"End of World" dream: Methane under the Atlantic
This dream came after a night of interrupted sleep. In fact I think I slept better during the late morning, when I had this dream.
I want to post the contents of the dream before I read any scientific articles, to avoid messing with the details I got in the dream. I'm mostly curious to find out how science will debunk it, but I also think it is a fascinating read.
Quote:
The dream starts with me thinking to myself "How will just one guy get all the governments to listen to me? I'm not a scientist or anyone important..." I send out letters to many government agencies and centers of education around the world. I somehow know that there is a huge series of methane gas pockets under the Atlantic Ocean, near the area between the tectonic plates, deeper then humans ever explored. As the gap widens, I receive a vision that in June/July of this year, the gas will begin to escape and float upwards in catastrophic quantities.
Time is distorted between visions of the coming disaster and my futile efforts to warn the world within my dream. I see a cruise ship trying deperately to turn around in the Atlantic as it begins to float lower in the region of methane-rich water. All the people on board are getting into lifeboats because the water is becoming less buoyant and the cruise ship will be submerged. It's scary because the methane in the air is also thick and even the lifeboats aren't sanctuary; people may suffocate if they don't get away from the area.
The cruise ship sends a distress call and the world wakens to this disaster too late. All ships on the Atlantic turn away from the methane leak, back to the nearest harbours. I seem to be a pure observer at this point, with my awareness on the heads of state and the military leadership, as they try to plan damage control.
Although the initial disaster affects the ocean itself, including ships that travel, and all marine life, the gas will continue to float into the air. The greatest threat is the potential for burning. If large volumes of the gas move ashore with the breeze, forests, towns and cities could burn to the ground. The atmosphere is becoming a mix of methane and oxygen, a deadly recipe.
Further, with thunderstorms that occur daily, even a coordinated human effort to prevent any kind of sparks in cities and industrial centres would be futile. The first lightning bolt in the volatile methane atmosphere would set off the widest explosion ever seen. And the secondary effects would be a loss of all Oxygen to the combustion of the methane, poisioning the air with carbon dioxide.
As military planners try to conceive a way to hide humanity underground from the atmospheric calamity and to preserve the planet, there seems to be a trap at every turn. A carbon dioxide rich atmosphere would allow plant life to flourish, and perhaps restore oxygen to the air over hundreds of years. For some reason in my dream, due to the methane, the world will be clouded over, and so the plants and trees would not survive to combat the loss of oxygen.
Plans for nuclear powered lighting are developed for the forests, running a mesh of high-power lights through the forest canopies. I have a future vision of old trees falling, tearing the web of power lines and slowly returning the forests to grey-blue darkness. So many years into the disaster, I see a lack of manpower to keep the infrastructure in place.
Finally I see space agencies launch a gold-plated beacon satellite into high orbit, then three more. The only purpose is to recount the disaster to the future population of earth, if any, so they might avoid the same thing again.
I see a failed mission to block off the methane by sending mining equipment into the deepest parts of the Atlantic, sealing off the thousands of cracks and fissures, to pipe the methane into storage tanks. It fails because somehow the quality of the ground here is too fragile, more openings appear as the ground crumbles, ruining the mining operation.
I crawl out from some sort of underground bunker, returning from an observer's state to just being me again. It is around the beginning of august I look around at the ruined world to see a purple/blue sky, overcast. I'm wearing a mask and I have a tank on my back. For some reason by this point I'm suicidal or hopeless, maybe because I knew of the disaster and failed to save the world. I take off the mask and the atmosphere is putrid, but I breathe it anyway, feeling nauseous. As I suffocated, I was thinking that I should save the oxygen for the others, because the the survivors will need it.
Already I can pull some elements of this dream from my knowledge, for example:
- The ship sinking was connected to my reading about the bermuda triangle years ago.
- The purple sky came from a documentary I watched about the death of ocean life due to excess algae at the surface.
- The clouding of the world, blocking light, probably came from my reading about "nuclear winter" in school years ago. Although I may also have drawn on from reading of the solar system, where some of the planets are blue from methane in the atmosphere.
Anyway, hope it was an interesting read. I never have heard of that kind of a theory before, so I'm eager to learn more about it. My scientific mind certainly pulled from a lot of my knowledge to put this dream together.
If you know of any links where this kind of "end of world" theory is brought up and then shot down, I'd love to read the explanations. Thanks.
-Adam
