50 replies to this topic

[dicko]

hi there everyone. i'm going to make a game. and it's going to be based on dream experience.

now, this obviously opens up a whole world of WACKY and SURREAL adventures, but i want it to be much more then that. i want to fully explore the human psyche, and portray a full personality and character through THEMES and IDEAS i guess. it's all very much pipe dreams at the minute and i haven't worked out fully what i want to do with this, but i definitely want to do this. the psychology and whatnot behind dreams intrigues me to no end.

so here's where you come in. tell me about some of the strange things from your dreams. send me reads/vids/artwork that you think would suit anything i've said so far (lets try and keep salvador dali out of it though eh). yes i am going to watch the science of sleep as RESEARCH (i've never actually seen it). anything you can throw out there would be entirely great and helpful! i know i am being very vague at the minute but i will clamp down on that when i work out what i fully want to do.

[dragonx]

the other day i dreamed i was playing league of legends and i bought the champion that i really wanted

[King of Spooks]

i had a dream that i turned ssj

[Ragnar]

I could make music as long as it doesn't have to be indie shit

[IceManual5580]

this game already exists.

its called LSD. No seriously, http://en.wikipedia....LSD_(video_game)

[Rajew]

shit icemanual5580 i made that same exact post on a different forum what the heck dude

get out of my head, man

here is what i dream: I always dream in 3d person! This is apparently not common. It doesn't help you at all unless you make the game first person but then suddenly you change dreams and WHOAAAA ITS THIRD PERSON THIS REPRESENTS A DETACHED PERSONALITY AHHHHHH

[General Robert E. Lee]

You should have some really mundane dreams in your game
I had a dream where I buttered my toast too much and it tasted bad
That's a real dream.

[Biggles]

IceManual4235456 I think that because dicko is not the developers of LSD his take on dream experiences may be vaguely different to theirs. There's some similarities between video games and dreams, so I think it makes them a really interesting subject matter for games. My interpretation of Jason Rohrer's recent gamething Sleep is Death is that it's sort of about dreams, or at least the title is a joke about dreams. Two of his other games, Passage and Gravitation, are fairly dreamlike too. He might be good research material.

Also, I don't tend to remember my own dreams but I did have a sleepless night before my exam yesterday where I was sick and feverish and semihallucinated some kind of psychic mindbattle with Jaron Lanier like DANIEL DENNET IS NOT A ZOMBIE GODDAMNIT because the sudden popularity of his recent book 'You Are Not a Gadget' bugs me. And that kind of leads to an interesting point about dreams and games which is that dreams often relate to stuff that's happening in your life or thoughts you've been having. If stuff's bugging you then it often shows up in your dreams. But how do you emulate that in a video game? Without access to your players' innermost fears and desires, you can't reference occurrences in their everyday lives in your game dreams. One way to get around that, I guess, would be to construct a character to explore the psyche of. Mind Game is a movie that does that to a certain extent. It's also good from a visual surrealthings perspective because they have one coherent style but it goes a lot of places and does a lot of different things. Waking Life I guess may be also about dreams. I was quite drunk the only time I ever watched it so I'm not entirely sure but I remember it being dreamlike and interesting.

Uh so yeah. Good luck.

[Corfaisus]

I will come right out and copy/paste a few posts I made about the dreams that I remember from another forum.

[hide=Dream 1]Upon entering my dream, I was in my room, as I typically am, but something was completely out of the ordinary. What is this thing you ask? Why, my main female cat girl character (Sarah) was in the room with me. You can tell that, seeing as how we're alone and the door is closed, either something wonderful or horrific, depending on where you stand on the matter, is about to happen. Surely enough, we manage our way of our clothes and begin... well... "having fun". Kissing, hugging, stroking, feeling, groping, bla bla bla. Unnaturally smooth insertion, but it's a dream, so why should it matter?Then, just as things are getting intense, wouldn't you know it, my aunt tries to come in and tell me that it's time for dinner or something.

