Nuclear Fears
Remember how in the X-Files, there was that storage room in the middle of the Pentagon where they kept all the secret stuff? I think that show worked as well as it did because on some level, most of us believe in that room. We may not believe in flying saucers, alien abductions, elaborate government conspiracies, or the Loch Ness monster, but we believe that room is there -- maybe not in the Pentagon, but somewhere. The scripts, characters, and chemistry were important, of course, but fundamentally, I think that show tapped into our belief in that room.

I was woken kind of abruptly this morning (because our new mattress arrived, so I had to get out of our old bed so it could be hauled off -- yay!) and was thinking back over the jumbled memories of my dreams a few hours later. My first thought was, "Huh, I had a Battlestar Galactica dream." (The jumble was triggered, weirdly, by seeing the BG logo in someone's LJ userpic.) A friend sent us the first season on DVD as a gift a few months ago (presumably to try to suck us into watching the show) and we finally got around to watching the movie and the first few episodes in the last couple of weeks. (We've only made it up through "You Can't Go Home Again," FYI, so please don't give me any spoilers.)

Anyway, I mentally sorted through the jumble and realized, no, it wasn't a BG dream, it was a post-nuclear-holocaust dream. Like I used to have when I was a kid. (I was very actively terrified of nuclear war for much of my childhood. I suffered insomnia, I believed I wouldn't live until I was 30, I had nightmares, etc. My parents didn't let me watch The Day After when it aired because they thought it would exacerbate my fears.)

I wonder if part of why that TV show works is that if you're the right age (30-ish or over) it taps into that remembered fear?