I posted last time about what turned up when I searched Kelly Bulkeley’s Sleep and Dreams database for dreams that mentioned “UFO” (17 reports, of what seem to have been 15 distinct dreams) and “flying saucers” (4). I also did a search for “alien,” and here the harvest was considerably more plentiful.
I found a total of 105 dreams about “aliens,” counting only those that used the word to refer to space aliens, and not to “aliens” from other countries. (There were a few dreams in this latter category, but not many.)
By and large, the dreams were frightening, the aliens threatening. In this respect, they were like the “UFO” dreams–and unlike the “flying saucer” dreams, where the saucers seemed to be comforting and to have religious overtones. Hardly surprising. Aliens in the cinema are normally invaders, threats to human existence or at least our well-being. (Think of the 1979 film that’s titled, simply, “Alien.”) That’s the way they often appear in our dreams.
“In the sky I see spaceships coming toward us,” one dreamer reported. “It’s an alien invasion….the ships have long tubes and wings….What do we do?….They try to round us up, make us prisoners, but I and others escape….we hide, continually moving as other people become their [meaning “our”?] helpers and tell people where to go….at one point I’m hiding in a little kitchen pantry or stairwell….then we find a room where we can be relatively safe….but then outside we see someone is floating down a river towards some falls, they’re in danger….do we save them?….someone tries to get them while the rest of us hide.”
A 31-year-old man, asked about the worst nightmare he could remember, recalled being “eight years old, sharing a bedroom with my brother and sister, and ‘waking up’ to aliens in the room attempting to kidnap us.” The survey was taken in 2010; the man would have been eight years old in 1987. This was the year that Whitley Strieber’s Communion, which opens with Strieber waking in the middle of the night to find his bedroom invaded by uncanny abducting beings, dominated the best-seller charts.
Several other dreams draw on the “alien abduction” tradition. A 59-year-old man remembered his “worst nightmare”: “I dreamed that aliens had emerged from wall by my bed and were dragging me away, back with them. I woke shaking with fear and silently screaming. It was weeks before I was free of the dread and shock. Even tho this dream occurred nearly 15 years ago, I can still feel the shock and horror of it.” In 1995, the approximate date of the dream, abductions were at the height of their cultural visibility.
A man in England–no further details given–was asked for his most recent dream. “I am in my primary school,” he responded. “There were aliens in spaceships flying around outside, trying to get in. I was running around the school making sure that all the windows were closed and locked. Suddenly I remember a door at the bottom of the stairs that was still unlocked and I started down the stairs to close it. As I came around the bend in the stars I ran into aliens coming up the stairs.”
He added: “In retrospect I think I may have experienced an alien abduction at this point.”
Children seem particularly vulnerable to dreams of alien abduction. A 9-year-old girl, asked about her most memorable dream, remembered when “I was 5 and I dreamed of an alien mouse that came to my house and wanted to take me away. I screamed and he left and I woke up.”
In 2011, a 17-year-old girl recalled the following:
“when i was in second grade i had a nightmare that i got abducted by aliens. In the dream i was going to sleep and as i lay in my bunk bed i saw these really weird footprints on the top of my ceiling. In reality they were deer hoof prints but in my dreams they were unrecognizable and i was afraid. there was a strange light coming from downstairs so i went down to see it and there were aliens. I don’t remember the actual abduction part but I was really really afraid. When i woke up i was even more afraid. I still believed that the aliens were still following me and i refused to stand in the same place for an extended period of time because i thought the aliens were following me underneath the ground and sorta like in those old cartoons they’d saw a hole around me and I would fall through into their clutches.”
It really interests me that the little girl’s fear persisted after she woke up. Also that in the dream, and also in her waking fears, the menace came not from above but from below.
The penetration of the home by the aliens, their coming through doors and windows, is a recurrent theme. (Does it plug into the image of an “alien mouse”?) A 63-year-old man remembered his earliest childhood dream as being of “opening back door and seeing aliens.” “Dreams about windows and faces (often distorted or alien) in windows and mirrors,” was a 28-year-old man’s response to the same question, of his earliest remembered dream.
“I was six or seven,” said a 23-year-old woman, “when I dreamed that my mom had died and come back to life looking like an alien, except only I could see her. I remember first seeing her in her closet, and then she followed me into the rest of the house.”
Mom turned alien … scary; and it’s all too understandable that a 62-year-old man remembers his worst nightmare as being of “people I know and love in my life being something other than what they seem, alien.”
The aliens may be those around you. On at least one occasion, the alien is you. “My sister and I are aliens crash landed on earth,” one man writes in his dream journal about his dream from the night before. To survive, they must steal money and food, fight off soldiers who attack them on huge weaponized cars. “Eventually my power wanes and I can no longer throw them off me. I am overcome.”
Two recurrent features caught my attention. In four of the dreams, the alien is likened to an octopus or experienced as having tentacles. “We were standing next to a plant,” a woman wrote in her dream journal, “and all of a sudden the plant turned into an alien with one large eye in the middle. It was trying to get us because it had about eight arms.”
In H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, the Martian invaders resemble octopi. Do these octopus-alien dreams testify to the enormous impact Wells’ nightmare vision still has on our collective awareness? Or to an association that comes straight from the human unconscious, which contributed to the shaping of Wells’ horrific masterpiece? I’d pick the latter option. The apparent foreshadowing of Wells’ Martians in the human-eating giant squids of his short story “The Sea Raiders,” published two years before The War of the Worlds, points in that direction.
The other feature, which leads indirectly back to The War of the Worlds, is an association with the Holocaust.
A woman dreams of a classroom with “a dry erase board with Soko’s ‘I Thought I Was An Alien’ lyrics. They make me think about the holocaust for some reason.” Another woman: “I am in danger. There are aliens and we must run. … We take a deep breath and start walking briskly down the sidewalk. … I think I carry a child or two in my arms. We are like fleeing Jews.”
If you’ll reread the first dream I quoted in this post, I think you’ll sense in it the same fleeing-Jews atmosphere as in this woman’s dream. Or in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 remake of The War of the Worlds, which Australian film critic Paul Byrnes called “a Holocaust movie that never mentions Jews or Nazis.”
Byrnes wrote, for the Sydney Morning Herald:
“The story of aliens attacking the US has obvious contemporary resonance, but the 9/11 allusions are skin deep. Beneath that is an older and more painful scar. This is the movie in which Spielberg makes us all Jews. …
“You could watch it and never know that’s what it’s about, but you will still feel what it’s like to be hunted down and killed without warning or remorse, or herded into an industrially conceived extermination camp in which human blood becomes a form of fertiliser. This is more than a scary movie, as scary as it is. It’s about an unspeakable horror that we don’t have to imagine, just remember. …
“Aliens are us. We have done these things already.”
From celluloid collective dreams to those we screen nightly inside our skulls–we’re menaced by aliens. We are the aliens. Attention must be paid.
by David Halperin
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I have had nightmares of alien abduction and invasion since the age of 2. Long before I ever saw a movie about aliens. They were the Greys! Terrifying nightmares! I had then until I was 26 when I was at work one day in a saw mill and a heavy, large piece of wood smashed my thumb where I believed an implant was, due to an exray I had gotten years before. I’m 44 now and not a nightmare since.
Thanks for posting, Josette!