As many of you know, I maintain a web site devoted to the discussion of time travel, Temporal Anomalies in Popular Time Travel Movies. Because Multiverser allows time travel and provides brief theoretical structures for resolving the issues it raises within play, and because a lot of those theories were originally developed in response to the various time travel films that we had seen, it seemed a reasonable notion that science fiction fans might take an interest in the game if they were introduced to the concepts through discussion of the time travel ideas.
That’s all by way of background. In writing analyses of these movies, I came upon 12 Monkeys, and it has been a fascinating film to discuss. It brings me more web-page-related e-mail than most of my pages. Not all of it is about the time travel elements.
Of great interest in discussions of the movie is the recurring dream sequence. At least three times during the movie, the main character, James Cole, dreams of a man in a trench coat rushing through a crowd while waving a gun, and being shot to death by security. In each replay of the dream, there is a different man in that trench coat. Ultimately we learn that this dream is a memory. When he was eight years old, he was at the airport, and he saw a man in a trench coat waving a gun shot to death by airport security. He doesn’t remember seeing it; he remembers dreaming about it.
I’ve had several discussions about those dreams over the years, and how dreams are sometimes related to memories; and in those discussions I have related a recurring dream of my own which was also related to a lost memory, and so has helped me to understand something about the movie 12 Monkeys, but also something about dreams and memories.
I’ll relate the dream in a moment. First, we’re going to prod our memories with a recap of the dozen articles which comprise the history of this column over the past quarter. I’ll also note that the last time we did this was in Memory, three months ago.
- Bands challenged the notion that the best of the best would always be able to work together. So many character parties, if they were real people, would splinter as each hero started his own group.
- We gave consideration to the tactics of villains in Resources, recognizing that they must at times improvise in response to situations, but that as referees we must be mindful of their limitations and not exceed them.
- Catch considered the notion of an enemy that doesn’t intend to kill, or at least not yet, but only wants to capture the characters for some reason.
- We’ve all been Snubbed at some point in our lives, and we’ve also made the mistake of snubbing others. This idea suggests that those the characters have mistreated or disrespected in the past might come back to be a problem for them in the future.
- Stained Glass looked at three songs from about the same time which drew from ostensibly the same inspiration, but came out very different. It advised going back to that which has inspired in the past and looking at it again with fresh eyes, for there may yet be more inspiration within it.
- I’ve been Amazed at times at how many people don’t understand the concepts of a maze, but here I gave some fresh suggestions for using mazes and labyrinths and similar problems within a game world.
- Looking at a dream, it occurred to me that many of the places I’ve been in my life have by now been Relocated, and that it was probably important to keep in mind that the places on my game maps should change with time, even without any interference from the players.
- That same dream suggested that there are several Types of people, or characters, within our dreams, and that these different kinds of characters can be useful in structuring our games.
- There is a way of structuring an adventure for players which focuses entirely on the identities, plans, and actions of the Antagonists, and we looked at the critical questions that had to be answered to design such an adventure.
- Conflicts finished our miniseries on alignment by looking at the balancing act that falls in the four corners of the old grid, where a character must make decisions which pit his values against each other.
- I saw Sparkles on the ground in the woods, and knew there was something wrong. This reminded me that sometimes it is beauty that tells of trouble, and also that sometimes we know something is wrong without being able to identify why.
- Last week we considered the problem that Darkness poses to the common gamer task of mapmaking, and some of the more unusual solutions that address this.
I mentioned a dream that was a memory. Let me begin with the dream.
In my dream, I was sitting in a wheelchair. I was young, not an old man in a wheelchair but a child; but I had this dream when I was young, and I perceived myself as being about the age that I was when I dreamed. Someone wheeled me into a living room, appointed with various tables and upholstered chairs, a rug covering the floor, and lamps here and there to provide light. There was a large free-standing console television set along one wall, and perhaps a dozen other kids, most of them watching the black-and-white television (which was still common at that time), some playing with the various games, toys, and puzzles that were also here.
This was one of those dream situations. I in reality did not recognize the place nor the people, and could not put names to any of them; but in the dream I knew exactly where I was and who these people were. I think at one point I referred to one of them by name.
As the dream continued, a boy walked into the living room from the hall outside the door, eating an apple. I immediately wanted an apple. I stood up out of my wheelchair and walked out the door and down the school-like hall to the kitchen, where the kitchen workers, dressed in white, scolded me for getting out of my wheelchair, but said that indeed I could have an apple if I wanted one. They removed an apple from the refrigerator, gave it to me, and one of them escorted me back to my wheelchair in the living room.
