15 Reader Responses

1. Gyrus Says:
   October 26th, 2006 at 5:06 pm

   Michael Ortiz Hill’s book Dreaming the End of the World is fantastic for thinking about, through, and with the dream aspect of The Bomb. He collected loads of dreams about nuclear holocaust and through the book discerns a consistent “landscape” that they’re all tapping into. My nuclear bomb dreams were certainly windows onto the same landscape, and this one seems to be, too.

   An interesting part of his thesis is that image of The Bomb in dreams has a continuity with how we feel about and envision ecological apocalypse - a threat that doesn’t have the same iconic representation as nuclear apocalypse does (clustered around the mushroom cloud of course). Aspects like the fallout and the poisoning of the Earth he sees as ways the psyche is using The Bomb to image ecological problems.

2. Tim Boucher Says:
   October 26th, 2006 at 9:00 pm

   Awesome. Somebody else has referenced that in the past as well. Sounds cool. Also check out Edward Edinger’s “Archetype of the Apocalypse” which is an excellent Jungian look at the End of the World.

3. fuj Says:
   October 27th, 2006 at 3:56 am

   Tim, how do you interpret the dream? To me it sounds like a reflection of what you’re doing in waking life. An acting out, or a fantasy?

4. Gary Says:
   October 27th, 2006 at 7:40 am

   It may be sophmoric to quote lyrics, but O!, non christian god, how I love this song!

   I’m mixing up a bunch of magic stuff
   A magic mushroom cloud of care
   A potion that’ll rock, the boat will rock
   And make a bomb of love and blow it up

   I did it
   Do you think I’ve gone too far?
   I did it
   Guilty as charged
   I did it
   It was me right or wrong
   I did it
   Yeah

   I never did a single thing that did a single thing
   To change the ugly ways of the world
   I didn’t know it felt so right inside
   I didn’t know it all
   I opened up the curtains
   I heard sirens there, the lights flash and crawl
   But I did it justice
   I just did it for the buzz, oh

   It’s a nickel or a dime for what I’ve done
   The truth is that I don’t really care
   For such a lovely crime I’ll do the time
   You better lock me up I’ll do it again

   …
   Oh, what I gotta say to you
   You got love
   Don’t turn it down
   Turn it loud
   Let it build
   We got a long way to go
   But you, ya gotta start somewhere

   Go door to door
   Spread the love you got
   You got the love
   You get what you want
   Does it matter where you get it from?
   I for one
   Don’t turn my cheek for anyone
   Unturn your cheek to give your love
   Love to grow

5. unthinkable Says:
   October 27th, 2006 at 7:43 am

   Gyrus: Intrigued by your comment I google for more info about Dreaming the End of the World and stumble upon this wicked site called Dreamflesh and I’m thinking, “I’ll post a link to this on Tim’s site.” And then I see it’s you. Small world.

   Anyway, nice work. In your review you mention 4 recurring themes:

   No Refuge
   Invisible Poison
   Suffering Children
   Mutations

   Are there others (from either the book or your own experience)?

   I’ve long been fascinated (hmm, just noticed the ‘fasci’ in that word) with collective dreamscapes. Do you have any quick links to similar material? I’m having a hard time finding much else of interest. (Forgive me if this is on your website. I’ve not yet had the time to peruse thoroughly.)

   Cheers.

6. unthinkable Says:
   October 27th, 2006 at 7:45 am

   I have to post the author’s caveat you quoted:

   Beware the seduction of the image, mine and others, for the myth of apocalypse seeks to enthrall us into an epic fiction with very real consequences. Beware the fascination with what is larger than life, this vulgar Passion Play that would crucify the world.

   Awesome, and yet I’m still curious. Moth to a flame?

7. Gyrus Says:
   October 27th, 2006 at 8:28 am

   The broad categories that Hill uses to examine these dreams are: Suffering Children, No Refuge, Taking Refuge, Things Fall Apart, Invisible Poison, The Unnatural (i.e. mutations), The World Destroyer (a figure initiating the apocalypse who seems crazed and beyond negotiation), Saving The World, The Emergence of the Sacred, and Compassion.

   I’ve not got time to expand, and obviously just listing them does his subtle analysis no justice! I found it really interesting how he shows that accepting and immersing in the apocalypse in the dream realm often has very positive effects. He quotes a woman, a long-time peace activist, whose nuclear dreams transformed into ecstatic experiences, and she felt that her embracing of the Bomb experience in dreams helped her in her work to campaign against them in real life. It’s a great example of non-literalism in action As Hill says,

   Rather than enacting the apocalypse in the world unconsciously, we deliberately enter the apocalypse in the psyche for the sake of the world.

   I’ve had inklings of this in my own dreams, although my last nuclear dream was a terrifying destruction of London. However, it ran through many the themes Hill picks out: finding refuge in an underground bunker, having to hole up for ages, finding a vulnerable child and protecting her, and her growing up to become an adult who eventually bore a child.

   There’s an obvious death/rebirth cycle here, the archetype of initiation, but after years of studying these things it’s easy to kind of gloss over the reality of these archetypes - they’re almost too blatant to pay close attention to. Hill’s work (and just general paying attention to dreams) is so useful in that it slows attention down and focuses on particulars. In fact, this is another of his “apocalypse themes”: that of paying close attention to small details, being moved by little gestures. I’m sure we all know that kind of experience, either from dreams or from traumatic experiences in real life.

   As for collective dreamscapes… You could try perusing the Association for the Study of Dreams site. There’s also a great book, Among All These Dreamers, edited by Kelly Bulkeley, that looks at various approaches to getting past the Western idea that dreams are just of personal significance. Analysts teaching dream classes in inner city schools, African-American communities using dreams to resolve neighbourhood conflicts, loads of fascinating stuff. Also look up “Social Dreaming”, a concept from W. Gordon Lawrence.

