I don't normally talk about my dreams here, partly because they're not all video game or just gaming related, but also because they are frequently not coherent enough to translate into a successful narrative.
The other night though, I felt that the dream I had, which was video game related, contained enough information that I could (at least attempt) tell how the game worked as well as the general storyline that my brain decided to come up with.
So the initial setting seemed like something out of a mid 1800s, in that the character (the one I was playing I assume) looked like Roland of Gilead (The Dark Tower), or John Marston (Red Dead Redemption), but there was nothing initially around that would have put the game setting in the old west; it was just one of those things that I immediately knew. So this Roland Marston we'll call him from now on, was in an alpine forested region with a wooden house (think Evil Dead, but less run down) and a well defined path leading away from the house, up a hill and into the forest.
Then the dream really kicked in and something happened that resulted in Roland Marsten having to shoot someone who was similarly dressed. I don't know if it was someone who was trespassing, or a robber, but either way, there was a shootout and the other person ended up dead. Then I (playing as R.M.) had to run up the road away from the house because (maybe?) there was someone on a horse who saw the incident and was going to report it to the local sheriff; I am only assuming here since all I recall was that R.M. began running up the road chasing someone/thing. That was when R.M. came across a small girl (maybe eight or nine?) in a plain but frilly dress (something Melissa Gilbert would have worn on Little House on the Prairie) who was running/skipping/walking down the road towards the house. For some reason, it was at this point that I knew that R.M. was inherently a bad guy. That to avoid being taken to prison, this section of the game meant that I would have to quickly track down each person I came across and kill them. The inclusion of the small child was to test the player to see how they would react and progress the story; a story that I was unaware of at this point in the dream.
So I tracked down the guy on the horse and killed him. Then I ran back towards the house and killed the girl followed by a small boy (maybe four years old, with bleach blond hair in a bowl cut) whom I also killed at the front door of the house. Then the screen faded out.
I would at this moment like to point out that the killing of the two aforementioned children just sort of happened "off screen." It was like I came across the girl, then ran towards the house knowing that the girl had been killed, but I did not actually witness the killing. The same with the boy at the house, and I'm pretty sure, the guy earlier riding away from the house. Just so y'all know that I usually do not have dreams where someone is off killing children, in a video game or otherwise.
The story then jumped a number of years and that was when I realized that the point of the game was to play different people in R.M.'s bloodline until you reached the present day; or maybe beyond the present day, I'm not really sure on that point. So the game jumped to someone else in R.M.'s bloodline sometime in the future and I played as a number of other people, although the dream did not include these sections, but again, I knew that they had happened.
The next section of the dream that I did remember was odd. I was playing another male, but this one was either in late teens or early twenties, and was naked except for an adult sized diaper. He was either on a bed or a couch with decor that reminded me of either something you would see in the late 1970s or early '80s. The guy stood up and started walking out of the room he was in and that was when I realized that this person had some kind of developmental disability and no bladder or bowel control (hence the adult diaper). I think the guy went to find someone because it turned out they had defecated and needed to be cleaned up. Oddly enough, I know where the visual for this part of the dream came from: it was a post on Facebook about with the "Have a baby they said. It'll be fun they said" and there was a baby in a diaper who had a very liquidy bowel movement that had gone up out of the diaper and up the baby's back.
It was shortly after this section that the game faded to black and I thought I understood the premise of the game. That you started out as R.M. and through your initial series of choices, you lived the lives of one of your ancestors making choices during their own sections until your bloodline ran out. Since this was my subconscious mind, I make no assumptions on what the reasoning or meaning behind ending up as a the young man with developmental disabilities. You might say that this could be a "bad ending" because bad endings happen all the time in games, but I am not one to believe that anyone with any kind of disability would be a bad ending, or seen as a punishment for doing something "wrong" in a game. I am guessing that my brain took that image of the baby with the poopy back and tried to find a way to integrate it into my existing dream.
But that dream did not end there. I apparently started the game again because once again I was R.M. and this time, after killing the initial guy, I ran up the road past the girl, past the guy on horseback and found myself at another house, where a woman in another plain cotton dress answered, which turned out to lead me to being arrested and taken to prison. I know that there was a brief section about being in prison, but I do not recall any details, only that R.M. eventually was released and his bloodline continued.
So that was it. I think it is an interesting concept for a game, that you only play certain parts of a persons life. There doesn't have to be an overarching story either, which is where I am sure production companies would come it and say that it has to be about something! Presumably events in a person's life where their life could take a couple directions, then you jump ahead in time to play someone else. Theoretically, this game could go on forever if your bloodline continues, but there are too many mechanics for me to even think about right now to even conceive of how this could actually work.
Maybe it could be worked out, or at least something like it (if there isn't already), but I don't know if I'm the one to do it.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