Dream ends.
That is the dream I had; that is how I described this dream after I had it, and some of those details were understood exactly that way for decades. Yet I learned fairly early what it was that I was dreaming, and over time and with greater understanding of how things were done then I have filled in the pieces. Here is what really happened.
When I was perhaps three or four I was stricken with acute nephritis, a not uncommon secondary effect of an untreated strep infection. They say I was fortunate to have survived. I was hospitalized for some time; hospitalizations of a couple weeks were not uncommon in the late nineteen fifties, and were probably easier and cheaper ultimately than the house calls our pediatrician sometimes made. After being bedridden for part of the time, I was moved to a wheel chair. I don’t remember any of that.
In the dream, I was in that wheelchair. I was younger at that time than I appeared in the dream; but then I obviously did not see myself at the time, so this placement of myself at my then-current age was my mind’s way of letting me know that this was me. I had been wheeled into not a living room but what was called until fairly recently a day room, a place where pediatric patients who are ambulatory and not contagious are permitted to play together. Of course there were no televisions in the rooms; Marty McFly’s grandmother was right that nobody had two televisions in that decade, and if you wanted to watch television in the hospital, you had to get the nurse to take you to the room with the television. This room was carpeted, because sick children played on the floor; it had games and puzzles to entertain them.
Another patient entered eating an apple and I, wanting an apple, got out of my wheelchair and headed for the source of apples. Of course, it’s absolute madness to think that even in a small hospital a child my age could have found his way to the kitchens, or even that he would have recognized such a vast and terrifying place as a kitchen if he’d found it. I went to the nurse’s station, where there were women wearing white uniforms (all nurses uniforms were white then; you rarely see them in white now) which to me weren’t any different from cafeteria uniforms. There was a refrigerator there in which drinks and snacks for the patients were kept, as there usually is on every hospital ward I’ve seen since. I was given an apple, and taken back to my wheelchair.
You can see the several discrepancies; yet some of those I did not realize for decades, despite having been in and out of hospitals quite a bit more than the average laymen, delivering needed items to my wife when she was working. Realizing who those people were, that the living room was actually a day room, that the kitchen was the nurses station, all took time.
You see, my understanding of the dream, and even the dream itself, was locked into the worldview of a six year old child. He knew nothing of how hospitals were set up. In his mind, that forgotten image of a day room that popped up looked like a living room, so he made it look more like a living room. The people who gave him food from a refrigerator must have been in a kitchen, because that’s where refrigerators are, so they must have been kitchen workers, and that was a kitchen counter, and it was all a kitchen. The images in the dream were partially what was remembered, but partially, and particularly around the edges where I, in the dream, was not focused, invented to fit my understanding of such things.
So, too, when James Cole dreamt of the man being shot, his mind filled in that man with people he had met, because he didn’t know who was shot, and he couldn’t really remember it. He could only remember the dream, and the dream was subject to his mind’s efforts to fill in the pieces he didn’t know.
In response to the claim people make that they have “precognitive” dreams, James “the Amazing” Randi observes something very like this. We all have dreams; it is said that we dream hundreds of dreams every night, and forget most of them. Dreams are comprised of random images which spring from our subconscious into our sleeping mind, but our mind doesn’t realize that we’re asleep. Thus the mind takes those images and attempts to treat them as if they were sensory information, and then to make sense of them. It thinks it’s seeing and hearing what is popping into it, so it fills in the missing edges, and we remember it as if it had continuity, because our brain created the continuity. It should not surprise us if sometimes things happen in our lives which seem for a moment to match something that we think happened in a dream. The very act of recognition causes us to remember the dream as consistent with the reality.
If that’s so, then there could be some very interesting ways to use dreams in your games, particularly dreams that are connected to memories, but also dreams that foretell future events. What you remember in a dream is not what happened; it’s what your mind reconstructed of the fragments it recalled, filtered through whatever you did and did not understand about it at the time of the event and at the time of the dream. A dream that recalled or foretold real events wouldn’t necessarily be fanciful in the sense that things within it were unrealistic; but it would not necessarily be fully accurate, and might have bits in it that we don’t understand at all, places or objects which have been substituted for the real ones because the real ones don’t correlate to anything we can understand.
It would be a bit tricky creating and describing such a dream, but it might well be worth the effort.
Incidentally, for anyone who does not know, the man whom James Cole saw shot to death in the airport was James Cole.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
