interactive dream journaling, website edition

[paxcallow]

hey, i wasn't sure if this was something that went in web crafting or here, so i'm sorry if this is in the wrong place!

i've kept a dream journal in some form for probably 15 years now? not every night, mind; i've fallen in and out of it with sleep habit changes, depression, lack of recall in general, etc. but i have a long record of dreams i can pick from, be it in a little notebook, in tumblr blog form, in a word document. i love learning about other people's dreams, even when they're not very interesting. the peek into someone's subconscious is a fascinating privilege. (psychonauts has been my favorite game my whole life, go figure! :P)

but my favorite method of "dream telling" so far has been the tiny subgenre of games, the dream game. LSD dream emulator, the indigo parallel, (EDIT: NOT the indigo parallel! a totally different game i had confused for it, so TWO little games i can't remember the titles of!) ... another i can't remember the name of for the life of me. mostly walking simulators through striking, surreal places. there aren't many, but i'm in love with the idea; taking your own dreams and making them an interactive experience for someone else. it may be the closest we can come to sharing dreams. (yet.)

i've been compiling a bunch of worthy dreams to make into a page on my site, and my idea was going to be that all the dreams (hopefully at LEAST a hundred or so if i can select enough) were hidden in the HTML of the page, and clicking a button or refreshing would draw one of them at random. rather than copy down every dream i've had chronologically, it would emulate the random, subconscious nature of dreams for the user so they didn't know what they were going to get.

but that's just my idea now, being a novice programmer. (and i'm not even sure how to accomplish that yet!) everyone has their own style, and i'm really curious as to what some of you would do, tasked with turning your dreams not into just a published journal but into an at least somewhat interactive experience for the user!

would you change the background? add graphics and music? send them to other sites? let's hear it!

[arcus]

but my favorite method of "dream telling" so far has been the tiny subgenre of games, the dream game. LSD dream emulator, the indigo parallel, (EDIT: NOT the indigo parallel! a totally different game i had confused for it, so TWO little games i can't remember the titles of!) ... another i can't remember the name of for the life of me.

Yume Nikki?

but that's just my idea now, being a novice programmer. (and i'm not even sure how to accomplish that yet!) everyone has their own style, and i'm really curious as to what some of you would do, tasked with turning your dreams not into just a published journal but into an at least somewhat interactive experience for the user!

would you change the background? add graphics and music? send them to other sites? let's hear it!

I have an idea for my Gemini Capsule I'm slowly fleshing out. It's in the format of an adventure game, with some of the areas based off places from my dreams. I wasn't thinking of having a dream journal on there, but if I do, then I'll rewrite it as poetry.

[banyploy]

very recently i've had two dreams recently which had two completely new games made up in them, i also have a dream journal but i sometimes forget what i dream of the second i wake up anyway. i've noticed something in these two dreams though, they seem to be a combination of two different games i've played in the past, the first one is assassin's creed 2 mixed with mgs 1, makes sense, they're both stealth games, the second one though... is fifa street with infamous 2, yeah i don't remember much from that one at all but i rememebr there was some resemblence of lore in it. anyway i'm a really novice gamedev but i'm working on something else right now, but maybe these games could become real life one day.

[Misanthropic Monster™]

This is a great thread, I am super fascinated with dreams - I've been a lucid dreamer since I was a kid - I can't do it every night, but sometimes I can pull it off and it's friggen awesome!

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

I only partially noted dreams, and most of these notes are lost. I once attempted to make a pen-and-paper scenario based on my dreams, but this didn't work out well.
However, parts, symbols, and elements of dreams are present in most of the art I do. Fluid Worlds, my last projects, is at no placed directly based on a dream - but many passages (such as this one) are directly inspired by them.

And that is also a thing I can recommend: To keep up the surprising, unforeseeable element - mix things through. Take images, scenes, and settings from your dream and let them interact with each other - not even yourself will be able to see their outcome :). Recently, I started to play a DnD-Setting in a city where surreal places (from single rooms to whole districts) are assigned to tarot cards - by laying out the cards (that are constantly remixed) you create a map, that is used by the game master and the players alike to improvise. It works out much better than my earlier attempt.