When Judy Garland sang Over the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz, it prefigured her journey into a strange land - a mirror world to our own - where dreams really do come true. She discovered it's our own personal inner resources which achieve them.
Landing with a thump backin Kansas, she could only protest: "I had the strangest dream ..."
This phrase entered the public consciousness and, a few years later, in 1950, Ed McCurdy penned the anti-war protest song Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, in which everyone got together in a room and signed a piece of paper ending war.
In 2008, director Eric Bednarski reclaimed the phrase for his documentary, The Strangest Dream, which chronicles the real life events of 1957, when a group of 22 scientists met in a small room, in an equally small Nova Scotia fishing village called Pugwash, and signed a piece of paper which quite possibly prevented nuclear war.
By now you will probably have got the drift that sometimes those strange dreams are not really dreams after all. What made the first Pugwash conference so influential was having scientists attend in a private capacity, rather than as official representatives of their governments - which generated open and frank discussions. It was soon apparent that no winners would emerge from an exchange of nuclear weapons and, on their return home, they were instrumental in restraining the more passionate marshal instincts of their political leaders. That first meeting in 1957 spawned a series of international Pugwash conferences, which continue to this day. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pugwash scientists worked behind the scenes to defuse the stand-off and they also played a major role in ensuring the Cold War never turned hot.
The Pugwash movement is also a testament to Joseph Rotblat, a Polish scientist who worked on the US Manhattan Project and resigned for moral reasons when he discovered Germany posed no nuclear threat. It was due to his convictions that the first Pugwash meeting occurred.
Next Wednesday at 6.20pm, the Tauranga Film Society presents The Strangest Dream at Rialto Cinema. You will discover a little-known movement that helped prevent nuclear war and achieved something as unlikely as that signed piece of paper in Ed McCurdy's protest song.
