Dreams of UFOs and “Flying Saucers” – the Kelly Bulkeley Dossier

“Laying on our couch, seem to be half awake and half asleep and seeing different colored lights through the window and UFO’s were all over the sky and floating around the houses all over town.  I was screaming in my dream for my husband to help.  He and my son were in the room watching TV and I kept moaning and finally yelled out loud and they woke me up.  It scared me to death it seemed so real.”

The speaker is a 57-year-old woman, asked in a 2010 survey to “describe the worst nightmare you can remember, from any period in your life.”  Hers is one of the dreams that turned up when I searched for “UFO” on Kelly Bulkeley’s Sleep and Dreams Database, which I drew on for my previous post about the dreams people have of Donald Trump.

The raw terror the dream evoked in this woman is striking.  To cry out aloud in your sleep, you have to be really scared.  What I also find striking, and very odd, is that the UFOs don’t seem to be doing anything that might account for that terror.  Their presence alone is deeply frightening.

My search turned up 17 dream reports that use the word “UFO,” although I think these are really 15 dreams of which two are described twice.  In most of them the UFOs are felt as menacing or frightening, though often–as in the dream I just quoted–without performing any act that’s overtly hostile.  Take this dream, reported as a “nightmare” without any information provided on the dreamer:

“Aliens were creating some kind of shrine by creating huge pillars out of thin air.  The UFOs were massive.  They sent out drones to scout houses with bright lights.  I called Tara frantically and got disconnected at the end.”

Or this one, described by a 27-year-old female dreamer in response to the question, “describe your most recent dream”:

“The last dream I had was last night, early this morning.  The dream consisted of me being visited by aliens.  I was at my mother’s home with my mom, sisters & brother.  I was looking outside through the kitchen and saw a bright light and a UFO.  I ran into my mom’s room to pretend I was asleep with the covers over my face.  I was terrified because I felt some was by side [sic] watching me.  Then I woke up because I felt it was real.”

Once again the “bright light,” and the frightening sense of being watched (and hiding under the covers).  As in the first dream, the dreamer sees the UFO through a window.  Is this detail significant, particularly in connection with the dreamer’s fear?  Back in 2011, a man whom I’ve known for many years told me about how, as a kid, he was afraid to look out through the windows of his house because he might see a UFO.  He wasn’t at all scared of seeing a UFO in the sky while he was outside.  There was something about seeing through a window that frightened him.

The dream of a Ukrainian man:

“I am going from Borispol to Kiev. I see car headlights in back of me and a barrier in front. I get through the barriers. Then I see a UFO flying. It pours liquid from tanks down on the earth. People see this and hide. I also hide in a metro. But the trains don’t move. I try to get home by walking through the tunnels. None of my phone calls home get through because the lines are busy. An old man tells me that there is an epidemic of “windy hills”; people fall dead for no reason. I leave the metro and catch a bus home. It is full of people, most of them in protective clothes. I see my brother; we are scared. Aliens arrive and handcuff us, and intend to make injections.”

Here the UFOs are openly hostile; and as in the UFO-shrine dream, part of the dream’s terror seems to lie in the dreamer’s inability to communicate.  Also paralysis of movement: he comes up against a barrier, and “the trains don’t move.”

Asked whether he’d ever had a dream in which he knew he was dreaming, a 49-year-old man replied that he had, but it was “years ago.”  This was his dream:

“I was outside with others I couldn’t see around me. They said ‘Look UFO’s are coming.’   I saw them and we ran into a house. The UFO’s were firing around the neighborhood and everyone had gone off to hide. I went to the window at the end off the hall on the second floor. [That “window” again!–DJH]  I saw the craft coming towards the house. And at some point, as it was coming, I said ‘This is a dream and you have no power here. Go and never bother me again.’  It stopped and flew off.  I eventually went outside and saw a clear sky, and woke up.”

A 46-year-old man was asked to “describe the first dream you remember from childhood.”  This was that dream–which the man said was also his “worst nightmare.”

“An alien came down from the sky and cut off my friend Doug’s head as we walked home from school.  Doug’s body picked up the head and the head continued to talk.  It was a nightmare back then; now it’s like seeing an old friend when it recurs.  I first had this dream in 1969 when I was six; the UFO craze was going on then.”

How strange: a dream so terrifying, transformed by recurrence into an “old friend.”  I wonder whether Doug and the dreamer stayed six years old in the dream’s later iterations, or whether they grew in the dream as they did in reality.

