major_kerina | Dreaming of Games and Neil Gaiman (Reply)

The dreamcatcher sure seems to be working well now. I not only had two potent dreams, but I can also recall both of them and I can feel them distinctively happening in my unconscious.

1st - I had an interesting dream of a puzzle/action game scenario. Think of it like that flash game Warbears but with a Team Fortress 2 style. There is a locked warehouse style building that four characters need to get out of. Each has a talent. One can toss makeshift explosives. Another can cloak herself and look around the complex (she can also float out of her body and see the surrounding shaft of explosives the team has to eliminate to escape. There's an elevator shaft and the elevator isn't there. The explosives dropper tries to send a bomb down the empty elevator shaft to blow only a few of the C4 segments without triggering a catastrophic chain. He manages to put a little english on the bomb but the four have to reset each time.

Aside from the recon agent and the bomber, there were two others. A sniper and a negotiator (he would use words as weapons). I didn't see if they ever passed the level before the next dream came on.

2 - This one was pretty good, because it involved an author I like a lot and one who I was reading last night before bed. That never happens to me. It almost makes me think I should start reading more zappy books or something before bed (especially with the dreamcatcher in place).

Anyway, I can't remember all the nuance now but the details were so amazingly beautiful. Neil Gaiman had a chat with me. There were moments it seemed I was inside his head. There were moments where I was trying to explain his books to mom and dad and neither of them were getting the appeal (they both smiled and were glad I liked it though). There were zooming dream angles and a lot of Neil Gaiman brainstorming.

At one point, I was able to interview him and I gave him an idea which I was able to remember in explicit detail.

He wanted to use the idea he had in a children's picture book. It wasn't really him, I figure, so I lay claim to the idea.

The idea was this. There is a small village in a rolling valley. Just on the outskirts of this small village, for as long as anyone can remember, there has been this strange sculpture on a hill. The sculpture has multitudes of goblins both large ones and tiny goblin gnomes all around a massive, horrific statue, rooted in the ground, of a Goblin Emperor.

There is a young boy (from town) who has gone there every day, with fascination, to sketch it. As he has spent all this time sketching it (always in the daylight), he has noticed small changes from day to day. He had noticed and named certain Goblins and found their legs in different positions than he remembers. And biggest of all, the great form of the Goblin Emperor and his legs have been shifting. He sees the Goblin Emperor's feet aren't entirely rooted to the ground anymore and this begins to worry him. But as he brings it up with the townspeople, they refuse to believe him (naturally), because they know that statues could never move. They're just stone.

They claim he spends too much of his day amongst these monstrous fantasy sculptures (which they believe were left by an ancient culture which died out...so they place any association with the sculpture as a sign of doom and failure).

Some stonemasons from town eventually agree to do what they can to dismantle some of the sculptures (however, their weapons aren't strong enough to make a dent in the Emperor's form).

The boy feels even worse about this as he notices the day to day changes are accelerating and no one else can see the slow differences from day to day (just the frozen status of the day).

Eventually, the boy sees that the Emperor has almost entirely freed himself from the ground. Despite his parents wishes that he never return to the statue grounds, the boy goes out in the middle of the night, fearful that something terrible is going to happen.

As he hides out in the forest nearby, he notices that there is, indeed, a difference to the statues in the middle of the night. They seem, somehow, softer. Some even seem to be shifting, but it's the Emperor's statue that worries the boy the most. As he watches, the last of the massive statue's foot rises from the ground and turns to a foul color of green. The Emperor, reanimated, howls out and the goblins all around him seem to come to life.

It is at this point that Gaiman is at a loss for where the story would go next. We discussed whether the boy's artistic skills would somehow allow him to recapture the goblins, whether the goblins would really be dangerous or that being stoney weakened them (or even just the Emperor). Together, we made clear that we wanted to avoid associations with the Boy Who Cried Wolf but also rather invoke that kind of tale in a new way. He seemed unconvinced that he could come up with a good enough resolution to the tale. As did I. But it was fun to work on the idea in the dream.

And then I was woken up, so that was the full extent of my dreaming. It was quite memorable. ^^

PS - I came up with one possible continuation.

"The boy soon finds out that the Emperor is still trapped and he learns something even more troubling. The goblins aren't actually goblins but they're the townspeople. They use the goblin forms as shells to possess for nightly proclivities. The Emperor Goblin has been secured thanks to the young boy's notice. He's the way that the townspeople have been able to possess the bodies of his former minions.

They sometimes raid surrounding towns in the middle of the night and hide the money to sustain the town. His parents are there. The goblin emperor is haggard and tired from all this but the townspeople pull him like on a choke chain."