The Dreaming DM

[Jack7]

This past week my wife and children have been gone to Virginia. I have been here alone for the most part.

I've taken that time to do several things that I haven't done in a long time. Practice solitude, practice Tai Chi, analyze scriptures and restudy Hebrew and Greek, practice meditative Yoga, contemplate. (I also had the week before this one suffered a bad back injury, having previously had my back broken in youth, so this was a good time to quit my training altogether and just recover. I couldn't do much physical anyways so I turned to concentrate upon my mind and soul.)

While engaged in activities like this I became kind of nostalgic and went back through many of my old notebooks. I was looking through some of the notebooks in which I had recorded results from some of my old scientific experiments and I came across my written Dream Logues. From February, 1983 until September, 1992 I kept a written Dream Logue. (Actually I've kept a dream logue since I was a little kid, and on up until the present, but the logues before this date are disorganized, the ones afterwards are recorded on tape or video, not on paper.)

I used to have very numinous dreams when I was a kid and even much later. I rarely have numinous dreams now, and maybe that's because being busy about life my mind gets swamped and I don't recall them very well. I just don't devote as much time in my life at this time in my life to my mind and my soul as I used to do. I might have a really impressive and numinous dream nowadays about once every six months or so. And often that's about something I'm doing, like working on a problem or inventing or whatnot. But it used to be once a week or so, on as wide a range of subjects as my imagination could devise.

Anywho, as I said, I found my old Dream Logues. I realized by reading over them that many of my old dreams and dream entries would make not only very good fictional stories but also very good adventure scenarios. Though not of the typical kind. They would make adventures of an almost surreal or mystical type in some cases, and of an extremely weird, bizarre, and frightening type in other cases.

I used to title my dreams based upon the chief subject matter and dreams like the Ghost, Ring Von Drei Firbindliches, the Black Wolf, the Airboat, the Falling Clockwork Moon and the Spheres, Conclave of the gods, Tarbfeis, the Opera Faux, the Invisible Man, the Deluge, and the Book of Lost Worlds would probably all make a basis for interesting, if very unorthodox, adventures.

I've never really thought of doing this before but I thought I'd mention it as unusual potential source material. Maybe you have some unusual source or method for developing things in your owns settings?

 

[LostSoul]

I had a powerful dream once where I was in a library. An ancient library that was created at the beginning of time and held all the knowledge of the universe.

There were some stairs going down. At the bottom was a cave with a pool that stretched to the horizon, glowing with a light of its own. That pool was the center of creation.

I always wanted to work that into a game (and did, kind of).

 

[Orius]

If I have a particularly vivid ream that seems like it would work well in a campaign, I try to jot down some notes about it. A lot of DMs rip off things like movies, books and so on for ideas, but with that you run the risk of the players knowing what you're doing with it. If I rip off my own dreams (and there's some good stuff in there), then they won't know what the hell I'm doing.

Some of the great stuff is pretty visual though, and might not be easy to work into a campaign. Like the one dream I had where I was standing on a forested mountainside looking out over a valley overshadowed by dark storm clouds. Several red dragons were fighting each other in the clouds, and their fire breath lit up the clouds with a sooty ruddy glow. Sure I could describe it like this to a group of players, but I'm not sure it would have the same impact and sense of awesomeness it had when I saw it in my dream.

There's some dream-based campaign ideas in this thread, although there is a bit of sock-puppetry in it: http://www.enworld.org/forum/off-to...amed-hapax-legomenon/248056-weird-dreams.html

 

[fissionessence]

I had a dream once that I thought made an interesting setting, except that I don't really remember enough of it to be any use.

There was a tall tower where everyone in the world lived, and there were some number of gods in charge. I think they were gods of fire, wind, water, etc., but I don't remember. Also, despite being gods, they were just regular people who had come to be in charge. Then these masked people were walking around with wheelbarrows, collecting people's souls, which were small orbs.

Yeah.

~

 

[Jack7]

I had a powerful dream once where I was in a library. An ancient library that was created at the beginning of time and held all the knowledge of the universe.

There were some stairs going down. At the bottom was a cave with a pool that stretched to the horizon, glowing with a light of its own. That pool was the center of creation.

Yeah, a lot of my more powerful dreams involve libraries, ancient tomes, and/or ancient places.

Some of the great stuff is pretty visual though, and might not be easy to work into a campaign. Like the one dream I had where I was standing on a forested mountainside looking out over a valley overshadowed by dark storm clouds. Several red dragons were fighting each other in the clouds, and their fire breath lit up the clouds with a sooty ruddy glow. Sure I could describe it like this to a group of players, but I'm not sure it would have the same impact and sense of awesomeness it had when I saw it in my dream.

There was a tall tower where everyone in the world lived, and there were some number of gods in charge. I think they were gods of fire, wind, water, etc., but I don't remember. Also, despite being gods, they were just regular people who had come to be in charge. Then these masked people were walking around with wheelbarrows, collecting people's souls, which were small orbs.

