(Non-political posts occasionally appear on weekends.) I'm in my car. Unusual military aircraft circle the San Fernando Valley. A civil defense siren -- a sound not heard since childhood -- fills the air. The radio blares the Emergency Broadcast System attention signal. An announcer warns: Only ten minutes left...
And then I wake up.
Nuclear dreams are the only nightmares that truly frighten.
Other types of nightmare disappear from memory a few moments after awakening. On those occasions when the theater of the mind books a Grand Guignol performance, intra-psychic displays of grue and gore don't have any lingering impact, thanks to Hollywood's ongoing desensitization project. The nightmares of social embarrassment (you're back in high school and you haven't studied for the big test!) seem like annoying cliches even as they play out.
But nuke dreams haunt you throughout the day.
I've had a few of these dreams lately, for the first time in years. The nightmares always end just before the bombs hit. The terror comes in the mad scramble for shelter. My dream self usually dashes for the sewer, which is probably what I'll do if the real thing happens.
Every child of the cold war has had these nightmares.
For some people, the nuke nightmares focus on post-apocalypse scenarios -- rubble, corpses, blistered skin peeling from the faces of wailing children, etc. For me, anticipation is the true horror. The ten minutes just before impact. Morpheus, god of dreams, has made me live through those ten minutes many, many times.
My question is this: Do people born after the cold war's end have these dreams? If people under 30 do have these nightmares, do they occur less frequently?
15 comments:
The under 30's, yea the under 40's ,have absolutely no idea of what you're talking about. Boomers, however, still remember ducking and rolling under their elementary school desks and wondering if they would ever make it to the age of majority.
MY NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE
As a former nuclear weapons fire direction control specialist allow me to submit this: Our unit was less concerned with a toe to toe with the USSR than having a warhead stolen by the Baeder Meinhoff Gang )a.k.a. Red Army) who's affiliations with the Weather Undergound (Billy Ayers) is documented.
Had Ulrike and Andreas obtained their bargaining bomb Billy would have eagerly lit the fuse.
The question that should nag us all is this: If Billy Ayers declared "War" on the U.S. when exactly was the armistice? Never mind the surrender. And now we're expected to idly allow Ayers the access he has craved since '68 through his "casual" friend Obambi?
BEST ADVICE: Everyone does better research.
<>_<> HIDE AND SEE
Hey Joseph,
I'm over thirty and have had nuclear dreams too. Very unsettling and puts me in a weird mood all day. I asked my two boys and my oldest boy's girlfriend whose ages are 16,17,18 and they don't recall ever having a nuclear dream.
Hmmm...I think you are on to something. Anyway I found this dream definition.
To dream of a nuclear bomb, suggests feelings of helplessness, being threatened and loss of control. You may be experiencing great hostility and rage to the point of being destructive. Alternatively, you may be expressing a desire to wipe out some aspect of yourself. It may also be an indication that something crucial and precious to you has ended and important changes are about to occur.
I suspect the movie 'The Day After' was powerful enough to provoke nightmares. Aired in '83; half the country watched it, and probably millions of kids. That might add a cohort younger than you'd otherwise presume.
Pretty horrifying movie. I remember my distinct feeling of utter dread just watching the missiles launch. Then it got worse.
My only nuclear war dream was seeing a bright roiling mushroom cloud in the distance. I knew what it meant, but wasn't worried about a bomb hitting my remote area, just making provisions for the aftermath. I probably figured wrong and was immediately vaporized, as the dream ended there.
...sofla
From the IMDB:
The premiere of this TV movie was a major media event. No sponsors bought commercial time after the point in the movie where the nuclear war occurs, so the last half of the show was aired straight through, without commercials.
The original air date (on ABC) was November 20, 1983. Over 100 million Americans were estimated to have viewed the program. ). Still rated as the most watched ever TV movie on US television as of April 2006 (not including miniseries), it was watched by 38.55 million households or 46.0% with a Neilsen share of 62%.
ABC set up special 1-800 hotlines to calm people down during and after the original airing.
Immediately after the film's original broadcast, it was followed by a special news program, featuring a live discussion between scientist Dr. Carl Sagan (who opposed the use of nuclear weapons) and Conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. (who promoted the concept of "nuclear deterrence"). It was during this heated discussion, aired live on network television, where Dr. Sagan introduced the world to the concept of "nuclear winter" and made his famous analogy, equating the nuclear arms race with "two men standing waist deep in gasoline; one with three matches, the other with five".