“It was a dark night at the beach,” a Brazilian man reported when asked about his most recent dream.  “I was walking on the sand. Suddenly, I saw some UFOs flying near the place where I was walking. Nobody got off, but I became scared and started to run into those high sand hills, jumping nervous and frightened over the dunes. I was very much afraid of falling down and hurting myself because the funds [? he must mean “dunes”] were so high. I had cold feelings in my stomach each time I jumped, but nothing happened. Suddenly, I felt that one of them could catch me. I tried to escape even more anxiously. I tried to run but couldn’t move, and had to remain in the same place.”  Here’s the immobility theme once more, and the fear of the UFO blended with the dreamer’s fear of falling from the heights.

And now a most extraordinary one, reported by a Japanese woman:

“I am outside under the sky.  I am with my husband looking up at the sky.  Suddenly, we see a UFO–an unidentified flying object. I become very close with my husband under the influence of the UFO.  It is as if I am breathing through him, as if we have one body.  We both rise and meet the UFO.  Then I realize that I can no longer breathe for both of us!  I become terrified and start to breathe for myself alone.”

I suspect that this is the most profound of all the UFO dreams, and the most instructive.  For C.G. Jung, who devoted a chapter of his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky to analyzing people’s dreams of UFOs, the round, shining object was what he called a mandala.  UFOs were “impressive manifestations of totality whose simple, round form portrays the archetype of the self, which as we know from experience plays the chief role in uniting apparently irreconcilable opposites.”  The “uniting of opposites” is the UFO’s role in this dream: fusing male and female into one body and one breath.  (Which is the way we were at the beginning, according to Plato’s myth, before the gods split us into two sexes.)

Restored to primordial totality, the man and woman “rise and meet the UFO.”

But this fusion, though longed for, is also terrifying.  The dreamer can’t maintain it and survive; she has to pull away.  Is this, and not the threat of extraterrestrial ray-guns, the real source of the dread that people seem regularly to experience when they dream about UFOs?

That is, the UFO stands for their absorption into something greater than themselves, which would mean their individual annihilation.  “I can no longer breathe for both of us!  I become terrified and start to breathe for myself alone.”

* * * * *

I searched also for “flying saucer” in Bulkeley’s database.  I expected that, if the term came up at all–it’s been obsolete since about the early 1970s, displaced by “UFO”–it would yield the same kind of dream as “UFO.”  Why shouldn’t it?  “Flying saucers” and “UFOs” are the same thing, aren’t they?

I was in for a surprise.

I found four dreams that mentioned flying saucers.  One spoke of seeing flying saucers in the sky; no details.  Another (by a man) spoke of “looking at a book on dreams.  Flying saucers. … I read some more and it scares me a little so I put it down, not wanting to damage my lucid dreaming work.”  The setting was the dreamer’s house, with “curtains closed but light coming in,” so I wonder if this can be added to the dossier on the “window” theme.

So far, we seem to be in the same territory as with the UFOs, including the fear the idea arouses.  Not so in the other two dream reports, which were far longer and more detailed.

“I had arrived at a train station and was departing the platform area when I overheard persons talking excitedly about the fact that the Christ was about to appear, immediately outside the railroad station.  I left the station to discover many persons assembling along the streets in order to get a glimpse of the Christ as he passed by.  I ran to a place on an adjacent side street where I believed that I would have an advantage in seeing him.  I saw a man walking down the street, dressed in a white tunic like in biblical movies.  At first I think that it’s the Christ, but as I take a closer look, I realize that he is not.  Next I hear the sound of horses’ hooves striking the pavement.  I look over to the main street and see very noble looking persons trotting along the street through the crowds on powerful horses.  I presume that they are announcing that the Christ is about to appear.  So I start to walk across the parking lot to the main road.   As I do, I see a flying saucer in the distance [sic] sky fast approaching.  I am awe struck!”  (Reported by an American man; no further details about the dreamer provided.)

“(I had a marvelous dream.)  A flying saucer entered my dormitory room.  Out stepped a marvelous and beautiful being who told me not to run away.  It was there to verify something about my daughter.  Later, I saw the flying saucer and the beautiful being in a church while I was looking at a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  The being had enormous eyes.  I had no notion of space or time, but had a very emotional and memorable reaction to the image.  I knew that the image of this being would always be present to cure me and help me, because I felt so much love coming from it.  I knew it had also discovered something helpful about my daughter.”  (Reported by an Argentinian woman; no further details provided.)

Now, this is what I call remarkable.  When people dream about “UFOs,” they tend to be ominous, frightening.  Their dreams about “flying saucers” are comforting, suffused with religious imagery and expectation.

The two terms are synonyms.  Yet to the unconscious, apparently, they’re altogether different.

Why this should be so, I don’t have the slightest idea.  But it is.

(In next week’s post: what came up when I did a search for “alien.”)

by David Halperin
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