The Power of Dreams

Dreams take two main forms, life goals and the ones you have at night. The life goals type are when you dream of making it big and having a good life. These are powerful in that they provide direction as you go and you often shape your life in a way to make your dreams come true. The dreams you have at night can also be very powerful, but are a little more... um... hard to use.

As I said, life dreams give you a goal to work towards. Everyone has some sort of dream, and everyone has a slightly different approach toward achieving them. Some dream small, allowing them to realize it easily. They then pick a new dream and move on, working incrementally. Personally, I dream very big, very big. It will take a lot of work and luck to make it happen, but I'm more than happy to settle for less if it doesn't happen, and if it does happen then I've done something amazing. Dream big, but be content with what you have.

Most video game characters would seem to tend toward my side. Many characters in games have huge aspirations. Prime example is Pokemon. A ten year old kid from a town of about six people wants to become the greatest Pokemon trainer in the world. Somehow, this kid in about a week runs all over creation thumping seventy year old guys who have been training their whole life. Not sure how they "train" exactly, but ten year old rarely become world champions of anything across all age groups. In order for a single person to make a major accomplishment like that, they have to be truly driven. They have their (unrealistic) dreams, and they will do anything to make them happen. This is what video game characters do. They have this drive built into their character, a pure will to succeed. Might sound stupid, but this is frequently the basis for protagonists.

Then there's sleep dreams. There's lots of different explanations for why we dream at night and what they mean. They might be cool, embarrassing, or stupid, and you might not really remember them the next morning, but these too have power. Some people try to focus on a problem as they fall asleep and tell themselves that they will dream a solution. I saw a documentary in one of my psychology classes where a NASA scientist did just this for how to build a base on the moon. The next morning he began working on a design where robots would it. Dreams can also be a source of inspiration on accident too. Two of my games I'm currently working on are based on dreams I had. They are both still in the early design phase, because I got very little from the dreams to go on, but they are fun to work on.

Sleep dreams are also used in games a lot. Usually, they are ways for the game to give you hints of some sort. Many times a character will jump up and exclaim they had a dream where the Goddess spoke to them and so they know we must go to the western mountains. This usually seems like a convenient cover for a plot hole the writers couldn't think of a better way to solve. Other times, NPCs will contact the player through the protagonists dreams. In Fallout 2, the village mystic would speak to you while your character slept to tell you that time is running out.

Yeah, wouldn't really want this guy showing up in my dreams. He also freaked me out real bad the first time, because I hadn't met him so I had no idea who he was.

There's one more way for dreams to be used in games. In high school I took a class about the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, writer of the Lord of the Rings. In one of his essays on fantasy, Tolkien spoke about "Dreams as an Excuse". He said that one of the worst things a fantasy story can do is to write it off as a dream at the end. The truth of this isn't fully apparent until one considers what the Lord of the Rings would be like if the last sentence of the book had been, "And then Frodo woke up." Maybe he gets a cup of coffee and picks up his briefcase to catch the bus to work, I don't know. But I think the books would be much less popular if that had happened, it would ruin everything previously written.

Games do this sometimes, and it usually has that very effect. A game can always be trashed by a terrible ending, but using the dream excuse is one of the worst. There is one game that did this, and for once did it well. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. It's hinted at in the title, and the goal of the game is to wake the sleeping Wind Fish. Waking him is the only way to leave the island everyone says, but the bosses (appropriately called Nightmares) claim that doing this will destroy the island. In the end, Link defeats the Nightmares and meets the Wind Fish. Mr. Fish ends his monologue with, "Come Link, let us awaken... together!" After the island fades, we see Link sleeping clinging to a piece of his ship destroyed by lightning at the beginning of the game. Link then wakes up and sits on the wood. The entire game was a dream. But, what makes it work for me, is that right after that the Wind Fish flies overhead. So maybe it wasn't a dream, or if it was, it had real world consequences. That makes it work for me. Personally, I don't plan on ever trying to pull of a dream excuse ending.

Link's Awakening Ending


So, what do you think of dreams and how do you use them?

I almost feel bad for killing that last boss in Awakening. On one level, he's actually trying to save everyone on the island, but mostly just himself.