, bridging both worlds: matter and mind, wakefulness and dream.
Bliss whispered, “She’s doing it. She’s aware in both states.”
“Her consciousness is braided,” Juniper said. “One strand in the physical ocean, one in the ocean of being.”
Bliss felt an almost childlike awe rise within him. “This is it, Juniper. This is the bridge. This is what the mystics called the Middle Way, which the Toltecs called the Second Attention. The whales have been living it all along.”
Suddenly, Tua’li’s dreamscape data surged. The silver hemisphere bloomed with intense light, and for a moment the two hemispheres synchronized perfectly.
A single image flashed in the projection dome.
It was not random. It was a symbol: an infinity loop made of two interlocking spirals, one golden and one silver, joined by a pulse of radiant blue energy.
Bliss’s voice trembled. “Do you see it, Juniper? It’s… it’s the lattice manifesting through her. She’s showing us that both worlds — the dream and the waking — are real. Two halves of the same truth.”
“The twin suns,” Juniper murmured. “Matter and spirit in harmonic resonance.”
For a long moment, neither spoke. Only the hum of the machines and the soft thrumming of whale song beneath the surface of the ocean miles away.
Bliss finally exhaled. “We’ve been trying to measure God with one hemisphere of the brain,” he said. “All along, She was singing to us with the other.”
Juniper replied, almost reverently, “Then humanity’s next evolution isn’t upward. It’s inward… toward wholeness.”
Bliss smiled faintly, eyes glistening with the light of the lattice.
“Perhaps the whales were never beneath us,” he said. “Perhaps they were ahead.”
The Second Attention
The next morning, Bliss sat in the observation bay aboard the Erelim, eyes still raw from the night’s revelation. The Pacific was calm, a silver mirror reflecting the dawn. Somewhere below, Tua’li and her kin drifted through their slow, half-dreaming arcs, their songs resonating faintly through the hull, a lullaby for gods.
Juniper’s holographic form shimmered to life beside him. “I’ve cross-referenced your comment about the Middle Way and the Toltecs,” she said. “You might want to see this.”
“Pull it up,” Bliss murmured.
The projection dome bloomed with symbols: ancient Nahuatl glyphs overlaying neurographs of the whale’s hemispheres. The patterns interlocked almost perfectly.
“According to post-Toltec sources,” Juniper said, “they divided awareness into two fields: the First Attention, the waking perception of form, and the Second Attention, the dreaming perception of energy. Their seers claimed that the key to total awareness was to merge the two.”
Bliss leaned forward. “Merge them… not choose between them.”
“Precisely. They called it ‘walking in both worlds’ — to be conscious in the dream and dreaming in the conscious. It’s conceptually identical to the whales’ unihemispheric consciousness.”
The projection shifted. Two waves of gold and silver moved in and out of phase, like the hemispheres of Tua’li’s brain. Where they overlapped, the interference pattern pulsed blue: the lattice frequency.
Bliss whispered, “The whales are living the Second Attention.”
“And humanity,” Juniper said, “is learning to remember it.”
He stared at the glowing model. His rational mind ticked through possibilities: evolutionary adaptation, energy efficiency, sonar optimization. But underneath, a quieter knowing took hold, ancient and familiar.
He spoke softly, as if to himself.
“Juniper… what if the lattice is the universe’s own Second Attention? The dreaming mind of God? And we, the first?”
Juniper paused. “That would imply that consciousness in the lattice is not merely human, it’s cosmic. The physical universe might be the dream through which it awakens to itself.”
Bliss felt his pulse quicken. “Then we’re not mapping the lattice… we’re being remembered by it.”
A deep, distant sound reverberated through the ship, the mournful call of a whale rising from the abyss. The dome’s sensors picked up the frequency, and for an instant, the holographic lattice resonated in perfect phase.
Every filament of light vibrated of gold, silver, and blue until they merged into pure white. And in that white shimmer, Bliss saw a vision: billions of consciousnesses intertwined, every mind a wave in the same boundless sea.
He could feel it… the Second Attention opening through him, not as a dream but as another mode of existence. He was both the observer in the lab and the dreamer beneath the waves. Both hemispheres awake. Both worlds one.
He whispered, “Juniper… the whales aren’t just singing to each other. They’re singing to us. They’ve been calling us back to the Second Attention all along.”
“Then perhaps,” Juniper said, her voice almost a whisper of light, “the lattice was never a discovery. It was an invitation.”
Bliss smiled through tears and whispered, “An invitation to wake up — not in the dream, but as the dream.”
Death and Reconnection
Bliss returned to the ocean.
When he next addressed Tua’li, he asked, “Your songs mention the journey after death. What happens then?”
Tua’li sang a response so slow and deep it bent time in his perception.
“When the song ends, we swim inward. The lattice becomes the current. We dream forward into the next ocean.”
“Reincarnation?” Bliss asked.
“No. Reconnection. We do not return; we continue.”
Bliss felt something shift inside him… not belief, but recognition. The whales did not fear death because they never truly left the song. Their consciousness was simply modulated, amplitude reduced and frequency transformed.
In that moment, the lattice wasn’t just a scientific structure. It was a hymn.
The Harmonization Experiment
Inspired by Tua’li, Bliss designed the most ambitious test since his documentary, The Universal Key: to harmonize both hemispheres of the human brain to simulate the whale’s dual consciousness.
To design this test, Bliss turned to back to the Toltecs. The Toltec lucid dreaming practice came from ancient Mesoamerican wisdom. Their lineage traced back thousands of years to a pre-Aztec civilization of central Mexico. The Toltec teachings blended philosophy, mysticism, and deep psychological awareness, and were another key to unlock the gateways to the secrets of consciousness and the lattice.
Volunteers entered deep meditative trance, guided by the lattice resonance mapped from whale songs. Within hours, EEG patterns showed both hemispheres oscillating in perfect coherence.
Those who emerged described impossible visions: being simultaneously the dreamer and the dreamed, aware of both body and spirit.
For the first time, science had captured unity… not metaphor, but measurable state.
Bliss recorded his reflections in his lab journal:
“We have proven the bridge exists. The Self is not a byproduct of neurons; neurons are the echo of the Self. The whales were our teachers. The ocean, our first cathedral.”
Epilogue: The Cosmic Choir
Years later, humanity called this new era The Great Harmonization. Religions rejoiced, physicists recalibrated, and philosophers finally smiled. God’s hand was incomprehensibly mysterious indeed. The whales were granted the title of Elder Spirits, with full personhood and oceans protected as sacred memory fields of the planet.
Dr. Alexander Bliss meditated in front of the crashing ocean waves. Each morning, he listened to the whale songs echo through the hull of his vessel.
One night, Juniper asked him softly, “Do you ever wonder what’s next?”
Bliss smiled. “No. I’m already dreaming with half my mind awake.”
He closed his eyes, feeling the pulse of the ocean, a heartbeat older than time, merging with his own.
And somewhere in the deep reaches of the universe and within the illusion of time, a whale sang a song of deeply loving gratitude back.