Nuclear Cleansing

MORNING OF AUGUST 2, 2009

I was watching some movie in which world leaders decided it would be a good idea to intentionally nuke the entire earth. The idea was that humans could stay in high tech, previously secret underground bunkers for a short period of time, and when they came back out, the earth would be renewed and we could start over. Sort of a perverse "Noah's Ark" concept.

There were, of course, a handful of main characters that the movie was following. We saw them go, with many other people, into the underground bunkers. They watched on video screens as nukes took out all the major cities, etc.

It was around this time that I was suddenly among the people in the bunkers instead of just watching it like a movie. A disembodied female voice coming from a speaker system announced that the earth had now been successfully renewed and everyone could go above ground again.

The earth looked fantastic. The skies were lush blue with beautiful clouds,and all of nature was vibrant and scenic. I couldn't believe that everything could heal like this so quickly after a nuclear holocaust. I remember looking at a pair of Canadian geese by a lake and feeling glad that some animals had survived. I wondered if there might have even been separate bunkers the animals had been sent to (I hoped so). There was a large but humble complex built on this beautiful plain that the particular colony of people I was a part of were to live in together, so we entered it at this time.

Somewhere in all of this, the female voice had told us that many people had been sent automatically to re-emerge in the state they had always dreamed of living in. One of the main characters from earlier had been sent to Alaska, but his love interest was in the group I was in. Somehow I was watching his plight, as though part of this were still just a movie to me. He decided he'd trek the miles to find his love again. His Alaskan colony warned him it would be dangerous travel, as some of the areas he'd pass through would not have healed from the nuclear devastation yet. He said it would be worth it.

The rest of the dream I just sort of vaguely recall adjusting to life on the new earth. I felt sad and melancholy about the loss of everything old. I also wondered what would happen when people got sick, as we'd lost much of our medical technology (along with most other kinds of technology) and were starting over almost from square one. Then I wondered if the high tech bunkers we'd stayed in before might be used as places to access technology when needed.

I had an old TV set and and old VCR in the room I was staying in at the compound. Some old Looney Tunes cartoons were on the TV, and I was trying to transfer them to video tape, because I wanted to make sure they were preserved, since most of the copies had likely been destroyed. The quality on both the TV and the recordings I was making was really horrible, though. I remember a commerical came on during the cartoons that featured Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy around a Christmas tree.

The last memory I have is that some other tribe of people suddenly showed up at our complex. I wondered how many other wandering tribes there were, and if we'd have room for all of them.