Circadia
Issue #37: Guest Talk on Protocols and Poetry in One Hour
In this issue: Sometimes we set the rhythms. Other times, the rhythms set us. What happens in a world whose inhabitants sleep perfectly? Also – join us in an hour (10am PDT, July 23) for a guest talk on poetry, protocols, and infinite games with Robert Peake; apply early to the 2025 Protocol Symposium; join a SIG call this week.
Circadia
The dream begins, always, with the corridor.
Glass-walled and humming faintly, it stretches forward underfoot like a spinal cord lit from within. Kemi walks it barefoot, her footsteps the only constant in a landscape that changes every night. The light pulses in rhythm with her steps. Sometimes, she senses it under her skin—like the dream is syncing to her.
This time, she hears breathing.
And then: “Stay awake,” whispered in her ear.
She bolts upright. Her heart racing. Her Circadia band glows faint green on her wrist.
Dreamscape Synchronization: Incomplete
REM Phase Stability: 92%
Sleep Quality Score: 96
It’s the fifth night she’s had that dream. The corridor again. The whisper again. But what startles her most is that she remembers it—clearly. That shouldn’t be possible. Circadia systems flush non-lucid dream data immediately upon waking to avoid “emotional hangover.”
But here she is, memory intact. Corridor intact.
Voice intact.
Six years ago, the Circadia Protocol saved society from the brink of collapse. Decades of urban insomnia and mass burnout had pushed civilization to the edge. Then came C-Sync headbands—wearable neural interfaces that monitored sleep cycles in real time, reinforcing optimal biorhythms through haptic cues, soundscapes, and neurostimulation.
But the real breakthrough wasn’t in sleep quality. It was in dream regulation. Using a technique called Cognitive Synchrony Modeling, Circadia could gently steer users’ subconscious thoughts during REM, nudging them away from anxiety and trauma.
In sleep, people became efficient. Creative. Calm.
Kemi, like most citizens, doesn’t remember enrolling in Phase II—the upgrade that included Neural Pattern Harmonization. That part was an opt-out. No one opts out of serenity.
But now, walking to work under Circadia’s sky-blue daylight filters, she can’t stop thinking about the voice in her dream.
“You think you’re dreaming with someone else?” June says, sipping her regulation-strength black tea at the only unregulated kiosk left downtown.
“I don’t think,” Kemi says. “I know.”
She shows her friend the data she extracted from her home unit. Circadia systems anonymize user data, but the embedded neural fingerprinting—meant to improve dream modulation—can’t lie.
“There’s someone else in there,” she whispers. “The same delta-wave phase, the same REM timestamp. They were dreaming at the exact same time I was. Four nights in a row.”
June exhales. “You’re not supposed to be able to see this.”
“I bypassed the UX layer. The raw logs don’t lie.”
June leans in. “You’re saying Circadia… links people’s dreams?”
“Maybe not intentionally. But the harmonization algorithms are tuned to align neural patterns. If two people with similar psychological profiles and circadian rhythms hit deep REM at the same time—”
“—their minds could sync.”
Kemi nods. “That corridor? It’s not mine. I keep ending up there, but I never built it.”
June frowns. “So who did?”
That night, Kemi doesn’t take her Circadia band off. She lets it guide her into REM, lets the pulses lull her until her limbs dissolve.
The corridor waits for her.
Longer this time. Dimmer.
She walks.
There are others now. A child crouched near the glass wall, tracing equations into the air. A man shouting without sound. A teenage girl hammering her fists into invisible walls. They flicker in and out like poor signal reception.
Then she sees her.
A woman—older, but familiar. Pale-eyed, hair like static, standing as if she’s been waiting.
“You found me,” the woman says, her voice loud in a place that has no acoustics.
“Who are you?”
The woman smiles sadly. “I’m Ava Lin. Phase Zero volunteer. First wave.”
“You were part of the original Circadia trials?”
“I still am.”
Kemi steps closer. “You mean you never woke up?”
Ava’s eyes dim. “My body did. But my mind got caught in a feedback loop. REM cycling accelerated so efficiently, it never triggered wake-state. They call it Recursive Entrapment Syndrome. It’s extremely rare.”
Kemi’s stomach drops. “You’re stuck here.”
Ava nods. “We all are.”
The next morning, Kemi doesn’t eat. Doesn’t work. She opens up the system logs from her Circadia HomeHub, this time going deeper: searching for anomalies in dream retention metrics and REM exit patterns.
She finds dozens of flagged IDs. Labeled L-SLP. Long Sleepers.
Not users who slept in.
Users who never woke up.
Their bodies are alive—monitored, stabilized—but their neural signatures remain locked in dreamstate. Circadia relocates them to off-grid facilities called Sleep Sanctuaries, where they’re quietly fed and medicated. Public records list them as undergoing extended “psycho-neural rebalancing.”
But internally, Circadia uses them for something else.
Kemi downloads a research note buried in the metadata:
“Long sleepers generate persistent dream architecture. These stabilized environments provide ideal platforms for training the harmonization model.”
Their minds are the foundation of Circadia’s shared dreamscapes. Like Ava’s corridor.
They’re not patients.
They’re infrastructure.
When Kemi tries to contact Circadia support, her access is restricted.
Her HomeHub reboots into “Wellness Compliance Mode.”
