Friday 17 July 2015

Only in Dreams

Nobody is ever interested in hearing about other people's dreams. It's an instant conversation killer. Nevertheless, I'm going to tell you about one I had today. So fuck you.

I was driving with my missus in the dark in the city of Chester - though obviously, a dream-world version of Chester which wasn't really it. Somewhere along the way we got hopelessly lost; I was driving around hairpin bends, ending up in poorly-lit multistory car parks inhabited only by shadows, heading down cul-de-sacs and having to do sixteen-point turns to get out, etc. Eventually we ended up on a residential street of large, prosperous-looking houses in a leafy suburb. We drove for what seemed like an age before I decided to turn around and head back into the city; just as I was turning the car around the engine gave out and the car refused to start.

Annoyed, I got out of the car to call a breakdown service, only to realise neither of us had our phones with us. I was going to have to ask somebody to use theirs. For some reason, rather than ask somebody in one of the houses nearby, I decided to walk along the road, away from town, to see if I ran into a passerby. Ultimately I did - a moustachioed, smiling, rather too-nice middle-aged man carrying a small Christmas tree in each hand. He said he didn't have a phone, but if I walked back in the other direction I would eventually come across a house with the lights on, and if I asked there, I they would have a phone I could use.

I doubled back on myself and kept walking, looking for the house with lights on. But I didn't find it. Eventually I thought I'd been walking so far that I must surely have come across my car where my wife was waiting for me - but I didn't. It was nowhere to be seen and all the houses looked the same. With a growing sense of panic, I kept walking, half angry ("Bloody women! Where's she gone?" etc.) and half worried what had happened.

Somehow or other, without quite noticing it, I found myself walking not down that residential street, but down a well-lit corridor in a house, with a thick red carpet and magnolia walls. It was as if the street had morphed into some upper-middle-class family home; I don't know how I knew, but I knew that it was one of the houses on the street I had been walking down.

Outwardly, it was a friendly family home. The corridor went up and down small flights of stairs and landings, and there were pleasant-looking paintings on the walls, side cabinets with knick-knacks on, etc. But I felt uneasy there. I had a growing sense of dread. I knew that there was something wrong about it. I knew that I shouldn't be there, and that I hated the place. Even writing about it now gives me the willies - just walking down that corridor was oddly terrifying to me.

Every so often I would come across a door, either on the left or the right, and open it. And there would be something inside. One was a horrible young girl, much taller than me, with glassy staring eyes and this truly sinister, benign smile. One was a kind of giant centipede or worm constructed from cubes of wood connected with string; the head was that of a jack-in-the-box style clown. In another room I ventured inside and discovered a closet which I opened - inside it was a big ceramic doll without a head, wearing a blue Disney Alice-in-Wonderland style dress. Another contained a figure like an Inca mummy inside a sarcophagus, which I knew was still alive even though it didn't move. This went on and on - each time I opened the door I would find something horrendous and/or weird, and flee to the next one.

The final room I remember entering I walked in and found an empty room with an alcove in the corner, about the height of a person. It was closed off by a screen of silk or cotton; behind this screen I discovered a tall, wicker door. On opening it I was confronted by an old, withered man with wild hair, who looked at me and screamed in abject horror: I felt as though he had been there for years and years, held captive and now completely and utterly mad. With his scream echoing in my ears I woke up.

Now, there is a purpose to this entry: it's not just an opportunity to unburden myself of a particularly vivid and detailed nightmare. The second half of my dream, when it started to get genuinely scary, made me think a lot (after waking) about D&D. Walking down corridors, opening doors, discovering weird and horrible things behind them - the whole thing superficially resembled a dungeoncrawl, except one with a dream logic rather than Gygaxian naturalism underpinning it.

That made me wonder whether there isn't some mileage in the idea of a megadungeon in which the conceit is that it is a product of dreams. One of the great stumbling blocks I encounter when mapping and populating dungeons is to try to come up with reasons for things being as they are; why are the halflings living right next door to the red dragon? In some ways this spurs the imagination, but in other ways it constricts it. In the dream megadungeon there is no reason why things have to have an internal consistency or coherence. It is entirely liberating: it is fine for one room containing a clown-centipede to be next to one containing an Inca mummy, as long as, I suppose, there is a kind of thematic sense underlying it.

15 comments:

  1. First: nice dream

    Second: I think using the dream-logic is great (maybe essential) but _describing it in the fiction_ as the product of a dream has a serious downside: the (very dreamlike) quality of _panic because you are looking for the logic_ disappears as soon as the PCSknow for a fact it is dream logic.

