DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
I had a dream last night. It'll take me a bit to land this plane so bear with me...
I dreamed my gaming buddies and I were playing in a Time Traveling Adventurers RPG campaign that consisted of five episodes.
In the first four episodes, we bopped around historical North America, righting various wrongs and stuff. The fifth episode I was summarizing for one of the other players, telling her how the Turks were marching through New orleans area, and that now we were Turks, as if it was just a minor detail.
She said: "Wait. Turks, as in: from Turkey? The other side of the world? What are they doing in New Orleans?"
I said yeah, but I didn't really have an explanation at the time. Her father stepped in from the other room and sat down to say "OK. Turks are now marching on Southern States and you are Turks? Lay it on me."
And I said "Well, I'm not really sure how this happ..." and I had an epiphany in the dream. "Ohhhhh. This is a time travel genre... In the first four episodes we must have changed history so much that the Turkisj Empire (I guess that'd be the Ottoman) managed to make it to America before the Europeans and so WE are not European but are - in the version of history we created - Turkish!"
And the GM stood and took a bow at us having solved the great mystery and paradox of the campaign. It was brilliant.
What is significant about this has nothing to do with the game or the plot, but that I was able to keep a secret from myself. I dreamt the progression of four episodes that had a paradox/mystery in them of which I eas entirely unaware at that point. But I figured it out after-the-fact.
The strange thinf is that there was, in fact, a secret to be figured out. And that secret was already in place at the startof the dream.
How could I set up a story in my dream - like an novel author, setting up plot points - if - unlike that author - I am not aware of the outcome, and yet there was an outcome that had to be set up?
It's as if my unconscious, which was dreaming, had its own unconscious that was keeping a secret from me, which was revealed later in the dream...
I dreamed my gaming buddies and I were playing in a Time Traveling Adventurers RPG campaign that consisted of five episodes.
In the first four episodes, we bopped around historical North America, righting various wrongs and stuff. The fifth episode I was summarizing for one of the other players, telling her how the Turks were marching through New orleans area, and that now we were Turks, as if it was just a minor detail.
She said: "Wait. Turks, as in: from Turkey? The other side of the world? What are they doing in New Orleans?"
I said yeah, but I didn't really have an explanation at the time. Her father stepped in from the other room and sat down to say "OK. Turks are now marching on Southern States and you are Turks? Lay it on me."
And I said "Well, I'm not really sure how this happ..." and I had an epiphany in the dream. "Ohhhhh. This is a time travel genre... In the first four episodes we must have changed history so much that the Turkisj Empire (I guess that'd be the Ottoman) managed to make it to America before the Europeans and so WE are not European but are - in the version of history we created - Turkish!"
And the GM stood and took a bow at us having solved the great mystery and paradox of the campaign. It was brilliant.
What is significant about this has nothing to do with the game or the plot, but that I was able to keep a secret from myself. I dreamt the progression of four episodes that had a paradox/mystery in them of which I eas entirely unaware at that point. But I figured it out after-the-fact.
The strange thinf is that there was, in fact, a secret to be figured out. And that secret was already in place at the startof the dream.
How could I set up a story in my dream - like an novel author, setting up plot points - if - unlike that author - I am not aware of the outcome, and yet there was an outcome that had to be set up?
It's as if my unconscious, which was dreaming, had its own unconscious that was keeping a secret from me, which was revealed later in the dream...
