I spent a lot of time playing video games as a teenager and young adult—enough that I felt guilty at times & worried I might be wasting my time. I had trouble defending video games against people who made such accusations. But in recent years I've come around to making sense of video games, putting words to the intuitive 'goodness' I sensed when I sat down at a keyboard or controller. And I think it has everything to do with DREAMS. In this video, I try to elucidate that connection.

I believe that video games are good, legitimate, and healthy because dreaming is good, legitimate, and healthy. Video games can be used in waking life, as dreams are used in sleeping, to further satisfy as well as augment the natural, necessary function of entering—entering as completely as possible—into imaginary worlds.

Like all good things video games can be abused (of course) which only means we should learn to use them well rather than not at all. Of course they can be misunderstood and maligned by those to whom they are foreign, which only means we should try to understand the dreaming mind. Of course some video games are trash, which only means that we should encourage good games to be made, as well as further teasing out the relationship between dreams and video games, in order to maximize the latent potential at our disposal in the gaming industry.

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RECOMMENDED READING
"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" by H.P. Lovecraft
Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung
The Complete Poetry of John Donne
Byron: Poetical Works
The Novel of the Future by Anais Nin



SOME SOURCES
Dreams: Why We Dream and How They Affect Sleep
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/dreams

Experimental research on dreaming: state of the art and neuropsychoanalytic perspectives https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/...

Why Your Brain Needs to Dream
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/arti...

Dreaming of a learning task is associated with enhanced sleep-dependent memory consolidation
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20417...

Cognitive flexibility across the sleep-wake cycle: REM-sleep enhancement of anagram problem solving
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12421...

Some stock footage from videvo.com yadayada