The movie is everywhere—including in our subconscious mind.

Seventy-eight years ago, 5:30 in the morning: a blinding flash, a boom, a shock wave, a crater. As the minutes passed, “a multi-colored cloud surged 38,000 feet into the air,” according to the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center. July 16, 1945, marked the first deployment of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s humanity-altering creation known as “Gadget.” The resulting mushroom cloud remains one of history’s most iconic images. And yet, the explosion itself is hard for most of us to conceptualize. What I’ve always found most haunting is the countdown to detonation—when the decision has been made but the world has yet to change.

Those inexorable, ominous seconds were the basis of a nightmare I had recently. It’s an old adage that nobody wants to hear about anyone else’s dreams, but perhaps we can make an exception for nuclear night terrors this summer. Poke around social media right now, and you’ll notice that scores of people are experiencing acute nuclear anxiety. (“Too many Oppenheimer dreams last night 😵‍💫,” reads one representative tweet.) My bomb dream happened last Sunday night. I was dead asleep, watching a missile carve an arc across the sky. I awoke just before impact, sweating, heart thumping, fists clenched. I did not get back to sleep.

End-of-the-world anxiety is omnipresent in contemporary American culture. Oppenheimer is poised to be among the biggest films of the year and will likely nab several Academy Award nominations. American Prometheus, the book that inspired Christopher Nolan’s film, is currently No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list. In the latest Mission: Impossible installment, Tom Cruise’s on-screen team races to thwart a possible nuclear attack at Abu Dhabi International Airport. Desert bomb tests pop up in the background of Wes Anderson’s pastel dramedy Asteroid City. A ridiculously large bomb that resembles Oppenheimer’s Gadget even rolls through the streets of Rome during a dizzying chase scene in Fast X.

Fear of the bomb is also in the news in a way that it hasn’t been since the end of the Cold War. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly taunts enemies and boasts about the strength of his nuclear arsenal. Last month, President Joe Biden told reporters that the threat of Putin using a tactical nuclear weapon is “real.” Just this week, North Korea’s defense minister responded to an American nuclear submarine’s docking in South Korea by saying that the move “may fall under the conditions of the use of nuclear weapons” according to North Korean law.

In a sense, it’s no wonder nukes are in people’s dreams. After my bomb nightmare left me unsettled for a few days, I reached out to Veronica Tonay, a licensed psychologist and a retired professor at UC Santa Cruz who has studied dreams as part of her work. She told me that although most people don’t dream about politics specifically, “they do tend to dream about things that are very emotionally valent for everyone, like an earthquake, or like nuclear annihilation.” She invoked a former colleague, the late Frank X. Barron, who told her he collected accounts of nuclear-annihilation dreams from patients during the Cold War. As one would expect, Barron’s data found that such dreams were more common when the topic was more prevalent in news coverage. This phenomenon relates to the “continuity hypothesis,” in which our dreams are an extension of what we see and experience in our waking life.

Though Tonay has yet to see Oppenheimer, she predicted that the film is “going to put right back into the collective unconscious and consciousness of all of us that in fact we could have been destroyed by nuclear warheads for decades now. At any moment. And we have no control over it.” Nolan recently told an interviewer that he doesn’t disagree with a fellow filmmaker’s characterization of his film as a horror movie.

Our country’s obsession with nuclear destruction has ebbed and flowed over the past half century, but it’s never really abated. The overwhelming majority of Americans were not alive when their government chose to drop nuclear bombs on humans. But the fact that such destruction could happen again, and that if it did it, it might involve a hydrogen bomb, which would be exponentially worse, yields the feeling that this historical episode does not exist safely in our past. Trinity Site—where Oppenheimer’s team conducted that first test just three weeks before America leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki—is today part of White Sands National Park, in New Mexico. The surrounding area remains an active military testing ground. Twice a year, the Department of Defense opens Trinity to tourists. Right now, a page on the U.S. Army’s website warns prospective visitors in blaring red that “due to the release of the movie, Oppenheimer in July, we are expecting a larger than normal crowd at the 21 October open house.” (Referring to this as an “open house” is indeed quite weird.) The notice sounds a bit like the fine print on a theme-park ticket: “You may experience wait times of up to two hours getting onto the site. If you are not one of the first 5,000 visitors, you might not get through the gate prior to its closure at 2 p.m.”

Oppenheimer is by no means the first time a film about the nuclear bomb became Americans’ preoccupation. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb tackled the subject head-on, albeit from a satirical perspective. Understandably, the serious stuff hits harder. On November 20, 1983, an estimated 100 million people tuned in to ABC to watch The Day After, a made-for-TV movie that depicted Soviet nukes destroying Kansas City, among other places. Audiences were instantly traumatized. President Ronald Reagan watched the film a month before its release while at Camp David. That morning, he wrote in his diary:

I ran the tape of the movie ABC is running on the air Nov. 20. It’s called “The Day After.” It has Lawrence Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done—all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed. So far they haven’t sold any of the 25 spot ads scheduled & I can see why. Whether it will be of help to the “anti nukes” or not, I cant say. My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war. Back to W.H.

In November, when the public broadcast concluded, the ABC News anchor Ted Koppel hosted a roundtable discussion with Henry Kissenger, Elie Wiesel, William F. Buckley Jr., Carl Sagan, and others about the film. Before the talk began, Koppel sensed the need to reassure the shaken masses: “If you can, take a quick look out the window. It’s all still there.”

I asked my colleague Tom Nichols, who grew up near a Strategic Air Command bomber base, about his own nuclear-annihilation dreams through the years. “In college and graduate school, I was studying Soviet affairs and strategic issues, and gaining all the detail that added a terrible sense of reality to those dreams,” he said. “I would be deeply skeptical about anyone in my field who says they’ve never had such nightmares.” (Though disturbed by The Day After, he told me that the British equivalent, Threads, was “the one that kept me up all night.”)

What are you supposed to do if all this stuff is keeping you awake, or if you find yourself having nightmares after seeing Oppenheimer? Tonay, the dream expert, told me that the moment you wake up, it’s important to put yourself in a quiet, safe place. Imagine you’re walking down a stairway, she said. When you reach the bottom, mentally put yourself back into the scariest part of the dream, and then consciously give it a different ending.

“I really think that one of the most difficult things that’s happening right now culturally is this relentless marketization of doom,” Tonay said with a sigh. “The movies, the apocalyptic films—they’re expressing a great concern that we all have, consciously or unconsciously, that what we’re doing isn’t sustainable, and we’re really in trouble on this planet right now. And those are real concerns. It’s just that they don’t leave a lot of room for a different ending.”

“I have seen a lot of young people, especially in the last five or six years in particular, who feel absolutely no hope,” she added, “because every image that they have, that they’ve taken into their unconscious, is that the world ends. And it may. But, you know, throughout history, every story that’s been told, we get to the point where we think everything’s going to end—and then something unexpected happens.”

Nukes may be invading people’s dreams because they are legitimate threats to our survival. Though nuclear anxiety may have seemed to recede in the decades between The Day After and Oppenheimer, the truth is, it’s been there the whole time. After we spoke, Tonay wrote me a follow-up email. “We do live in a world we mostly don’t control; overt and existential threats to our well-being are real; and our apprehension about that is always present to some degree, above or under the surface of our awareness, expressed in our dreams,” she said. “Rather than discounting our dreams, it helps to recognize them as our own, unique, nightly reminder of how we view the world, what feelings we need to acknowledge and express, and actions we might want to take in our waking lives.”