To be honest, I wasn't paying attention to her, though I did not want to be seen doing what I was doing, so I threw myself against the door and barricaded it with my back, still in the process of my previous arrangement. She was on top, moving up and down, as I sat upright on the ground, hands on the top of her thighs, back against the door. The closest I can remember something being remotely close to this would be:

[hide=Encyclopedia Dramatica Yiff Animated Gif][/hide]

We came... Weird sounds were made from below as we continued for all its worth... The only way to describe the sound without recording myself making said sound (as difficult as it is) is a dog trying to lick peanut butter from the roof of its mouth while making loud, wet, suckling and/or drinking sounds. As this is happening, I'm trying to convince my aunt that I'm not interested in dinner, or that I'm busy.

I wake up in the middle of the night, and spend some time thinking about the dream that I had, proceeded with watching some television for a couple of hours before going back to sleep. Unfortunately, dreams like this come along only once every few years. [/hide]

[hide=Dream Post 2]I've had dreams that I was flying. There was one where I was walking my dog, and then I took to the skies like a kite. Another where I was at school and I could hover above the basketball court. Is it still considered traveling if you aren't moving your legs? And yet another where I had a wooden axe in one hand, and an iron axe in the other. I flew across these swamps and forests of dead trees to make it to an abandoned farmhouse (much like WoW) where I fought living jack-o-lantern-headed scarecrows.

Another recurring theme is being at school, or in some fantasy world.

The school ones are typically talking to old classmates, or going about a normal class of P.E while listening to speed metal over the intercom, while the fantasy ones are more of an MMORPG where I've got some kick ass armor and a bear familiar, or attempting to fight a metalic minotaur in my light armor. I was losing the battle, until I switched out to some black, shadowed armor and the minotaur essentially considered me its master.

There was one that stuck out to me that I was on an island with cliffs to the northeast, and a mine to the east. To the northwest was an opening in the cliffs to the beach, while the southern path lead to a tree-filled valley with an ancient temple on the end coming out from the mountain. After walking in, I came face-to-face with living tomatoes with realistic, serious-looking elderly faces. I waltzed past them to continue down the corridor. I then took the corner to another room divided into different elevations, with stairs connecting them. Inside were these demons, some with thick outlines, others being tall, lanky, clawed fiends, while the other few were robed, eyeless wizard-like characters.

I tried to escape, as I was only level 7, and even the tomatoes, which I assume were the easier monsters in the dungeon, were level 26. The reason I knew this is because it was displayed above them. Upon exiting the dungeon, I forced my way back to the middle of the valley, at which time I was blown back by a mighty gale and forced back into the temple. I then woke up. [/hide]

[hide=Dream Post 3]Another that I haven't mentioned was one where I appeared in a circular frozen cave. I'm guessing it was some sort of game because I looked like a knight, and I had a sort of war bear familiar. I look up to notice the that ceiling of the cave looks like fangs that surround the opening. I noticed that I had different symbols like commands in an MMORPG for things like Attack and Defend. If I were to walk down one path, it would lead to stairs going up, while the other would lead to a large mine that looked to be made out of the Rm2k3 RTP dungeon chipset.[/hide]

[Mince Wobley]

I used to dream that my teeth were falling, but not anymore. Today I dreamt they were just rotten. And  I played uno with some people.

[MysteriousWanderer]

i dream about soldat

[Ciox]

once i dreamed that i was showered with wet earthworms from an undisclosed location like every 5 minutes

[bonzi_buddy]

i'm not sure! like uh this is some tough subject to tackle on especially considering that dreams can be really short or uh seems to have no time qualities or dream seems long even though it feels short etc oh and things change from person to person. how would you make a game out of it unless you want to examine the control side of the dreams and make a point of it? idk just put in my end-of-the-world scenarios from high school and hundley's shooting fantasies and i'd call it a day.

GOOD LUCK!!!

[thecatamites]

I dreamt a while back that I was at some huge open-air concert/rally/celebration and pushing through crowds and lines before the perspective changed and i saw that presiding over the whole thing was a jabba the hutt with the face of a gorilla (the gorilla face covered the whole front part of the jabba the hutt). I remember saying "whoa" in the dream when I saw it which was pretty cool. That's it for the dream.

