11/5/61
I am standing alone outside my house.... I see a group of aircraft emerge from the cloud cover, just above it. They approach, and I note that they are not typical aircraft or rockets.... They are not like any airplanes I have seen before. No wings are visible, and each machine is gigantic.... Each is shaped like the head of an arrow, V-shaped....
6/12/63
Gasoline is unavailable, electric power has been shut off. there is a great sense of fatality among everyone. It doesn't seem to be the product of atomic war, and there is no concern as to radioactive fallout. There is principally a feeling of doom and the breakup of civilization as we know it due to something momentous having taken place, a factor beyond human control.
My own personal experience with dreams of this type are too numerous to recount here, although one interesting note is that the dreams have changed over time. I'm not a person given to optimism or hope, nor would I characterize the "changes" in the nature of the dreams as "hope," necessarily, but my own conclusion for my ultimate personal fate is that I have already altered it.
For example, I used to have three reoccurring dreams. I don't anymore, but one of them involved being trapped in my own neighborhood during the beginning of a nuclear war as one of the U.S.'s own missles was launched from a silo nearby and either malfunctioned or was deliberately aimed at my neighborhood. I woke up as the missle was striking ground.
In another reoccurring dream, I was at my workplace when some sudden news had broken and a wave of distress was spreading among the employees. I was told that a chemical weapon attack had been launched -- no details about from whom or why -- and sirens outside had begun as we were told to immediately find shelter, but my workplace was on ground level with no obvious place to hide. A number of us decided to flee the workplace and run to the nearest nearby business that might have some type of basement. As we flung open the exit door and ran into the parking lot, I smelled some type of invisible chemical and I immediately couldn't breathe. As I recognized that I was going to die, I woke up. The smell of the chemical and the sounds, events, etc. were all very vivid, textured & visceral.
Later in life, I had several nuclear war dreams, but they had changed and I was farther from the point of impact. And I've never had the "chemical weapon attack" dream again (although when it was "reoccurring," the events repeated, all in sequence, and I recognized during the dream that I knew what was going to happen next, but I could think of no other options during the dream to change the outcome).
Some time ago, after I had made a decision to leave the country for another continent, I had various dreams about a feeling of safety (and horror) upon learning about the complete destruction I'd escaped, and seeing maps of the destruction of places I'd lived.
When I have these types of dreams of escape across great distances, there's also a feeling of euphoria.
I do keep a daily log (not quite a journal) in which I record dreams as often as possible, especially dreams which are vivid or significant. I've found it to be a very worthwhile effort, and it only takes a minute or two upon waking to write down one's dreams.