Radioactive dreams

Another in my recent slew of intensely vivid dreams occurred the other night. I'm not sure what brought it about, but I dreamt that there was a nuclear war. The plot of my dream played very closely to that of the 1980s TV movie The Day After -- which I remember watching as a kid and being alternately petrified of and fascinated by (something that I think pretty much sums up a key component of my personality.) Anyway, I remember that we were at Heidi's grandparents' house and I distinctly remember the mushroom clouds -- they looked just like they did in The Day After. Windows broke, the blast wave came across the town and then it was over. After that, the sun was shining and cars were driving and it looked just fine, but I knew that the radiation level was too high -- it was all a ruse.

I looked up what it meant to dream of a nuclear bomb and according to the dream interpretations site that I frequently go to in cases like this. This is what it said:

• 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'm not sure what to make of that -- I'd like to chalk it up to my deeply embedded fear of nuclear war. It's one I don't consciously think of much anymore, but the thought of nuclear war just petrified me as a kid. During the 80s, before the Cold War started to thaw a little bit, I lived in fear that I'd wake up in the middle of the night with the air raid sirens going off, ICBMs inbound from the Soviet Union. Saying that makes it sound like I thought of nothing else, which isn't true, of course, but it was a very real fear that I had. I remember being in college and waking up in the middle of the night to the sounds of the civil defense sirens and all that same 10 year old boy fear welled right back up, even though by then, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Cold War was pretty much over. I didn't even think of tornadoes, which would be a really common reason for civil defense sirens to be going off in Iowa, I thought of nuclear annihalation.

When I was in the 8th grade, I did a research paper on the effects of an atomic blast. There was a book that I got from the library from which I did a lot of my research called Nuclear War in the 1980s? Of course, completely dated now, but how I'd like to get my hands on a copy of that book for my late 20th century history library that I've managed to accrue.

(image courtesy Wikipedia)