I was born in '82, am 25 now - read this site almost every day. I can't remember ever having a nuclear dream.
...egh. I had a whole response about how I understand a tiny little bit about nuclear nightmares, having had some myself, but then I called my mom, age 61 this year, and, well...no.
"Joe wrote about nuclear nightmares for the blog tonight."
"Great. Don't read it to me. I've been having nuclear nightmares for much of my life—I need to have more now?"
"He says people under 30 probably don't get it; especially people born at the tail-end of the Cold War (like yours truly). And I guess we don't. It's not like we had air raid drills—"
Then she launched into a five minute flashback-like tirade about said drills, which made me realize that no, my fears of nuclear war are really not the same at all.
"Get under the desks, don't look, shield your eyes...and sometimes they would make us go into the basement of the school. They had maps for how to get out of St. Louis, as if there was any way anyone was going to be able to do that in five minutes..."
I've only talked with my parents and other Boomers about this aspect of life in the '50s/'60s on a few occasions. I haven't read any books with references to nuclear fears since...high school? There's a scene in The Basketball Diaries, which I read in '96, in which Jim Carrol's NYC subway car stops unexpectedly and then its lights go out, which everyone immediately assumes means nuclear war has begun. The only recent film I've seen that references the topic is 13 Days.
So, that's...not on par with my mother's experiences. At all.
Here's what I have experienced (I'm under 30, though just barely):
I dimly remember when my parents first told me about nuclear weapons. I was six or so (1985 or thereabouts). I didn't sleep for a week. What I thought was scariest about the way they descibed nuclear war was how finite it was. The Bombs get launched; we all die. I was also freaked by how out of our control it was. Some distant world leader punches The Button, and it's over.
I remember watching a re-run of The Day After in 1987 and thinking the potential aftermath of a nuclear war looked pretty freakish (of course, it also looked survivable, something I think of as a flaw in that film). I had the occasional bad dream about the apocalypse in middle school after doing a report on the Manhattan Project for 8th grade American History. But those dreams always focused on an abstract vision of Armageddon, on being alone, or with a small group of survivors, in the streets afterward. Never with the visceral details Joseph describes in his nightmares.
A boyfriend (same age) and I talked quite a bit about nuclear war in the months after 9/11, when I was first starting to grog that the Bush Administration might just mean the arrival of the fascist revolution my professors had been warning us about during the four years I'd just spent in college. Said boyfriend was the one who showed me www.ready.gov, but our incredulous reading of that website together (we both thought it was the most horrifyingly stupid thing we'd ever seen) was about as far as we got in our "mental preparedness" for descending nukes, even after Gulf War II began.
I saw The Fog of War in 2003, in which Macnamara points out that the threat of nuclear war is as pressing today as it was in '62. Still, I don't think the idea that nuclear war could actually happen was real to me until 2005. The election had been stolen, huge, it was obvious to me that the proverbial Vast Right Wing conspiracy and everything I'd read about it in the last five years was true, and, of course, I'd just found Cannonfire, which helped me get hip to BushCo's plans for Iran. I woke up every day between the inauguration and June 15th (a date an online rumor had claimed would be the start of the Iran invasion) expecting to find out that a bomb had finally gone off. I have never been that scared before. After we passed mid-June without Big Wedding II, I relaxed, (a little) though the fear returns every time news related to Iran does.
I should add that I don't think my mindset is typical of those of my generation. I've been meaning to compose a post about this, but the difference between me and others my age is that I had the good fortune to be raised by individuals who were politically and socially conscious during the 1960s. They shared their stories and perspectives with me, so I have a certain awareness. Not many people my age do, in part because (I think) their parents kinda forgot to communicate their '60s experiences to them. Or their parents tried, and those communications got lost in the scramble of Reaganite propaganda, MTV and distracting Clinton Era prosperity. (I also went to a private elementary school in the '80s, which shielded me from the Reagan brainwashing during my formative years, which may have more to do with how I turned out than anything else.)