I know exactly what you mean. A lot of dream elements are almost indescribable in effect because of the emotions attached to them in dreams or because in dreams our perceptions and senses are altered, so that sensing things becomes a sort of different act than normal. We sort of see through and "into" things in a way we normally don't.

I'd like to find a way to present that (condition or state of affairs) through language so that it would have a similar effect on the reader, and find a way of presenting that kind of effect so that it would have such an impact on the hearer (in a story or game).

Nevertheless I think you could create a game in which you could alter, modify, or change dream elements in such a way that they become strange game elements that sort of "give a hint" as to what is really going on.

For instance in one of my games there was a monster form the other world who was benign, but very fearsome in appearance and considered very dangerous because the locals assumed it was responsible for some horrendous and gruesome murders. There was also a man, a local leader, well respected who was the actual focal point for the murders.

Every now and then one of the characters, like the cleric or the psychic in the party, would "see" the man as he really was, that is they would "see through to his nature" and his appearance would become greatly altered and twisted. Same for the monster, the psychic kept having dreams in which the monster would transform into a handsome young boy who was mild and pleasant to be around. Not angry, twisted, bitter, and outcast. (They couldn't do this through magic, because the boy had been transformed through becoming a korreupt, and so that had become his real physical nature, but his original psychological and behavioral nature still lay underneath. So the "seeing through" was not a magical process, but a psychological and spiritual one, so that the cleric and the psychic could at times misperceive physical reality for psychological and spiritual reality.)

Eventually the party figured out what this meant and tricked the monster into an old, buried church where it was miraculously transformed into an Lorahn (Eladrin) youth and they could converse with the monster. Whenever the boy left the area he transformed back into shape and appearance of his "monster form" but in the area of the ruins he was his true self.

They had to hunt down and kill the town leader, though not without a good deal of suspicion and maneuver because his public persona and facade protected him for a long time.

Anyway, I think if you change derma elements around a bit then you can transform them into game symbols, objects, or events that are useful. Though they probably won't have the same sort of immediate, psychological impact as in the dream. But they might have a longer-term psychological impact depending on how you work them.

Maybe I'll post one of my old dreams and then make an exercise (not exorcism) of changing around the dream elements to see how they could be sued to create an unseal story or adventure. Call it something like a Dreaming Adventure.

Such adventures might also unlock some interesting psychological (as the Greeks used the term) capabilities for character classes like the Bard, Cleric, and Psychic (I'm not a big fan of the term psionic in a fantasy setting, I sue Psychaec instead.)

Maybe even lead to new clerical spells and new psychic powers.

 

[Jack7]

The Dreaming DM, Part Two: In examining some of my old dreams in my Dream Logue I came across an old entry in a special section separated from the rest.

Over time I recorded Seven Special Dreams, those dreams seeming to me to be the most important dreams I ever had. These dreams are also some of the most intense and clearly detailed of all the dreams I've ever had, going back to the very first derma I can ever remember having, when I guess I was about five to six years old.

This particular dream (the one discussed below) I had as a teenager and to me it not only foreshadowed a number of things that would happen to me later on, but I thought after re-reading it that it would make an excellent adventure story/game mission. So I'm gonna briefly detail the dream here and then try an experiment in which I adapt it to a game/adventure storyline.


The Dream of the Other Hand: This dream began with me at an archaeological site. While there I decided to separate from the rest of the expedition and made my way over to a sort of lonely area that had been untouched by either excavation or prior exploration. I began to dig and eventually uncovered a crystal case, that was clear and easy to see through (it was as transparent as glass but far heavier, almost like holding something made of gold). Even though the crystal had been buried under significant debris, and there were other artifacts scattered nearby that had been weathered and were in various states of decay, this crystal flask seemed completely clean and pristine when I recovered it. It wasn't even scratched by the dirt and other debris. It was as if the flask had been hermetically sealed inside and out and had been preserved exactly as it was covered or buried. This struck me at the time in the dream as both odd and wonderful. And very weird and frightening.

I took the flask in secret back to the camp and concealed it from everyone else for a time. The object (and it reminded me instinctively of both a petri-dish and a sealed test tube) was sort of spherical in shape (from an overhead view) with pinched ends, looking much like two pie plates turned upon each other, but there was no visible sign of join because the crystal looked as if it had been created as a single piece with the object it contained perfectly cantered within it (without any visible means of support, the object within did not touch the inside of the glass). And inside the object was another object, easily visible and open to examination. That second object being most of a forearm and the hand of some creature.

It was in no way a human hand. It was crudely clawed, the scales being a sort of blue-green color in appearance, and very rough. the hand had three long digits with long claws at the ends of each digit and it also possessed a complimentary and opposable digit (like a thumb only far more versatile) that sprang from the center of where would be the wrist on a human hand. I was extremely excited as I relayed that nothing like this had ever been catalogued and that I had apparently found the remains of a completely unknown species.

