The past few nights, I’ve had some unusually vivid dreams involving video games. In one of them, I was a Terraria character, traversing a world that vaguely resembled surface biomes from the real game, minus some incongruous floating platforms. After fighting a few enemies I came across, I delved into a dungeon, where I promptly got killed by a skeletal, serpentine monster that is not in the real game. What really stood out to me was my perception. Rather than sitting at a computer pressing a mouse and keyboard in the dream, the screen was the entirity of reality to me: a purely two dimensional world absent an experience of depth. 

This has been weighing on my mind ever since for a couple of reasons. For one, I was surprised that my brain is capable of constructing this purely two dimensional reality, even though maybe I shouldn’t be. When you’re intently focused on playing a video game, or any other task that requires a screen, your mental model of the world ignores anything that isn’t on the screen. Maybe it’s not such a stretch for the mind to remove it completely when not given any visual stimuli from it. But the other element that stood out to me was how much I identified with the avatar running and grappling across the terrain. That was me, as far as I was concerned. 

It’s hard to call our subconscious minds’ ability to create a 2D reality a negative, or directly impactful in daily life, but the experience is worth discussing on novelty alone. This is an experience that’s less than fifty years old, emerging at earliest with the dawn of the arcade era. I doubt that medieval scholars became so thoroughly one with the page the way we do with our screens. As new technologies such as VR (and perhaps cybernetics) emerge, I wonder how it will influence our subconscious minds and models of reality. 

But video games in my dreams have not just been purely a curiosity for me. Sometimes, they’ve represented overconsumption and obsession for me. Back in college, before I developed any proper self-regulation, I played Stellaris obsessively. As soon as I finished my classes some days, I would play the space empire-building strategy game for six hours in a row. The sleep I got as a result was horrendous – in my dreams, I imagined the continuing expansion of these empires for the entirety of the night, barely distinct from the hours of play beforehand. This left me exhausted the next day. More out of a desire for good rest than getting sick of Stellaris, I cut back the time I played it appropriately, and such dreams vanished.

So in my experience, dreams about video games can go either way. They can either illustrate our gaming habits consuming us, or a more mundane, if unique corner of our identity manifest. What about you? Do you ever play through video games in your dreams? Do they represent obsession, mundane identity, or something more to you? Let us know on the Boss Rush Discord. 

Featured Image Credit: Pixabay