    For that reason I like to start with the dream ideas, but then layer on some kind of structure that makes legible (if not rational) sense.

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    1. First: :) Indeed! It was very evocatively described.

      Second: I think I see what you're getting at, and of course the things that work for your play work for your play, so more power to you with them. But I don't agree that the "downside" you talk about is especially serious. There are plenty of things you can do - even in terms of specifically inspiring dread or "panic" - regardless of whether or not the party knows that it's a dream. There are even things you can only do when they definitely know that it is.

      The literature is full of examples (Inception, e.g.) where the stakes are based entirely on the fact that the environment is a dream-environment and what this implies. "Dream logic" allows you to create all sorts of stakes, limitations, tools, and threats for the players that wouldn't otherwise be available. Then again, I think that dream logic (or at least fictional dream logic) already has to make, as you say, "legible sense," so we might just be using different definitions here.

      In contrast, I don't think I would get a lot out of a dream environment that was hiding its dream nature. Either it would be rational enough to be indistinguishable from bread-and-butter fantasy-reality, or it would be a frustrating series of non-sequiturs.

      TL;DR: I agree that playing Calvinball (i.e. making random stuff up) and calling it "dream logic" is limited in its fun and usefulness for play, but I think that "dream logic" done right, with internal consistency of a kind, is a powerful and useful tool that lasts, or even gains in power, after its nature is revealed to the players.

      PS. Do let me know, and clarify your intent, if I've misunderstood what you were trying to say. This is an interesting topic that most DMing discussion doesn't really touch on.

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    2. Please don't talk to me you are a psychopath.

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    3. Lesson learned: even when you go out of your way to be nice and polite to someone, if that person is an abusive, irrational bully, then the only response you're likely to get is more irrational abuse.

      Which is a damn shame, but I guess that's the internet for you. Meanwhile - If any, you know, polite and reasonable human beings would like to engage the points discussed above, then please feel free to do so.

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  2. I wrote half of one on my blog and tidied it up to about 75% completion in my notebooks.

    http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-house-of-hours.html?showComment=1389650160356&m=1#c45439356520296849

    Dream logic works as long as its internally consistent and exploitable. If it feels *entirely* arbitrary, your players will never get a hold of it.

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  3. I wrote half of one on my blog and tidied it up to about 75% completion in my notebooks.

    http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-house-of-hours.html?showComment=1389650160356&m=1#c45439356520296849

    Dream logic works as long as its internally consistent and exploitable. If it feels *entirely* arbitrary, your players will never get a hold of it.

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  4. In line with the comments above: it seems to me that the way to do this has already been set out in the discussion of the "mythic underworld" described in the OD&D rulebooks and which you discussed here last year:

    http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.ca/2014/01/the-mythic-underworld-and-mythic.html

    Which is to say: a dungeon obeys dream-logic in the sense that the environment itself is a malevolent actor that works against the PCs, and the inhabitants of the dungeon do not have to obey the same rules of logic and science that the PCs do. In such an environment there is ALWAYS a balance that needs to be struck by the DM: balance between coherence and unpredictability; balance between malevolence and survivability; etc. Stray too far down the dream-logic/malevolence path and every dungeon turns into a pure exercise of DM fiat that invalidates all player choices (e.g., "sorry your torch doesn't light the straw because no reason" or "rocks fall, you all die").

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  5. Re: setting up a construct for a dream dungeon. I remember one of the GURPS Who's Who books had an entry on Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who was famous for his "memory palace" mnemonic method. A sidebar in his entry suggested a scenario in which the PCs have to psychically delve into Ricci's mind and explore a literal version of his memory palace in pursuit of a McGuffin.

    You could take that "dream warrior" concept into a more fantastic realm by having the dungeon/memory palace be some sort of slumbering god's mind that the PCs are physically (rather than psychically) exploring, perhaps.

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    1. Yes, I have been thinking about a dungeon like that - the memory palace of a slumbering god/mad magician/family member etc. It's a really cool conceit.

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  6. I had a player guest-DM for a couple of sessions in one of my campaigns once; the action was a series of puzzles and challenges set in vignette form, and the party eventually caught on that they were literally adventuring in his PC's headspace to help him deal with a foreign entity that lived there.

    It was well-executed, and the dream-logic and the revelation really added a lot to the experience.

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  7. Sean Robert Meaney29 July 2015 at 07:47

    I had one about a kilometre long space ship that used the sound of the big bang to propel itself.

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  8. If you are on the plane of dreams there is no dispute that it is 'real' and the horror is none the less diminished.

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