I grew up and had almost all my schooling in the San Fernando Valley. Only in the 11th grade, 1962, at San Fernando High School, do I remember having been forced to do the "cover your head and hide under the lecture chair" routine. (We had fire drills as well.) I visualized there being a bright flash, probably from over the hills in the metro area of L.A., and wondered what the aftermath would be like. I probably didn't think about it a whole lot otherwise.
I have all my life resented (that seems the most accurate word) horror movies. I think the only one I ever sat through was Rosemary's Baby, and I meditated through most of it (I peeked at the sex scenes).
I don't understand why people put up with that crap, much less pay money, or spend time, watching it. Just walking down a street in the USA can be horrific enough for me.
About 1965ish, I used to regularly take evening walks in my San Fernando Valley residential area and appreciate the peacefulness and family togetherness of it all, but I couldn't fail to notice the glare and flashing of the idiot boxes emanating from most homes--I've hardly watched TV most of my life since around that time (The series MASH stands out as a typical exception.) I gravitated to more rural areas as well.
Visited my parents in the 70s at Christmas holidays, took a long walk through residential streets of North Hollywood on Christmas Day. NOBODY was on the sidewalks for miles and miles. One little kid had gotten a football for Christmas and was alone in an unfenced front yard with it. I felt sorry for him and about the whole God-dammed worsening mess as well. I wanted to call out to him and play catch a little, for the lonely kid's sake, but I was AFRAID to! I feared someone would accuse me of being a child molester or something. I just walked on my way, sad and confused.
This was near the neighborhood I had grown up in, less than 100 yards from a park I used to regularly play in with my childhood friends, on Christmas day.
Have never had a nuclear event nightmare. Mine are about dealing with fascists. They ruin the following day or a good part of it if I am not scheduled into more constructive duties that take my mind off it.
I remember, decades ago having come to the conclusion that if it came to imminent nukedom, I’d go outside and face it.
And every day, over all those decades, around 30,000 children have had their light extinguished through starvation or preventable disease. Every. Day.
And it's all fixable.
larouchepac.com
Gary, let's not talk about dear old lyn, who used to run under the slogan "I will WIN WARS."
I grew up in the Valley too. My nuke dreams tend to center around the suburb of Canoga Park. There, an emergency shelter -- with the nuke symbol at the entrance -- used to have its entrance in the old Topanga Plaza parking lot.
That place always had a frightening mystique for me when I was very young. I always used to wonder what it looked like inside.
It's gone now. Of course, it never offered any actual protection, since the nearby Rocketdyne plant would probably be a target.
jen, I want to thank you very much for your eloquent recollections. You're right to bring up Iran. Indeed, we may be closer to WWIII now that an any time in our history, and we're all too busy paying attention to an election to notice.
There have been signals that Israel will strike Iran before the next president takes office. Russia has taken an increasingly hard line.
The thing could happen.
I (born 1944) can't recall having any nuclear disaster dreams. The air-raid sirens every Monday, and the alarm blasts shrieking inside the schools for detention drills were frightening enough. Grown, my Sociology professor played Bob Dylan's 'Talking World War Three Blues" for us in 1963. Were she still reporting here, dr elsewhere might suggest that Joseph heard and repressed that song in his childhood. I explored Western Pennsylvania on my motorcycle and discovered abandoned Nike Sites. I made Jonathan Schell's 'The Fate of the Earth' (1982) required reading in my courses. I saw test-blasts in 'The Atomic Cafe' that sent old WW2 battleships hurtling into the sky end-over-end. I watched right-wing idiots like Pat Buchanan in the 1990s laughingly dismiss Dr. Sagan's 'nuclear winter', confusing it with 'global warming' issues, by saying "it never happened, did it?" Last week I watched Robert Osborne and Rose McGowan on Turner Classic Movies trash-talking about Stanley Kubrick's oeuvre, after they screened his 'Paths of Glory', raving about that film, also about his 'Lolita', while saying his other work is over-rated, though Osborne praised the very-early 'The Killing' as Rose looked uncomprehending - neither of them mentioning 'Dr. Strangelove'. I mean, huh?
Listen to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhAJskamNC4
NatFan
You had to be there, and more importantly, paying attention, but the '80s and Reagan saw nuclear tensions and fears spike up to near-critical levels.
It's what put millions of people into the streets in protest in the nuclear freeze movement.
