What Does It Mean to Dream of the End of the World?

You stretch and look up from your computer screen and out of the window, blinking as your eyes adjust to the light. You hear a faint rumble which gets louder, becoming uncomfortably loud. A fighter jet, zipping past the window and into the distance.

You hear gasps throughout the office but pay no attention because you see another, slower plane passing far away over the city centre – you can’t be sure, but there seems to be something falling from it.

You look back at your colleagues, saving your eyesight as the flash bathes the room in bright light, you spin around in time to see the beginnings of a familiar shaped cloud rising from where a city used to be.

Still, it’s only a dream – right?

The etymology of ‘apocalypse’ sees the word passed down to us, via Old French and Latin, from the Ancient Greek ‘Apokaluptein’ which means to ‘uncover’ or ‘reveal’ something hidden or unknown. The catastrophic connotations of the word are inherited from a genre of prophetic literature in the bible which culminated in the Revelations of John (the final book of the New Testament, though actually one of the first written).

Interpretations of apocalyptic dreams also seem to vacillate between the two meanings throughout literature on dream analysis. An apocalypse is the ultimate change – both in the sense of greatest and final – so it will come as no surprise that many interpretations of the apocalypse dream do so with that in mind. The nature of the change – the specific cultural meme that your unconscious mind chooses is therefore chosen as the differentiation for purposes of analysis, or as Jung phrased it:

Dreams of nuclear apocalypse are dreams of confrontation between sources of power or influence in your life, for example – whether they are parents, or work and relationships, dreams of this nature (and of other war-themed apocalypses) reflect a feeling of powerlessness in a confrontation that impacts you but in which you are not an active participant. The world ending in fire, however, is indicative of an unacknowledged rage with your circumstances – the fire here is cleansing, but allows for rebuilding.

Whether the dreamer interprets their own apocalypse as revealing anxiety about a high impact change in circumstances or as a loss of control or powerlessness will obviously depend on individual circumstances. But the idea is to analyse the specific elements of the dream itself – the location, the type, the timing – which are more important than the variety of dream archetypes.

As with any dream analysis, the meaning for one person may have little in common with the meaning for another. However, dreams of the apocalypse are obviously traumatic and lead many to seek meaning. The important thing with the analysis of any data – dreams or otherwise – is that it should always be contextualised. Use dreams as prompts to indulge in self-reflection and self-care.

By seeing dreams – even unsettling dreams – as growth opportunities and invitations to self-examination, dreamers can use the analysis of psychologists and philosophers as platforms to improve how well they understand themselves and as a driver of positive change.

Here’s the weirdest graph you’ll see all week. It’s graphing the popularity of zombie movies versus vampire movies, split out by whether the president at the time was a Republican or a Democrat. There are exceptions, but in general when a Republican is in office, it’s all about zombies. When it’s a Democrat, it’s all about vampires.