I spent all night making a personal investigation of the object with my personal investigative kit and the next morning revealed my find to everyone else. I kept what I had discovered through my private investigation a secret. Because although I could find no way to open the crystal casing I found by examination with a magnifying glass and an ultraviolet light (like I use during crime scene analysis) that the underside of almost every "scale" contained a sort of cryptic and unknown language in script form.

The team members took the find (by now we were calling it the crystal arm or alien arm) to a big lab at some university (I can't remember which one but seemed like MIT to me) and they were also unable to open the case or penetrate the crystal (which we had all figured out now wasn't crystal at all) but they did discover that the DNA of the scales resonated information when bombarded by certain wavelengths of radiated energy.

The find became famous and most people, including the examination team were certain it was alien in origin. But I didn't believe that. I thought it was an indigenous but unknown species that had existed in human pre-history and that had probably died out and been lost. I kept working on the notes of the script I had discovered on the underbelly of the scales as well as copies of the information triggered by the resonant bombardment. Eventually I pieced together a map of where I thought the species had originated and found it lay on the bottom of the Ocean, but not just the Atlantic, in several places, including under the mass of the Antarctic. I didn't tell anyone what I had discovered.

The dream then switched to me diving in the Atlantic where I eventually discovered a huge undersea ruin of mammoth proportions, but covered in thick silt. It was about half way down a large mountain range which lay in the lip of an immense trench that strangely enough US subs used as a navigational beacon line. I had to make several dives but eventually found my way into an underground area of the mountain range that contained an atmosphere, where I found buildings and a lot of artifacts. What I found confirmed to me that the original arm had indeed belonged to one of the creatures who had built this place, that they were partially amphibious, and that they were indigenous to earth and had existed in human prehistory. (And that in their day they had been more primitive than us in some ways, and more advanced in others.)

The dream skipped in place again and I was in a large storeroom where I found literally thousands of stacked crystal cases with forearms like the original find. I also found some sort of way of obtaining information from the cases and arms so that I came to understand that the unknown race had suffered some sort of horrendous plague outbreak that had led them to all cut off their arms and store them in these cases. I really wasn't sure of exactly why but the arms contained "sympathetic information" that led me to conclude that somehow the plague had been accidentally self-inflicted and that they had intentionally mutilated themselves in hopes of killing off the plague and of preventing it from spreading to other creatures. For some reason I kept getting the impression of enormous corruption and sadness regarding all of the dismembered arms. The dismemberments had led to the eventual extinction of the race, but why never became clear.

The next skip in the sequence of events in the dream had me back at home examining one of the cases and arms I had brought back from the Oceanic site, through the electron microscope I had in my private lab. I was convinced that despite what the creatures themselves had thought the real and actual disease was contained not in the arms and the DNA but in the scripted information on the underside of the scales. The media kept talking about the original find as if it was alien, not prehistoric, and that the genetic information had led to stellar coordinates that were being searched for alien life.

But I became frightened and obsessed (in the dream) that the real danger lay in cracking open any of the cases and letting out the "Script" of the language on the scales. That the "writing on the scales" would somehow lead to the same thing happening to people, and would kill humans off. That we too would misunderstand the real cause of the disease and try remedies that would kill us rather than combat the disease (if indeed it could be called a real dis-ease, it seemed more like a mass psychological/genetic disorder to me). So I decided to try and sneak back into the lab at the university and steal my original find and then try and find some way to hide all of the artifacts. But I woke up before that happened. When I woke I clearly remembered almost all of the details of the dream, and I also remember the feeling of corruption (which was almost like being sick at your stomach through disappointment) and decay and fear I felt until I realized it had all been a dream.


For Adventures regarding this dream see Here.

 

[LostSoul]

That is an interesting look into your subconcious, Jack7.

 

[Mephistopheles]

I had a powerful dream once where I was in a library. An ancient library that was created at the beginning of time and held all the knowledge of the universe.

There were some stairs going down. At the bottom was a cave with a pool that stretched to the horizon, glowing with a light of its own. That pool was the center of creation.

I always wanted to work that into a game (and did, kind of).

That dream snippet reminds me of The Shadow Out of Time by Lovecraft.

 

[Jack7]

That is an interesting look into your subconcious, Jack7.

LS, that's either a scary observation, or an amusing one. Or maybe amusingly scary.

By the way if anyone else wants to post a dream and then change it around a little to develop a story or plotline then feel free to do so. That's what the thread is here for.

 

[Hereticus]

I had a powerful dream once where I was in a library. An ancient library that was created at the beginning of time and held all the knowledge of the universe.

There were some stairs going down. At the bottom was a cave with a pool that stretched to the horizon, glowing with a light of its own. That pool was the center of creation.

Did you meet Edgar Casey there in the Akashic Library?