Forest Fire Dreams and Nightmare Tornadoes

I’ve always been a very active dreamer. Every night, without fail, my mind conjures up strange and sometimes terrifying images as I sleep. Vivid and in full color, they may bring me great joy and wonder and let me come to consciousness on a good note, or they embody my anxiety and fear until I startle myself awake in a panic. Not surprisingly, the natural world plays a strong part in my dreams. Animals, plants, and other beings join me in a strange alternate setting where trails through the forest may not be where I left them, and where I may find myself climbing the same rock three times in a row before I get to the top.

These settings are more weird and a bit unpredictable than actively hostile. Such is the nature of the dream world, where the underlying symbol-language of the unconscious mind takes over and throws the conscious mind’s rationality all off-kilter. However, like many people I get nightmares now and then. Mine are most often manifestations of the anxiety that has colored my perceptions for much of my life. And, like the good dreams, the bad dreams incorporate natural imagery as well: tornadoes and forest fires.

The tornado dreams started pretty early. When I was about seven years old, I found a religious pamphlet that had blown into a neighbor’s back yard. It was all about the Apocalypse, and how the world was going to end and everyone who wasn’t saved was going to die horribly. On the front cover was a picture of a couple of children running from a tornado. Now, I grew up in Missouri, right in the heart of Tornado Alley. Fortunately, I never went through one of these massive whirlwinds, but I had enough close calls with warnings and the like. The schools put the fear of F5 in my heart. And as I was raised Catholic, and hadn’t gotten old enough to really start thinking critically, I believed what I was told about religion. My church and parochial school weren’t at all of the hellfire and damnation sort, choosing instead to focus on Jesus as a pretty nice guy who helped people. But nobody ever took the time to even mention the book of Revelation to me, and I never asked about all those scary things in it. I had already learned at that young age to keep my fear to myself, and so the terror of tornadoes—both the mythical prospect of them destroying the world, and the very real images of the devastation they could inflict—insinuated itself into my nightmares and never left.

Forest fires came up once I hit my teens and the small, sacred place I found haven in from the world was completely bulldozed. In these dreams, I would be running—sometimes as a human, sometimes as a wolf—through a burned-out conifer forest. The ground would still be hot with ashes and burn my feet, and the tall trunks of trees towered charred over me. Then as I ran the tops of the trees began to fall down all around me, and I had to desperately dodge them with no clearings in sight. I’d never seen a forest fire, either, but I’d seen pictures of the aftermath, and the devastation of my own little patch of woods was just as bad. The images connected in my mind, and there another nightmare theme was born.

These two themes took on their own personality. Forest fires symbolized the threat of physical violence and the loss of material things, burning everything in their path indiscriminately. They were the sweeping, speeding flames that overcame and consumed all, but were at least predicted somewhat by the winds that drove them on. Tornadoes, on the other hand, seemed to be more mysterious, dropping out of the sky without warning and changing direction suddenly without any rhyme or reason (even though I know now that fires can do the same). When I had nightmares about tornadoes, they heralded an upswing in my anxiety, feeling as though my psychological integrity was threatened. The tornadoes would chase me, too, and just when one seemed to pass by, another touched down a hundred feet or less away and bore down on me as I watched through windows, unable to take shelter.

So why is it that the things that scare me the most disguise themselves as terrifying forces of nature, instead of as pollution or bulldozers or other human attacks? After all, I know that forest fires are necessary for the forest’s health in the long-term, even as they wreak short-term havoc and death. And tornadoes are natural, too, even if they don’t seem to serve any apparent restorative purpose.

Perhaps it’s because the internal imagery of the world that I formed when my brain was young and more malleable was so nature-oriented. The internet didn’t exist when I was a child, at least not in any form that the layperson could access. My life in a semi-rural area was a lot slower than it is now, and I spent much of my free time immersed in the outdoors, or reading about the outdoors, or learning about it anywhere I could at school. So my mind’s architecture focused on animals and plants and fungi and rocks and waterways, and even from a young age that’s where my dreams went, too.

Or maybe it was because I grew up without anyone to really show me around the great outdoors. My parents would support me by getting books on it from the library, and letting me go fishing in the creek by my grandma’s home, but they didn’t participate in its exploration with me. None of the other kids at school were as fascinated by it as I was, or if they were they didn’t share it with me. And my girl scout troop was rather a joke; we spent our time making potholders out of fabric loops, not camping or hiking. So I was on my own, and even as I was amazed by what I found in the wildernesses large and small, I also felt alone and vulnerable, too.

And, to be honest, forest fires and tornadoes can be really scary, even to us nature-lovers. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to fear them. They can kill and destroy. They’re unpredictable and overwhelmingly powerful. We may be able to stop a fire, but only at great risk and with the use of many resources, and we still can’t stop a tornado. We can only get out of the way.

But it’s okay to be afraid. It’s okay that, even as natural phenomena embody some of my greatest hopes and dreams, they also represent deep-seated terror. It doesn’t make me less of a nature-lover. And if anything, it shows even more that the nonhuman natural world is my deepest, most primal language. It’s proof that I am a human animal, a mammal, Homo sapiens, ranked among apes and descended from reptiles way back when and with a common ancestor floating way off in the sea. It means I haven’t shaken that heritage off. It keeps me connected.

I can look at those dreams and know the fires and storms aren’t my enemy. They’re the message-bearers, and in that they do me a great service. They tell me when I’ve been ignoring my fear too long, and when I need to attend to myself and my self-care. They’re some of my deepest friends and companions, the ones who speak to me with tough love. They are among my wildest totems, and for them I am grateful.