Dream: Nuclear war *again*?
Earlier this morning I had an intense lucid dream about helping people prepare a nuclear bomb shelter -- or what was supposed to be a nuclear bomb shelter -- under a large house in an area that could have been the northern part of the Los Angeles Basin, say, in the Hollywood Hills. (BTW, if you've got Google Earth, fire it up and put "Los Angeles, CA" in its search engine, and it will show you that area -- and why it's called the Los Angeles Basin. It is. It really is a basin. Cliffs and foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains -- small but respectable mountains in their own right -- surround it at the north and east, the Pacific to the south and much of the west, with only relatively narrow strips of land leading out of it at the northeast and southwest. On Google Earth it looks like the basin it is, something gouged out of the Earth by tectonic forces, a bowl with mountains and the Pacific Ocean for rims.)
The house, located in a middle-class or upper-middle class neighborhood, was on a low rise overlooking the plain below, where cities and suburbs clustered thickly. The shelter, such as it was, which was under the house, was capped with a "roof" of concrete and dirt beneath the house and above a hastily-dug basement shelter. It was open on at least two sides, however, which wouldn't have helped much in the event of nuclear war, and given the overpressure generated by a hydrogen bomb (on an urban area that size, an atomic bomb just wouldn't do; only a thermonuclear device could have done the job on it), that "roof" would have been as fragile as an eggshell, or even more so, by several orders of magnitude. And what was left of the hotly-blazing house after that would have collapsed into the shelter, crushing everything in it, assuming there was anything left there to crush.
We knew when it was supposed to happen: in a week to 10 days, on the 8th of some month that was probably September, given the very warm weather and general look of the sky and everything around the house at the internal time of the dream. So we had plenty of time to prepare, which is absolutely ridiculous, because you wouldn't get two days of warning about a coming nuclear war, let alone 7-10 days!
We had wet clay to put on our faces, and I was trying to get people to put white sheets up over those gaping openings at the rim of the shelter, which, if nothing else, would reflect at least a little of the light from the Bomb. (Come to think of it, though, why not several layers of aluminum foil over Masonite/rockwool slabs, which would have lasted longer and worked far better? Never thought of it.) In the house above the shelter, I was taking down fragile things and putting them "securely" under large pieces of furniture such as chests of drawers on four legs with fairly big empty areas beneath them -- another bit of stupidity, because you can bet that inside that house, above the shelter, nothing would be left after it was hit with the blast, shock, thermal pulse, and other electromagnetic radiation emitted by the Bomb.
I've had a lot of dreams about the outbreak or threatened outbreak of nuclear war, but this is the first truly stupid one I've ever had. {Sigh}
The house, located in a middle-class or upper-middle class neighborhood, was on a low rise overlooking the plain below, where cities and suburbs clustered thickly. The shelter, such as it was, which was under the house, was capped with a "roof" of concrete and dirt beneath the house and above a hastily-dug basement shelter. It was open on at least two sides, however, which wouldn't have helped much in the event of nuclear war, and given the overpressure generated by a hydrogen bomb (on an urban area that size, an atomic bomb just wouldn't do; only a thermonuclear device could have done the job on it), that "roof" would have been as fragile as an eggshell, or even more so, by several orders of magnitude. And what was left of the hotly-blazing house after that would have collapsed into the shelter, crushing everything in it, assuming there was anything left there to crush.
We knew when it was supposed to happen: in a week to 10 days, on the 8th of some month that was probably September, given the very warm weather and general look of the sky and everything around the house at the internal time of the dream. So we had plenty of time to prepare, which is absolutely ridiculous, because you wouldn't get two days of warning about a coming nuclear war, let alone 7-10 days!
We had wet clay to put on our faces, and I was trying to get people to put white sheets up over those gaping openings at the rim of the shelter, which, if nothing else, would reflect at least a little of the light from the Bomb. (Come to think of it, though, why not several layers of aluminum foil over Masonite/rockwool slabs, which would have lasted longer and worked far better? Never thought of it.) In the house above the shelter, I was taking down fragile things and putting them "securely" under large pieces of furniture such as chests of drawers on four legs with fairly big empty areas beneath them -- another bit of stupidity, because you can bet that inside that house, above the shelter, nothing would be left after it was hit with the blast, shock, thermal pulse, and other electromagnetic radiation emitted by the Bomb.
I've had a lot of dreams about the outbreak or threatened outbreak of nuclear war, but this is the first truly stupid one I've ever had. {Sigh}