In terms of material there's the Tales Of Hoffmann which are bizarre german folktale things (I think one of them was the basis for some freud text on dream interpretation??) or actually maybe just early folktale shit in general since the ones I read all seemed to have this really bizarre dreamlike structure where there was a total lack of uh continuity I guess. Like instead of having a moral or story or whatever it was just this constant and disconnected stream of Then THIS Happened And Then THIS Happened And Then She Gets Cut Up And Turns Into A Shoal Of Fish. There's also Yume Nikki which I haven't played but looks really cool, it's an rpg maker game about exploring a big dream world I think. Psychonauts apparantly did this as well to some extent in terms of exploring landscape based on subconscious etc but I haven't played that either (I'm awful, sorry). Also obligatory David Lynch mention I guess. And Fletcher Hanks who was a bizarre Golden Age comicbook guy, all his stuff is basically a slightly more polished version of those incomprehensible comics everyone drew when they were twelve but there are these obsessively recurring themes of people being crushed or floating in space and this horrifying art style that makes it all really strange and uncanny.



EDIT: also wait the 'Frank' comics by Jim Woodring sound just what you're looking for

[Allen Hunter]

i had a dream about dragons and weed

[Vellfire]

i just want to say that having a dream where you teeth fall out is like this collective thing that tons and tons of human beings have and idk why!

like i know i've had tons where my teeth would just crumble and it's horrible but i mean it's such a THING that there was even like a king of the hill joke about it once, bill was talking about some dream he was having and then he just ends it with "and then all my teeth fell out".  In a similar vein there was this really old toothpaste for dinner

I think it would be really cool if your game sort of did this kind of thing at some point, like some dream that's universal among all sorts of people.  And also while I was finding that I also found this which reminds me of another thing I see myself do constantly.  I'll have a dream, wake up in the middle of the night, think "oh god i gotta remember this this dream is SO IMPORTANT" and write it down or commit it to memory, and then wake up and it's something really really dumb or insignificant.  Like I had some dream where I edited the Cosby Show to where Rudy was edited out entirely, and the rest of the episode was uncut so it was just like she never existed.  This is such a useless idea but I thought it was SO IMPORTANT right when I woke up that I wrote it down and when I properly woke up I looked at the paper and just went "what the fuck why did I think this was so important".  I don't know I just think these sort of things fall into the category of PSYCHOLOGY OF SLEEP or something but I think they are neat ideas, not sure how you'd incorporate them into a game but who knows!

One last thing:  This maybe wasn't exactly a dream but one time I accidentally took a far stronger dose of allergy medicine than I normally would, and it was right before bed.  I remember either waking up in the middle of the night or DREAMING that I woke up and I thought all of my thoughts were coming out of my hands instead of my brain.  Like, you know how almost all of your senses are all in your general head/face area so it feels like that's where they're happening, well I thought that all of those senses as well as my own thoughts were happening in my hands instead of my head/face.  I guess it's really just that my mind was foggy from the medicine and maybe my hands were tingling but that's exactly how I felt, I was thinking out of my hands.  I fell back to sleep shortly after and that's all I remember of it but it was weird!!!

[the bloddy ghost]

i just want to say that having a dream where you teeth fall out is like this collective thing that tons and tons of human beings have and idk why!

Yeah, a friend of mine had a dream about her teeth falling out. I think it has something to do with fear of aging, dying, or being vulnerable.

[Corfaisus]

Yeah, a friend of mine had a dream about her teeth falling out. I think it has something to do with fear of aging, dying, or being vulnerable.

If this is true, there must be something horribly wrong with me, because I can't ever recall having a dream where my teeth are falling out.

[Mince Wobley]

By the way did I mention I stopped dreaming about falling teeth once I started flossing?

[benos]

Just don't use "Dreamwalker" as your title, that's mine!, I already have screen title made for me at charas-project. :p lol.