It's even worse: even when people do ingest available information, they very often do it erroneously, forming a misunderstanding (without realizing it).

> Most people haven't really nerded out on the details of how pilots maintain combat readiness and how budgets work, but uh, your point?

Broadly: humanity runs mostly on untrue stories, and does not realize it (actually, there's a "it's even worse' here too).

>> anything that has the potential to wake up the American/Western public from their dream state is a good thing in my books

> I'm not exactly the biggest fan of any government, but what specifically are you talking about here?

Simplistically: people's understanding and trust in their government (abstract and concrete), and what is going on in general is highly erroneous, and not only do they not realize this, they believe the opposite. I consider this to be an extremely dangerous state of affairs, despite it having always been the case and "we're doing ok" nonetheless. Things often go "ok" for a very long time, and then suddenly start going "not ok", often without an obvious trigger.

> What is the "dream state" that these incursions might shatter?

The phenomena resulting from the combination of consciousness + culture + time, both individually and collectively.

You might be best served by filing this under "woo woo" though...but then again, you also might not - there's only one way to (possibly) find out!