Learning to Wake Up
Oppression rarely announces itself with boots. In Hungary, in this imagined 2025, it arrived as insomnia.
People stopped sleeping properly. Dreams became repetitive, invasive, familiar in the wrong way. A dead parent’s voice. A childhood friend who spoke in slogans. A sense, on waking, of having been addressed. No threat was spoken. None was needed.
At first, everyone assumed it was personal weakness. Stress. Screens. The economy. That, after all, is how modern power prefers its victims: isolated, ashamed, silent.
The counter-measure began there — in the refusal to suffer alone.
Step one: naming the wound
The first act of resistance was not technical. It was confessional.
People began speaking, quietly at first, about their dreams. In kitchens. On night trams. In encrypted group chats mislabelled as book clubs. Patterns emerged. The same phrases. The same voices. The same hours of waking dread.
Authoritarian systems thrive on uncertainty. Once citizens realised the terror was shared, its psychological monopoly broke. Fear loses efficiency when compared.
Naming the phenomenon — even clumsily — stripped it of mystique. Ghosts, after all, feed on silence.
Step two: starving the ghosts
The Digital Ghost Networks ran on data exhaust: old posts, old photos, old habits, predictable emotional triggers. Hungarians responded with a campaign of deliberate erasure and noise.
Accounts were deleted en masse. Photos scrubbed. Writing styles deliberately corrupted. People posted nonsense. Switched languages mid-sentence. Lied about their preferences. Shared memories incorrectly on purpose.
It was not about privacy — it was about unreliability.
A system trained on ghosts fails when the living refuse to be legible. The children running the networks, raised on clean datasets and obedient patterns, struggled with contradiction. The ghosts began to stutter.
Step three: reclaiming sleep as a political act
The most intimate battlefield was the bed.
Citizens dismantled the wellness apparatus piece by piece. Wearables were abandoned. Smart speakers unplugged. Bedrooms were made dumb again — dark, quiet, analogue.
Some went further. They slept in shifts. They slept together. They slept with radios playing human voices — chaotic, unscripted, live. Others kept dream journals, not to analyse, but to defang. A written nightmare, shared over coffee, loses its authority.
In this imagined resistance, sleep hygiene became civil disobedience.
Dreams could be invaded. Rest could not be automated.
Step four: mutual presence over digital courage
The ghost networks were excellent at targeting individuals. They were useless against crowds.
Hungarians began gathering — not to protest, but to exist together. Long dinners. All-night conversations. Choirs. Chess in public squares. Activities that produced no data and no optimisation metrics.
The regime’s greatest weakness was that it could not simulate genuine presence. AI could mimic a dead voice, but not the awkward pause before laughter. Not the warmth of shared exhaustion.
Children trained to terrorise through screens were helpless against a society that stepped back into physical reality.
Step five: moral inversion
The final counter-measure was the darkest, and the most personal.
Citizens stopped seeing themselves as victims of a superior system. They began seeing the institutionalised children of the nouveau riche for what they were: damaged heirs, trapped inside roles they did not choose, operating machinery they barely understood.
This did not produce forgiveness. It produced contempt without fear — the kind most corrosive to illegitimate power.
The terror stopped working once Hungarians internalised a simple truth:
Nothing confident needs to haunt your dreams.
The cost of waking up
This resistance did not look heroic. It was exhausting. Careers stalled. Relationships frayed. Sleep did not immediately return. But something else did: agency.
The ghost networks weakened not because they were hacked, but because they were rendered irrelevant. Dream induction faltered not because it was exposed, but because people learned to distrust the voice that arrives uninvited.
Power that operates in the dark collapses when citizens are willing to sit with one another in the dim.
In this imagined 2025, Hungary did not defeat the system with revolution. It defeated it with stubborn humanity — with memory shared instead of harvested, sleep reclaimed instead of optimised, and fear spoken aloud until it lost its shape.
The lesson of this fiction is bleak but precise:
When terror becomes intimate, resistance must become personal.
And the first step is simple, brutal, and hard to automate:
You wake up.
You tell someone what you saw.
And you refuse to be alone with it.
INTEL KARTEL 
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