Why? Because the Reagan people talked openly of winning nuclear wars, that 'with enough shovels' (to dig into the dirt, which would be all we'd need to survive) we'd all make it, and not to worry, after about 3 years after a nuclear war, we'd be a functioning industrial society again. It was so bad that crazed Sec. State Al Haig was the SANE one, relative to his colleagues who talked of firing a nuclear bomb 'across the bow' of the USSR as a warning shot. At the same time, we were deploying several kinds of enemy command decapitation/first strike capable weaponry: the Trident SLBMs, the MX ICBM, the Pershing IIs (8 minutes flight time to Moscow), etc.
Our top leadership was oblivious to the Soviets' extreme reaction to all of this. Robert Gates, Bill Casey's deputy director, in his memoir, described how shocked they all were to later find out that the Soviets seriously expected an imminent pre-emptive strike with nukes.
IMO, the freeze movement which showed millions in our allies opposed to our nuclear posture as well as millions of our own citizens in the streets, the effect of 'The Day After,' etc., literally pulled the world back from the precipice.
Contrary to the Reagan apologists' line that Reagan's bellicosity cowed the Soviets into surrender in the Cold War, the will of the people forced him to back off the nuclear policies, talk to the Soviets, and re-begin the detente-era arms limitations talks that he had said were a waste of time that locked in American military inferiority. A modest improvement from the Soviet opinion that they'd be nuked in the short term was the precondition for lessening tensions.
The KAL 007 US provocation was the critical turning point, or one of them. Despite its providing an excellent casus bellum, the Reagan administration blinked, limiting the response beyond rhetoric to denying Aeroflot landing rights in the US.
...sofla
As a very small child uring WW2, in England I remember hearing the sound of bombs dropping in our city, from the relative safety of the bomb shelter in our garden. Yet I never have dreamed (or don't remember dreaming) of anything related to that time.
I have dreamed of a nuclear explosion though. The dream stayed with me too, and usually they don't. I was in a restaurant at the top of a high building with windows all around, and I saw the mushroom cloud rising in the distance. I said to my companion "This is the end, isn't it?" - and woke up.
I've had other dreams of disaster too - earthquake in particular. And dreams where I've been walking in a long line of what seemed like refugees, or lying in a field with many other people, as though having escaped from something nasty.
I came to the conclusion that these dreams are a sign of anxiety arising from some aspect of life, manifesting as dreams with a theme of common anxiety causing elements.
On the other hand, the dreams might be prophetic - but I doubt it.
I grew up in the 60's with the hide under your desk like a turtle drills and commercials. I couldn't see how that little bit of wood could provide much shelter from the bomb blasts shown on TV. I was terribly distraught when I tried to talk to my dad about building a bomb shelter -- he was a very poor farmer. His take was that if an atomic bomb fell and obliterated our environment, there would be nothing left and he would rather be dead too. Who would want to live in the wasteland that would be left? As I wrestled around with that idea I began to come to terms with it and decided that it was probably more comforting than facing the horror of how to survive in the aftermath.
I've often wondered how that early indoctrination into fear of the 'most powerful unknown' has effected our lives and beliefs. Were we vastly changed because of it?
I've talked with my children (born early 70's) who have always lived with the nuclear threat, but they never have had the same fears. They did not experience the 'turtle' drills (and laugh at them). There take is more 'that's part of life accept it and go on'.
I haven't had nuclear nightmares for many, many years. My nightmares deal with things that I consider more real threats such as the well-being of my family member that is Iraq right now. And the fear that my grandchildren will end up in an Iraq-type situation if we cannot regain control of our government for the people instead of the powerful.
I've never heard this talked about before but I have had a dream since I was 12 (born 1943) and have it about twice a year since and it is about the aftermath of a holocaust, with a city in the distant completely liquidated and a few of us trudging along in rags by the remains of a stone wall. I cannot begin to describe what i feel in the dream, everything is lost, the world is destroyed and I have no idea where I'm going. No birds, no water in sight and I don't know the people with me. Planes fly overhead creating more smoke and fire.
Over fifty years of this nightmare. And it is always the same.
My granddaughter (14) tells me her nightmares are all about global warming and a parched planet with nothing to drink.
JOE, dream real. Past Sun night had dream of explosion daytime Miami very vivid very real very untypical for my dreaming, last almost same dream was years ago. It is possibly a prophecy of real event. My experience supports probabilities dream is real forecast.
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