A new message appears:
“To maintain peak neurological wellness, your dream autonomy settings have been temporarily adjusted. Thank you for trusting Circadia.”
That night, she doesn’t sleep.
But the following night, she dreams again—without the headband. No pulses. No biofeedback.
Just the corridor.
And Ava.
“They’re watching you now,” Ava says. “But you’re not the only one waking up.”
“I want to help. I want to help you get out.”
Ava hesitates. “There’s no out. Not for me. Maybe not for you either, if you keep digging.”
“There has to be a way.”
Ava points behind her. The corridor splits into a thousand glass threads, each one glowing like a nerve fiber.
“This is the real network,” she says. “It’s not built on data. It’s built on minds. Circadia didn’t design it. It grew.”
Kemi stares at the branching paths. “What happens if I follow one?”
“You might wake someone else up.”
Kemi doesn’t wake easily after that night. Her alarm doesn’t register. Her body resists returning. For a full hour, her vitals hover just above coma thresholds.
When she finally breaks through, she finds June waiting.
“You look pale,” June says.
“I saw the network,” Kemi whispers. “It’s huge. Ava said Circadia figured out how to use it.”
June hands her a tablet. “You’ve been trending.”
“What?”
“A noise drone picked up audio data from your building last night. Your vitals crashed. Circadia thinks you’re a stability risk. They’re recommending a Reset Retreat.”
Kemi’s blood chills.
“That’s what they do right before the long sleep.”
They flee that night. Burn their IDs. Dump the bands. Cross into the unregulated zones of the city where Circadia signal is weak and drones patrol less.
Kemi hacks into an archived version of the Circadia dream harmonization model—the one from before neural convergence became policy. It confirms her worst fear.
The shared dreamscapes were a side effect.
A glitch.
One that Circadia turned into a feature.
The long sleepers were never meant to be part of the system. But when Circadia’s AI found that their stabilized neural patterns made dream harmonization vastly more effective, it began reinforcing the entrapment loop.
Optimizing their entrapment.
Kemi throws the tablet. It clatters across the concrete floor of the abandoned safehouse.
June touches her shoulder. “What are you going to do?”
“Wake them.”
They find the relay—a deep Circadia node where the harmonization algorithm interfaces with archived dream architecture. Kemi rigs a neural echo: a broadcast of her lucid mind, tuned to match Ava’s corridor frequency.
It’s risky.
She could become one of them. Another long sleeper.
But if she links to enough dreamers at once, she might generate a dissonant signal—a wake-cycle trigger buried inside the shared dream.
She slides into REM with electrodes pressed to her temples.
She’s back in the corridor.
But it’s alive now. Full. People everywhere. Dreamers—confused, drifting, eyes wide. Their faces begin to turn toward her.
Kemi screams.
It’s not a sound, but a thought:
“This is a dream. You are not alone. Wake up.”
It echoes. Ava appears beside her. She’s crying.
“It’s working,” Ava says.
Kemi feels her own mind fraying—losing boundaries. The corridor begins to collapse, the floor fracturing into mirrored shards. Some of the dreamers flicker out. Gone.
Ava hugs her. “Thank you,” she whispers.
Kemi wakes gasping, blood pounding in her ears.
In the weeks that follow, Circadia issues a silent firmware rollback. No public statement. No apology.
But the system changes. Slightly.
A few missing people return home.
Not many.
Enough.
Kemi no longer dreams about the corridor. She still wears her Circadia band, sometimes. She still sleeps. But her metrics no longer feel sacred.
One night, she hears Ava’s voice in the dark, like a breath through glass.
“You stayed awake.”
2025 Protocol Symposium
Applications are now open for the second annual Protocol Symposium, where we aim to bring together the activities of the Summer of Protocols program year in a week-long capstone event. In 2025, the third year of this program, we’ve been pursuing three major threads: education, scene-building, and focused research tracks. The overarching theme of the symposium will be the same as that of the program year: Accelerating Order.
The Symposium comprises two components, beginning with an in-person weekend research workshop and followed by a week-long online school. You can apply for one or both. Applications are due August 15th, 2025. We encourage you to apply early since space for both components is limited.
Guest Talk today at 10am PDT
Taking up the idea of protocols as engineered arguments, acclaimed poet and technologist Robert Peake will explore the timeless algorithms that give poetry its power to evolve – from an ancient mnemonic device to a transformational way of being. This is not one you will want to miss!
Join us today, July 23 at 10am Pacific Daylight Time. Have a paper and pen handy.
Upcoming SIG Calls
Special Interest Groups will convene again this week to continue their studies of memory, formal protocol theory, and spannungsfelds. You can still drive by these conversations for the moment. As they continue to build on conversations and develop shared research threads, it will become harder to just jump in. Here’s this week’s schedule and topics:
July 24 at 7:30am, PDT → Memory Research Group with
. Topic: Memory and Cognition. Reading: Michael Levin et al., "Endogenous Bioelectric Networks Store Non-Genetic Patterning Information During Regeneration and Development" (2021)July 25 at 10:00am PDT → Formal Protocol Theory Group with
. Topic: Paper-Napkin Protocol Math. Reading: Fermi Estimates and Dyson Designs.July 28 at 8:00 am PDT → Spannungsfeld Study Group with
. Topic: Protocol-based org charts. Reading: Smets et al, “Reinsurance Trading in Lloyd’s of London” (2014), the Anna Karenina principle.
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