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Dreams of war...

Hospitaller

Ephemeral Spectre
Joined
Aug 29, 2001
Messages
427
Location
Ireland
My significant other has no interest in forteana nor is she versed in the horrors of nuclear war and its aftermath (having spent a childhood of blissful ignorance during the Reagan/Thatcher era and the TV portrayal of the impending threat, i.e., "Threads" "The Day After" etc.)
She has, however, of late had awful dreams of being in what can only be a post-nuclear war scenario without putting that label on it herself.
She has had vivid dreams of "night turning to day in a blinding flash" and subsequently wandering through deserted landscapes dominated by the skeletal superstructures of buildings, of having skin peeling off her face, of seeking shelter in deserted houses and of being "very sick". :eek!!!!: I find the whole thing disconcerting in that she couldn't imagine what might explain the dream scenario until I versed her in the after effects of a nuclear explosion.
The only solace I take is in that:
1. perhaps she did see all of those horrible TV portrayals of the nuclear winter and repressed them completely, and in that
2. one of the dreams featured the cast of "Friends"...
 
She can't not have been exposed to this information at some stage. Even in Ireland ;) She would have absorbed it subconsciously. Dreams have to be "translated" anyway in my experience; they show everything as symbols. What she has to ask herself is 1. How was she feeling when these things happened in the dream, and 2. What could all these symbols mean to her personally.
Or I could be wrong and she's having premonitions and we'll all die horribly.
 
Nuking the cast of Friends is tempting...

Edit
Goddam. Why did nobody point out my spelling mistake? This is me we're talking about, here...
 
Must have been late 80s, early 90s when I had a few very vivid dreams of an end-of-world scenario, with people cramming into bunkers to avoid fallout rather than direct nuclear attack.
More disturbing was one dream in which the Moon was spiralling in to crash with the Earth.
Some of these dreams are obviously a reflection of subconscious fears that might be held by any post-nuclear child, particularly at times of heightened global tension. It will be interesting to discover if apocalyptic dreams undergo a resurgence following Sept 11 and the US policy against terrorism. However, Whitley Strieber, I recall, found vivid disaster dreams correlated well with abduction claimants.
Hmm...perhaps I used to be abducted? Which would explain the dreams, my ease of nosebleed, the odd Old Hag/sleep paralysis experience, a close-up 'helicopter' sighting in early childhood(which no family member could ever remember), recurrent tiger dreams, and that odd scoop-scar on my right shin [- all true]. Now I am getting worried....
 
Freudian psychology has it that the collective unconscious foresees the traumas of subsequent generations.
His patients in the late 19th century described terrible dreams of war and violence which seemed to presage the 1914-18 and subsequent wars.
(This is dealt with in D.M. Thomas's 'The White Hotel' if anyone's interested!)

There are other ways for the collective unconscious to express its disquiet about the future: the Jacobean tragedies, full of terrible violence and cruelty, are seen by Freudians as a sort of society-wide vision of the horrors of the subsequent English Civil War.


Apocalyptic dreams might be a natural part of the collective unconscious, especially after TV coverage of 9-11.

Our dreams can tell us things we don't want to hear when awake.
Maybe your S.O. is beginning to feel vulnerable and worrying about the state of the world.
Don't be surprised if she joins Greenpeace!
 
Hermes said:
Must have been late 80s, early 90s when I had a few very vivid dreams of an end-of-world scenario, with people cramming into bunkers to avoid fallout rather than direct nuclear attack.
More disturbing was one dream in which the Moon was spiralling in to crash with the Earth.
I must have had almost exactly the same dream, at roughly the same time, in which (I think it was a fragment of...) the moon was going to spiral in and collide with the Earth. Scientists were trying very hard to get it back into orbit but until they did we'd all have to keep quiet as any noise could cause it to hit...

Some of these dreams are obviously a reflection of subconscious fears that might be held by any post-nuclear child, particularly at times of heightened global tension. It will be interesting to discover if apocalyptic dreams undergo a resurgence following Sept 11 and the US policy against terrorism. However, Whitley Strieber, I recall, found vivid disaster dreams correlated well with abduction claimants.

Hmm...perhaps I used to be abducted? Which would explain the dreams, my ease of nosebleed, the odd Old Hag/sleep paralysis experience, a close-up 'helicopter' sighting in early childhood(which no family member could ever remember), recurrent tiger dreams, and that odd scoop-scar on my right shin [- all true]. Now I am getting worried....


MEEP! :eek!!!!: Me too! (with the exception of the shin scar, although I have others) Now I'm getting worried!

Niles "Worried" Calder
 
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"Hmm...perhaps I used to be abducted? Which would explain the dreams, my ease of nosebleed, the odd Old Hag/sleep paralysis experience,"
---------------------

I have experienced all of the above. But I would lean toward certain personality types perhaps being more inclined to have these similar experiences, and that the personality profile would be the connecting link, rather than the abduction by aliens being the common factor.

There is an interesting link to a story on the main Fort page (the date the story is posted is 05/24/02, I believe,) about a connection between genius, madness and depression. This would indicate that the mental "landscape" of some people would lead towards some types of mental activity or experiences. I believe depressed people have reported the sleep paralysis phenomena statistically more often than those who do not confess to depressive episodes. (I am recalling this from info I read at Al Cheney's site dealing with sleep paralysis, and could have remembered incorrectly, apologies if I screwed up that fact.)

Anyway, I think that the above listed experiences are happening to a set of people who have a certain psychological profile.

And I would rather settle for the title of "mad genius", or even "depressed genius" than that of "alien abductee." :)

-Sudi
 
There is an H.G. Wells story, " a dream of armaggedon" that is based on a dream he had and is like that.
Which is here.
 
My armegeddon day....

I had my own little apocylpse scenario one bright Sunday morning whilst dozing in bed.

First I'll digress by explaining a quirk of mine that occurs whilst dozing: If a loud or abrupt sound occurs I often get a dazzling rush of bright white speckly light blasted into my visual cortex powerfull enough to wake me up. I put this down to a crossover of sensory input, perhaps in the thalamus that sends auditory messages to the visual and auditory parts of the brain at the same time (a sort of sensory cross-wire) A few people I've spoken to about this don't know what I'm on about, but I daresay it happens to many people. Anyhow to continue:

In the mid-eightees when I was a teenager and the Cold War loomed I honestly believed in the high probability of a nuclear exchange before the end of the decade. I'd seen "Day After" and similar films and enjoyed post-apocyliptic novels, although like many, feared the potential of a war occurring.

Anyhow I'm dozing in bed on a Sunday morning and suddenly I'm blasted into wakefullness by a loud, but clipped explosive sound, accompanied by the light "flash" I described that occasionally occurs. A split second later a very noisy fridge I had in the room cut-out. Added to this the normally noisy neighbourhood was dead quiet.

Living just a few kilometres from the city centre my addled brain calculated that I only had a few moments to live before the shockwave or firestorm collected the house I was living in. With my heart pacing I braced for the moment of truth. Needless to say the seconds ticked by, nothing happened and I had a very pleasant day.

It turns out the noise was a blast from the cannister of a low flying hot air balloon (they used to have dawn flights over the city from a park nearby). The fridge just happened to turn itself off at that particular moment, having reached its cold threshold.
 
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