i dreamed i was working for elon musk as a direct report and everything that came out of his mouth was word salad. i just wanted him to leave me alone but he kept swooping in and making everyone confused and uncomfortable. eventually it was just like “fuck this, the bloated salary isn’t worth it, i’ll just go back to my actual job tomorrow, having two full-time jobs at once wasn’t going to work out anyway”
then i was at a high school reunion and had to keep the food from the buffet on my plate while traversing a gymnasium on roller-skates with gigantic fans blowing in every direction, forcing me to execute figure skating moves
I dreamt that my partner and I went to a naval base to do art therapy for the naval officers.
When we got inside, it looked exactly like a kindergarten classroom. All the naval officers were taking a nap in little cubbies. When we arrived, they all woke up and went to sit nicely at little school desks. Instead of a chair, one of them was standing in a tall cylindrical tank of water just a little wider than him. The water was up to his chest. In the tank with him, snuggled close up, was a tiny dolphin. It was the size of a small dog. Occasionally he pet it. It made a big dolphin chirp, and the man said, “okay, go ahead, Scooter.”
Scooter jumped out of the tank and landed on the ground on four little legs. Just stubby little grey legs shaped like little pegs, no feet. He ran around the room and then kept bumping into the door and chirping to be let out. That’s when my alarm went off.
I had a dream that I had my own home, and was married, and out of debt, and living a life of some sort of success. I got confused…how did this happen, surely my dream will explain this gulf from real life…and it was from selling bumper stickers, which I’ve done my best to recreate here.
(Please do not steal, in case this makes my dreams come true…)
Was stuck in a James Bond adventure game, playing the role of Connery Bond. I was supposed to be incognito on the supervillain’s yacht party, but I kept giving myself away because I would ask for fancy food, and that kept trapping me in an early ending branch where I was stuck fighting sharks in a sunken ship.
Eventually I figured out I had to pretend that I didn’t know anything about food, and the villain became really sorry for me and started giving me advise on how to expand my palate. I also flirted with his gay second in command, which started a fight with his ex (who was also at the party), and befriended a pigeon named Mr. General, both of which I assume would have helped me later on in the adventure.
i have dreams about being stuck in mystlikes all the time, but they never really have the aesthetic compulsion of the actual games; i dunno what it is that my brain is so stuck on
That’s interesting…yeah, I wonder what it is. Maybe something about the rhythm or structure of those games nicely captures how you feel moving through an environment sometimes? It’s kind of funny—sometimes I have dreams that have like, 3D platforming sections, and sometimes I even think of them that way sort of consciously in the dream, like there are floating flat platforms moving back and forth I’m hopping around on and trying to make the right jumps from and things, but I’ve never really been much of a fan of that genre even when I was little…I’ve played Super Mario 64 an okay amount here and there but never enough to clear it, and I played Solstice last year and actually really liked that and did clear it, but otherwise I’m actually not sure if I’ve played any other game like that much. I do feel like there must be something about how space feels to me sometimes that easily takes on those qualities in my mind, not really in a way that makes me want to play a lot of platformers necesarily, but more in a way that feels like it relates to feelings and dreams I had about space as a toddler, before I really had a clear idea of what a platformer was or anything, more just as a result of being close to the ground and uneasy on my feet probably, and then later being delighted when I figured out how to hop around on rocks in creeks and things, and probably I learned to relate those feelings to that genre just from it being around, so sometimes those things come together in my dreams still…or at least that’s my best guess.
the usual features are like a central island or other landmark with three or four smaller zones around it where you have to solve some component of the larger puzzle. but yeah, it’s primarily a feeling of being “stuck” and confused, i guess
other games get into my dreams too, for instance massive-scale geological features have been a theme since elden ring
Ah, okay, so more like the “background mentality” or whatnot than the style of movement it sounds like?
That’s neat…I think a lot (as I guess many people probably do) about how readily games can influence dreams. It’s really interesting to me because it seems to me as if games can influence dreams much more easily than most other forms of art tend to, just like, anectodally. I wonder if it’s because games are like, something you participate it actively and in a way that’s relatively self-directed, as opposed to forms of art where you receive them as kind of an outside observer (music, film, theater, etc.) or where you do advance the action yourself but the material is static and typically linear (literature). I guess, architecture does tend to have a really strong influence on dreams, and moving around in a building is similar to a game in this regard, so maybe games and architecture are both art forms with this kind of strongly-dream-influencing property. Why that self-directed quality would be an important feature in terms of influencing the makeup of dream imagery I have less even in the way of guesses at, except that I suppose dreams typically feel self-directed (even if the plot obligates you to perform very specific actions, it seems to me like most commonly for people it’s more like in waking life, where you consciously recognize the importance of performing those actions and chose to, as opposed to like, feeling like your body is just moving of its own accord or something).
