This is the stuff, this is the stuff.

I'd like to share with you a vision I had in 2003, which I believe applies DIRECTLY to this issue:

i became aware of waking, and lifting my body with some effort out of a thick black slime, and i was in a sea of it. i saw the vast, vast expanse of this slime around me, stretching out for as far as the eye could see.
i look around me and i see that there are others waking and pulling themselves from the sticky muck as well, and i also see a host of others stuck in it, barely visible, unconcious.
some of the people around me are waking as i just had, and some are already awake and trudging forward with great difficulty through that opaque slime. i suddenly realise that this is an army around me, and i am a soldier, and that we are slowly and with difficulty moving forward, toward an unknown landscape.

This vision and the discussion that followed it left me... well, psyched.