A Game That Never Was
I have to write this, just to keep the memory of it somewhere. Tonight, I once again dreamed of a game that never was. It was called “From My Own Friends,” published by Square Enix, and this was the first time I dreamed of it in years.
It’s hard to detail the plot of a dream, but I’ll try. There was this villain in control of a world somewhere, who had brought over a girl from our world. She was desperately trying to escape him, with the help of a fairy-like companion and a boy wizard. It wasn’t working though, as he had caught up with her and forced her to choose something which diminished her humanity even further. Like arriving had caused level one, and now he had caused level two; when the level filled up, it was game over. She would become his bride. There was a scene of the boy wizard fighting the villain, and getting his butt kicked, and one where gameplay was being explained; a centaur had a forwards attack of seven squares, but only the tip hit enemies; you got bonuses for each square before it that was occupied by friends. I had a memory of going to a movie and getting a bonus item for the game, and in the dream I actually looked it up on Amazon to see if I could buy it; it was something like fifty bucks used.
Needless to say when I woke up I immediately looked up on Amazon for it. It didn’t exist. I had hallucinated it.
I’m writing this post if just to keep the memory alive. It felt almost like a magical spell; I barely remembered the name on waking, and in the brief time between searching for it on Amazon and starting the post I forgot it again! I had to look up in my history to remember the title. I had dreamed of it many years back, and recognized this in the dream. For me, very rarely, certain dreams can and will repeat themselves. It’s a unusual thing when it happens, because it makes it feel like an actual historical memory instead of a dream. Like I had really played some obscure PS 1 RPG, had forgotten about it, and was now remembering it in the context of a dream.
It was unusual this time because I actually remembered the name. On reflection now, it’s obvious it’s a dream. The boy wizard (who was overconfident) used a cell phone’s battery power to enhance his magic; this wouldn’t have existed in a PS 1 RPG. Nor even in my dreams back then; I owned a cell phone only in the past five years. Even now the rest of the dream is fading.
It’s eerie in a way because it does feel like a spell. There is no game by SE or anyone called “From My Own Friends,” which in a way makes it weirder. I could see a game with that name filtering into my subconscious and being misidentified, but the thought that I literally created the title of a dream game in my mind as well as assign it to a publisher and struggled to remember it is an unusual feeling. It’s potent too because one of my important values is to remember things that are forgotten or lost. I tend to like weird or obscure things so that they stay alive in memory. I’m the kind of guy who forgets where he puts his car keys if he isn’t careful, but can remember vividly all the places where he first played an arcade game over thirty years ago. I’m probably one of the few gamers who remembers Kartia and played it before the rerelease. When I didn’t believe, I’d say that remembering things like this was a small victory against entropy and death.
This though, I know I will forget. I really don’t want to.
I think in part this is why atheistic claims of rationality just don’t work on me. It’s hard to be against superstition and in favor of rationality after an experience where your mind deceives you enough in a dream where you imagine a game you created out of whole cloth is real. You get reminded of the oddity of memory and how little we know about it, or even how little we remember. Another example would be sleep paralysis; rationally, you understand the concept of your brain firing off while your body is still immobile in a sleep trance. In reality, you suddenly are aware of a spiderlike jumble floating two feet above your head, hovering there, and then floating away to disappear into the wall. The atheists thought that focusing on the mechanical aspects of the brain would debunk any idea of a soul, but instead it created massive doubts about how rational we really are.
It’s like everything breaks down. Really, in the end all we have is hope. It’s really only the young who disdain faith as a crutch, I think. As you get older, the uncertainty of everything only grows. You hope in Christ not entirely because He explains everything, but because there’s nothing else in the world that warrants hope to any level similar. All other crutches break under your own weight. This dream was just an odd little reminder of how little I can trust one of my own core values; the remembrance of things forgotten. How fluid a sense of memory can be at times. Without the internet, I doubt I’d even know the game didn’t exist. The world has a habit of acting like this. Little weird moments like imagining a game you thought you played ten years ago.