yeah my personal brain thought is that people’s dreams are generally influenced by the most engaging visual media they’re steeped in. the common conception of dreams a few decades ago was that they were in b&w right? and video games are so much about perspective switching and engaging with Spaces right, which i feel like was a thing in my dreams before i even knew what videogames were
That’s interesting—do you think of games as primarily visual? I guess like, I was sort of thinking of the interaction a person has with both games and building interiors as like, kind of distinctively tactile…like, they’re both media where you do things with your body, like push on things or walk or whatnot, and then you like hear sounds or the scenery changes around you or whatnot in response. Actually I wonder if to some extent that’s part of what allows them to influence dreams so readily—like, maybe that helps them feel like a “complete experience” somehow that your brain latches on to more. At least speaking personally, I feel like, although media like paintings and drawings do sometimes have an influence on my dreams, there’s something about both games and building interiors that’s like, I could experience one a single time and then have it play a role in my dreams for many years, whereas somehow I feel like it takes more regular, sustained interaction with something like a painting for it to make an appearance, and even then it might be in a more specific and limited sort of way. All of this stuff is really subjective though of course…not only in terms of how you might see different media but also in terms of how you experience your dreams and what sorts of dreams you have. I know that’s different for everyone, so I wouldn’t say I think it’s wrong or anything to view games or buildings as primarily visual media, or dreams as a primarily visual experience, if that’s how they feel to you.
It’s kind of funny, I’ve often assumed that the whole “dreaming in black-and-white” thing was just a strange pop culture trope of that era although of course I don’t really know, but actually I have had a few dreams in black-and-white which has made me question that assumption. They’ve all been in a really specific type of circumstance, though, which is doing the lucid dreaming technique WILD (“Wake-Induced Lucid Dream,” where you go straight into a lucid dream from a waking state) when first going to bed, without doing the commonly-paired technique WBTB (“Wake-Back-To-Bed,” when you wake up 5–6 hours after going to sleep; if you attempt WILD then, your REM cycles are much longer). Sometimes when I have dreams under those conditions they’re in black-and-white, very short (like 1 m.), and quite unstable, like I’m kind of struggling to keep the dream from breaking up the entire time. They’re not always in black-and-white though—in more recent years they’ve been in full color and also more stable although still short, but there was a period in 2015 when I had several dreams like that in black-and-white and thought it was kind of fascinating. I have little idea what the neurological mechanism would be behind something like that, although I do know that there’s a condition sometimes suffered by stroke victims and the like called cerebral achromatopsia where people lose the ability not only to see color but even to imagine or dream in it, which seems like it would suggest that there is some special area of the brain dedicated to producing the subjective sensation of color vision specifically…maybe in early REM it’s more likely to be kind of damped or something compared to the later, longer and more vivid REM cycles.
Oh neat, what is that like for you? Do you feel like a background sensation of “being at the computer” like even if you don’t necessarily feel your body per se, or is it more like the text itself is the “background”? If that makes sense? This makes me feel tempted to spend a lot of time on a MUD or the like just to see what sort of dream influence it might have.
Haha wow cool. I guess that’s what I was trying to get at with “the text itself is the background.” That’s kind of awesome that it would even be in the same font and everything. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a dream in pure text even though I spend a lot of my time reading, so maybe there is something about the “tactile-action-and-reponse” mode of interaction that makes it feed into dreams really easily. I wonder if playing lots of solo text adventures might also have this kind of effect, or if there’s something particular about the MUD sort of format (maybe since like, online games like that can be kind of all-consuming over a long time period ). Maybe I’ll email Jason Dyer (of Renga in Blue) and ask if he ever has all-text dreams, since I think he mainly plays single-player IF.
I was at a book store and a large children’s birthday party was happening at a folding table setup. The dad asked me to set up more folding tables, but I accidentally knocked the stack over onto some of the children, knocking them unconscious. I was apparently doing a residency at the hospital or something because I ended up working on the care of the children too, and was hyper detail oriented and strict about trying to get them the best care as fast as possible, which annoyed the other doctors to the point they called me a bad person since I made a major mistake and since I was pressuring them. They were being super indifferent about the treatment in my view though, they were all jaded and tired.
This makes me feel tempted to spend a lot of time on a MUD or the like just to see what sort of dream influence it might have.
I guess that’s what I was trying to get at with “the text itself is the background.” That’s kind of awesome that it would even be in the same font and everything. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a dream in pure text even though I spend a lot of my time reading, so maybe there is something about the “tactile-action-and-reponse” mode of interaction that makes it feed into dreams really easily. I wonder if playing lots of solo text adventures might also have this kind of effect, or if there’s something particular about the MUD sort of format (maybe since like, online games like that can be kind of all-consuming over a long time period 
). Maybe I’ll email Jason Dyer (of