From: mol@df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson) Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction Subject: Dreamhold Interpretation 2: myth & mural Date: 17 Dec 2004 12:10:59 GMT Organization: DF Computer Club Lines: 172 Message-ID: <32g0mjF3mivf5U1@individual.net> Here's some more analysis of _Dreamhold_, in particular, the third ending (the one with the mural and the moon). I'd really like this to be the start of a discussion - the conclusions I make below are really tentative, more hypotheses than answers. The third ending (I'm not counting the various deaths as real endings) is in a sense the simplest, most traditional IF ending: collect some stuff, wear it, enter a portal, win. But it is also the strangest ending because of the questions it raises: How does it fit into the story? What's the significance of the mural? And what with the "regalia" you have to collect? I'd like to make the connection to the various myths included in the game, which are prompted when the player examines the constellations. Like in Greek mythology, the constellations are connected to the stars, and the PCs ultimate fate in this ending - literally entering the heavens, joining the stars, and presumably becoming a constellation himself - is a common one in myths. So the apparent meaning of this ending is that the PC transcends his former existence and becomes some sort of mythological hero. Or, perhaps, he was one all the time - although his actions as revealed by the latter flashbacks seem more like those of the "silver demon" of the list of dynasties (this may be a reference to the PC's silver hair, as suggested by David Goldfarb). The various myths that are told when you examine the stars could perhaps be considered just embellishment - if there is a starry sky and a planetarium, of course you should be able to examine the stars and get a nice story - but the "dome" section of the game places rather too strong an emphasis on celestial phenomena for this not to be important. (And in a Plotkin game, it seems that everything is put there for a purpose.) There is also the connection, pointed out by several posters, between the myth, and constellation, of the Crutch, and the PC's son and his use of the crutch as a banner. In this interpretation, the mural is a depiction of the mythical hero - either the PC, or the mythical hero which the PC strives to become - and the strange circumstance that it "was there when I built the room" seems less strange: the myth is not one of the PC's memories or inventions. It seems that most (or all) people who have commented on the mythical aspects, at least so far, have assumed that the myths are external to the PC and his dreamhold: either they existed before the PC, and somehow the events with his son parallelled the myth of the Crutch, or the myths were created based on his life. But what if the myths, like so many other things in the dreamhold, are in fact internal, creations of the PC? I'd like to suggest that the myths - like the masks and the various artifacts of the dreamhold - are aspects of the PC's mind; his dreams, perhaps. In that case, the myth of the Crutch may be an idealization of his relation to his son. Note that the myth is much more innocuous than the story put together from the flashbacks. Perhaps this is how the PC would wish things to have been, or wish them to be remembered, rather than the actual grim story? And the PC's own myth - the one depicted in the mural, and his eventual apotheosis? My theory is that this is the PC's own view of realizing his inborn potential - this is what the boy who could hear the stars sing was *really* supposed to become, not a brooding wizard-king who does terrible deeds? The significance of the pre-existenc of the mural is that it depicts the potential that was there all the time; the PC built the room - developed into the man he became - afterwards, but the mural was there from the beginning. And in connection with the myths' being constructs of the PC's, I can't help wondering about the sky - or skies, rather. It is easy to take for granted when playing the game that the starry sky taht appears when you first light the fire in the small dome is the real thing, and the red sky with four moons is strange and unnatural. This is, after all, the PC's first reaction (as seen in the room descriptions). And the red sky clearly seems artificial, and the moons seem like projections (you can ut your hand through them). But this is a Dreamhold, a mental construct (at least partially), and, as in all Plotkin's work, the distinction between reality and imagination is very blurry indeed. Inside the domes, there is an orrery, a model of the four moons and their motions, as well as a planetarium, a device that projects images of the stars onto the dome. The planetarium is activated by lighting a fire. Lighting another fire "turns on" the starry sky outside. Changing the fire into cold fire changes the outdoor scene to a projection of the orrery. The parallel is striking. The point with this seems to be that the "real" constellations are also just mental constructs - which supports the idea that the myths associated with them are also constructs. The sky outside is a projection of the inner sky, the myths projections of the PC's dreams. Everything is part of the dreamhold, everything aspects of the PC's personality. With one exception, all the artefacts needed to complete the myth-quest are defective or deficient - the gauntlet in the mural is a common gardening glove in the dreamhold, the belt has lost its silver, the buckle has no strap, and so on. This may reflect the discrepancy between the PC's potential and actual abilities - despite being about to join the stars, the PC is deficient as a human being. The exception is the dagger - while it is blunt and not usable as an ordinary dagger, it appears perfect for its purpose, whatever that may be. It seems to me that the dagger is the really important thing here - all the other artefacts more or less happen to be lying around in various hard-to-get-at places, but the dagger is the centrepiece of a scene of weird, poetic beauty, which for me felt like one of the climaxes of the game. Given the great care put into presenting this scene, and the steps leading up to discovering it, I can't help thinking that the dagger is one of the most important objects in the game. So what is its purpose? When you take it, it leaves behind a sort of rift in space itself, in the fabric of "reality" (whatever that means in the context of a dreamhold), and trying to enter this rift ends the scene, putting you back in a fairly mundane cave. What I think is that the dagger is the means of destroying the of the dreamhold, cutting through the weave of illusions and finally escaping. Because the other endings don't actually escape the dreamhold. The first ending (restoring memory) restores too much; the PC is back where he started. Redrawing the portal seems to make the PC leave the dreamhold itself - but he ends up in the same kind of world, a world which seems to be an expanded, less limited version of the dreamhold. He's free to wander the worlds, but the worlds are part of the same universe. Only the third ending seems to offer a real possibility of escape. Which brings me to the nature of the dreamhold. Early on, the game hints at the dreamhold being not just a memory palace - a mental construct having no independent existence - but something more, and it also refers to it as a wizard's house. If the PC is indeed stuck in his dreamhold, it is far more than just a mnemonic device. It seems the dreamhold is made up not just of the PC's memories, but his entire personality, his history, and if that is the case he is trapped in the prison that is his own mind; not in the pop-culture meaning of insanity, but in the sense that we are all prisoners of the limits we put on ourselves - habits, guilt, memories, regrets and ambition. By transcending this, cutting through the fabric of the dreamhold, the PC can finally free himself and fulfil his inner potential; join the stars. -- Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se) PGP Public Key available at http://www.df.lth.se/~mol