Dreams

For all my life, I have had very vivid dreams. I never understood the ‘experts’ that say we dream in black and white. I dream in color, remember almost all of them, and can sometimes even make changes to control what I am dreaming. Maybe I’m special, maybe I’m a freak, maybe that is why sleep is my favorite drug (caffeine is ironically, my second favorite drug).

Last night I had a dream where I was Zarnian, my Mul character from Dark Sun. In this dream, she was young, still a slave, and already one of the best Gladiators in all of Nibenay if not Athas. Her slave masters did some really messed up things to herself and one of her friends in the dream, I will spare you the details. After that, her anger soared and she thought about committing suicide by killing as many of her slave masters as she could. The house Psionic detected this and planted walls in her mind to remove that righteous anger, leaving the core of who she was so she could still be affective in the ring. I woke up knowing that this happened again when her lover was sold to another slave master that killed him, and now the walls are breaking down that she has her freedom. This explains much of her behavior the last year and a half of game time, and is just kinda cool. I immediately decided that was cannon and I needed to build it into the character’s backstory. I guess since my gaming group reads this blog, I just did.

Do any of you ever dream about your characters? If so, do those dreams ever affect your game decisions? If so, I would love to hear from you. If not, I find that as I’m drifting off to sleep if I can think about my character in a story setting, it can help to trigger the dreams. Do whatever helps connect you with your character, consciously or subconsciously.