A Dreamland Armageddon?

Last night I had a dream, and I want to get it out of my head.

Yesterday I had felt distinctly uneasy all day, hadn’t eaten a thing since the previous day, and went to bed very early — even for me.

I don’t know why exactly, but when I woke up after the dream I’m about to describe I think that, just perhaps, I had to have this dream.

If anything, to get it out of my system.

I don’t believe dreams are anything but processing what’s in your memory, what you’ve been thinking about, or what you’ve been exposed to recently in some way so I definitely don’t think it’s a portent of disaster but the angst it’s given me all day, so far, made me write it down and share it.

I wanted to get it out of my head and move it on.

I’m in the business of catharsis you see, especially if you’ve read any of my articles about software engineering, or the future in general.

So, here it is. Forgive the style, I wanted to write it quickly so that my recollection wouldn’t be embellished by me thinking about it too much.

I was sitting in a black leather reclining chair, of some bizarre sort, with wheels and a steering wheel. I could drive it around like a little buggy and was doing so between two houses on a small estate.

The chair swung around pretty violently as I steered it and I was riding it through the streets and across a small tarmac playground, complete with slide and swings, that divided the small housing estate from a main road and some fields.

In one of the houses was a man, further away, and a woman, in the closer house that I could see from the small playground. She was standing in the front room, brightly lit, talking on her mobile phone.

The houses were older, perhaps 1950s, a standard council estate from the UK. I recognised the layout actually, from somewhere I’d visited regularly as a child though not the specific houses I could see.

It was dark, and the light from the houses shone brightly into the clear night. The sky was clear and the air was still and cool.

Suddenly a small plane tore loudly overhead from behind me. It wasn’t your usual large passenger plane, but a smaller one with perhaps 10 or 15 windows down its sides.

It was very low down and I thought it was coming in for some sort of an emergency landing, but it turned quickly at it approached and disappeared briefly over a hill to the east, then reappeared and landed on the (thankfully empty) main road that boarded the small housing estate.

(I guessed it was east I was looking toward as that’s where the light would start to appear from shortly.)

I drove quickly in my leather chair to the outside of the house of the nearest person, seeing them clearly in the window — half obscured by old fashioned net curtains — as I was chatting excitedly on the phone.

Then, suddenly, the lights in the houses went off and everything except the plane was in darkness.

I turned to the east where the sky was beginning to get light, a pinkish hue, some vague orange and wispy clouds, and I headed over the brow of the hill to where a large passenger plane had already landed in a clearing away from the estate of houses.

The plane was side on, I looked at it from the left side, and there were crowds of people both on the plane and looking at it, standing around me.

I somehow realised I was on an island somewhere, with only a small airport, but neither plane seemed to have landed on one. Perhaps the second plane had, maybe that’s why the first one had landed on the road? I couldn’t be sure.

The second plane was large and brightly lit, with many people quickly exiting it, streaming down toward me and the other local people standing around.

I turned to see many of local people with supplies, food, bottles, and huge mounds of toilet paper of all things on tables.

“At least they’ve brought lots of toilet paper!” someone said.

Suddenly there were flashes in the sky, again from the east, pale pink circles high up expanding quickly out from pinpricks in the sky and every time one erupted there was a loud clicking sound.

This might have been interference on the radios, or just in my ears, I just heard the sounds and it was eerie, unusual, and seemed to come from all around me.

Then, from the horizons there were bright white flashes, like a distant lightning storm, but in distinct clusters.

They flickered two or three together, then a pause, then a few more.

I knew they were detonations of nuclear weapons and I now realised why those planes had landed here. I felt the pit of my stomach fall and gasped.

I looked down at my mobile phone in my left hand, it had a pale green wallpaper with a white rectangle to the top left with a line through it indicating no coverage, no signal at all. No wonder I’d lost contact.

Instinctively I turned around away from the plane and ran to where I knew my family were, to the west, and I was quickly running down the street between the houses.

Some cars had stopped in the road, there were puddles of water on the ground which reflected the flashes behind me, they were bright enough now to cast faint shadows of the ground around me of the objects around me.

I ran faster and hoped I would get there in time. I didn’t know what I’d do when I got there, I thought quickly of how to hide in the house, what there was to use, to eat, and how we could survive.

Then, I woke up, worried, my heart racing.

Several things occurred to me as I attempted to rationalise this during my morning walk.

1. I have a strong interest in the Cold War, anything nuclear, and of very dystopian futures including what might happen post-apocalypse.
2. Playing a lot of Fallout¹ certainly fed my curiosity as well as reading far too much of the news lately, too. I guess that all fed into it.
3. There were also pandemic related themes, the food supplies, the supply chains, and the toilet paper especially. That could have been much worse.
4. Funniest thing of all was that I’d also read recently that with so many mobile phones in the world, why don’t they come up in dreams? Well, they did in mine.

That concludes my brief summary, and very terse analysis. I hope it goes some way to making me feel better² and may also provoke some reflection for us all into how dangerously close we might be to some kind of nuclear exchange right now and how seemingly blasé the world seems to be about it.

Personal Aside:

Many people don’t remember how present it used to be, many of the people growing up lack awareness of the Cold War, the brinksmanship, how close accidents and misunderstands brought the world to armageddon in the past.

Now we have all that plus actual wars being conducted by nuclear powers who have vocalised the threat to use them. It’s not Cold and it’s not Hot, it’s somewhere in-between and that’s really not a good place to be.

Perhaps I’m just processing that too, again, and although I didn’t live through the Cuban missile crisis, I did live through the 1980s when the possibility of nuclear war was always there, often made fun of — primarily to process the fear I reckon, and was indeed the golden age of nuclear war related music too.

Oh, and the chilling Protect and Survive³ and the truly wonderful extended versions of Two Tribes too. I could go on, but I’ll save this for another article.

When my thoughts run away with me I find myself buying canned food, bottled water, and wondering how quickly I could barricade rooms, tape up windows, or which room in the house might be the safest.

Thing is, if the worst did happen, I don’t think I’d want to live through it.

[1]: It’s wonderful, and beautiful, you should try it. Especially Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4. I hope they make a 5. [2]: It did, actually, I just re-read it and fixed a few errors with spelling and structure (as you do) and I feel a bit better. Writing works! [3]: Watch the videos on YouTube if you don’t want to sleep. Though more modern people would just laugh at the production values, we know better about the message they contained.