8. brekin Says:
   October 27th, 2006 at 11:06 am

   Robert Jay Lifton has written extensively about the bomb and disossication, The Protean Self, Life after Hiroshima, He believes that people to differing degrees can’t be confronted with the continual possibility of their and everyone they know sudden demise, so we have to split off that realization from most of our straight life. But like everything repressed it returns. I know being a child of the late 70’s and 80’s their was the constant fear of nuclear annihilation, hinted at by movies like The Day After to Mad Max. We all know the more locked in fear a people are, the easier they are to control, we think about 9/11 now, but post hiroshima everyone has been operating on the doomsday clock so much that it’s second nature.

9. Gary Says:
   October 27th, 2006 at 12:18 pm

   A wise man once told me why young males love, simply love, to see things blown apart?

   It’s freedom. Freedom from the material world. Subconsciously, people feel trapped by our culture’s confining buildings and its relentless avalanche of consumer goods. So, when they watch all these things this shitbeing demolished in a totally irreverent and devil-may-care fashion, they experience the kind of release the Greeks used to get from their tragedies.

   The ecstasy of psychic liberation.

   Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land. People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permanent space and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and they’re scared to death of that stuff because they know it controls them and restricts their movements. That’s why they relish the boom-boom in cinema and why apocalypse is a delicious fantasy.

   On a symbolic level, it annihilates their inanimate wardens and blows away the walls of their various traps.

   Islamic terrorist groups are successful in attracting volunteer martyrs because the young men get to strap explosives on themselves and blast valuable public property to smithereens. Exhilarating boom-boom power. If they were required to martyr themselves by being dragged behind a bus or sticking a wet finger in a light socket, volunteers would be few and far between. Incidentally, are you aware that there’s no such thing as a smithereen? The word exists only in the plural.

   Or so I heard.

10. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 27th, 2006 at 12:56 pm

    Very interesting analysis of the atomic bomb symbol all around here. But to be honest, the thing that struck me more about this dream was the strange aspects of alternate reality, parallel history and re-enacting someone else’s life. No one has really addressed those but I’d like to see what people think specifically…

11. brekin Says:
    October 27th, 2006 at 3:39 pm

    I thought it was kind of cool how your dream tried to positively rectify a very nightmare scenario from the past/present. I imagine though anyone trying to sabotage or openly protest the secret Manhattan Project would have been swiftly executed as a spy.
    Someone was telling me how Richard Feynman wrote about being ecstatic with everyone else working on the Manhattan Project when they had their first detonation in the desert. So ecstatic that he was playing his bongos on a jeep, but then he noticed one scientist who seemed forlorned. He asked him what was wrong and he said something along the lines, “This isn’t a good thing we’ve done.”

12. unthinkable Says:
    October 27th, 2006 at 6:47 pm

    Thanks, Gyrus.

    Tim, I’ve never liked the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, yet dreams like this make we wonder if maybe it’s possible to observe the wave functions that didn’t collapse. That is, that there is one ‘real’ reality (coherent), and that ‘everything else’ (incoherent) is stored in some kind of cache, and that dreams are like a browser to explore the unreal. Of course, if it can be experienced maybe it’s not unreal at all.

    But we’re not the people to be asking about your alternate world. Next time you’re in an alternate reality, try and set up a blog and ask them what’s going on. Maybe someone will post a link we can click on, y’know?

13. Darkshadow Says:
    October 28th, 2006 at 1:48 pm

    I had a dream somewhat like this, Tim. It wasn’t about the same subject, but I did have the same sort of experience with it. A different universe, and I knew the history leading up to where I was (I think, though, that it was a “current” event rather than history I was in). I was looking through somebody else’s eyes (or, rather, I just knew it wasn’t me in the dream, but someone else I was sharing space with).

    Short synopsis of the dream: The government there (different than ours) had decided to rescind the rights of anyone under the age of 30. Some years before the time I was in the dream. The people under that age rebelled, and a war was going on because of it.

    The most fascinating thing about the dream, to me, was that I could also follow the person’s thoughts as well as see what was going on. And he thought differently than I do. I don’t really think I can explain that very well. The way he thought about things, the way he filtered what was going on to experience, is very different than the way I do. It actually gave me a headache thinking about that part of the dream after I woke up (though I had no problem with it while I was dreaming).

14. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 28th, 2006 at 4:48 pm

    Darkshadow, that’s really odd. Thanks for posting that. Partly it’s odd because when I have these alternate reality dreams, they almost always include some kind of super-repressive government and a group of people resisting them underground.

    There’s a PKD essay where he talks about this phenomenon:

    http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/12/06/alternate-universe-dreams/

    So let us ask, Does any one of us remember in any dim fashion a worse Earth circa 1977 than this? Have your young men seen visions and our old men dreamed dreams? Nightmare dreams specifically, about a world of enslavement and evil, of prisons and jailers and ubiquitous police? I have. I wrote out those dreams in novel after novel, story after story; to name two in which this prior ugly present obtained most clearly I cite The Man in the High Castle and my 1974 novel about the United States as a police state, called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

    I am going to be very candid with you: I wrote both novels based on fragmentary residual memories of such a horrid slave state world — or perhaps the term “world” is the wrong one, and I should say “United States,” since in both novels I was writing about my own country.

    […] I am sure, as you hear me say this, you do not really believe me, or even believe that I believe it myself. But nevertheless it is true. I retain memories of that other world.

15. Darkshadow (aka Mike) Says:
    October 28th, 2006 at 10:43 pm

    I’ve only had that one, so I can’t confirm that. It is interesting, though.

    I felt really bad about the guy in the dream I had though. The under 30’s crowd wasn’t doing very well, at least at the point I dreamed about.