Dream Game

  • Do you fancy helping a friend out to dream a dream, together? Enter the dream game.
  • This is a verbal psychology-fiction-fantasy game played with at least three players.
  • Someone who has not played it before is chosen the It and is told about the rules: “You will go out of the room, someone will tell a weird dream of his/hers and we call you back when we are ready. Your task is to build up the whole dream by asking yes/no questions only”.
  • What is at play is different, though. When the It is out, players decide on a rule on how to respond to questions. They will reply according to the last letter of the main word in the question.
  • For example, if the last letter of the main word is a letter alphabetically between A-K, the answer is “yes”; if between L-Z then “no”.  Say the It asks “is there a PALACE in the dream?”, the players go “yes”. “Is it built on a MOUNTAIN”. “Mountain? No”. To avoid inconsistency with previous answers, the “last letter rule” is suspended when necessary – which happens not so often.
  • When the dream feels complete, the It is congratulated for the great job and is now asked to guess whose dream it was. When the It is out of guesses the truth is revealed: “This is your dream, you made it up”.

Source: Murat Gulsoy 

 

 

What if dreaming and fantasy are a production, an active artistic "happening", a process of creation and emancipation? Why do dreams have to be understood as as distortion of subconscious content through the symbolisation process of so-called "dream thoughts" (...) Then, can we perhaps -instead of resorting to the vagueness of the concept "principle of reality" (reality has no principle whatsoever!)- challenge the idea that "dreaming" is an expression of an individual mythos (which presumably is also a "desired" story) and even that it is an anxious expression of an unproduced subconsciousness, by suggesting to consider dreams as "necessity", as production and as socio-political, aesthetic, artistic "investment" or attempt? Dreams should be "produced" and incorporated into the mechanisms of social, political world.

 

Ulus Baker, Ignoramus: The Not-To-Know of Psychoanalysis