I’ve been playing games for as long as I can remember, although recently, I find myself not having enough time to devote to singleplayer games. I don’t want to start a really good game only to not be able to finish it because something popped up and forced me to drop the game for a few days and made me forget about the game by the time I was done. I’ve noticed that my dreams were on average much more mundane, which made me think about this topic…
In the short periods of time when I did get to devote time to play games regularly, they would make my dreams much more interesting. The sort of locations I’ll find myself in my dreams would be a lot more unique to say the least. They would be much more expansive, colourful, diverse, and what not… Not to mention the things I do would be really interesting too. Instead of boring everyday tasks I would be shooting people, running around, racing cars, etc. Although I do have to mention that I simply imagine doing most of these activities.The only thing which actually feels real in the dreams is the movement, and I believe that’s because it’s something I actually do in real life, so I can imagine it in my dreams too.
I should also note that not all of my dreams were like this. I still had mundane dreams, it’s just that gaming drastically increased the chances of having better dreams, depending of how much time I spent in real life and how invested I was in it.
The content of your dreams relies very heavily on your daily experience and perceptive intake, but orbit more specifically around those that stirred up the most engagement (exciting experiences, stress, generally just things that “overtake” you the most). This intake is simply intake, and is not directly tied to the physical world.
Since life itself is literally the definition of mundane, while the gaming universe is completely packed with new and exciting experiences and activities, it’s really not surprising that your dreamscape would fill itself with these elements as opposed to the average couch you see everyday in your living room that carries no weight on your thoughts.
On the topic of how this relates to lucid dreaming, this could also just be a component of being more capable of “projecting” your consciousness to exist outside the reliance of the physical body. I would suspect that someone who does not play games, does not watch television, and does not read story books, would find it impossible to lucid dream, no matter what techniques they tried, since they are unable to detach from the conscious reliance of the physical body. Meanwhile those who are heavily engrossed with being able to exist consciously outside of that body would find it far easier to lucid dream, since they are basically doing the same thing lucid dreaming does on a regular basis.
Hmm, I was aware of how dreams were constituted of your daily experiences but I never considered that the engagingness makes a difference. It makes sense now that even though the majority of time is spent outside the game even when I’m regularly playing games, the same cannot be said for my dreams.
It’s also nice to know that my high use of escapism gives me an edge over those who don’t engage in it as much. I mean I didn’t have lot of success despite a long time of trying but that’s mainly because I was unable to dedicate enough time and effort to it.
I have pretty good imagination. And probably because of that I enjoy fantasy worlds of video games (mostly RPG-s). Having good imagination also helps me to have more lucid dreams, because my dream life is pretty intense as well. And yes, those two are related. For example my last lucid dream (a couple days ago), I was playing an online game that I haven’t played for few years (at least it was similar to that game). This game was interactive, so the creature I tried to kill in game, came out of the game into the “real world”. I was already lucid during that time (I knew it was dream). So I hit this creature with my fists.
Still mostly I see myself playing video games in normal dreams. But the online games I play in dreams happen to be more interesting than IRL. For example, there has been cases when I happen to be in the middle of the game myself (i.e, I don’t play the game on my computer, but I am at the middle of the game in person). So yes, they influence each other pretty much.
Interesting. If I was you when the creature came into the real world I would have definitely woken up in fear lol.
I would also say that the games in my dreams are more interesting than the ones in real life, because of the same reason. It’s a fair tradeoff, you don’t get the sense of continuity and all that, and the experience is shorter, but you get to directly participate in the world instead of controlling a character in it.
