Study Provides Evidence that Games Force Their Way into Dreams

Video games have always been a source brain stimulation. That is fact. But a lot of the time, video games have an ability to tap into the subconsciousness of our minds, interfering with our dreams. I admit to dreaming about video games after playing them. It happens quite often, and can become pretty bizarre. Some of my dreams included running through the glass desert from Sword of Mana on chocobos with characters from Final Fantasy XIII-2, or watching a friend be kidnapped and taken through the mines in Donkey Kong Country 2. Apparently, a study proves that dreaming about video games is actually pretty common place in those that play video games.

In dreams, we are in the game in one manner or another. Bob Stickgold, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard, found evidence supporting his theory that video games were very likely to appear in dreams. He experimented, using the game Tetris, by instructing those that took part in the experiment to play Tetris right before bed time, but the particpants were woken just before they drifted into sleep. About 75% of the participants reported seeing Tetris in their dreams. There were repeats of the experiments using pornographic and violent videos, but none of them had the same impact as video games.

It is considered that emotional investment may have a big role to play in this. People are more emotionally invested in video games than in the films and pornography. Stickgold even hypothesizes that dreams are more of a recollection of emotions rather than visual images. Images instead just act as a shell to encompass those emotions. And we are just so invested in video games because we interact with video games - this increases our immersion and thus our emotional investment.

Additional discoveries have been revealed in the study, such as gamers being more capable of lucid dreaming, a state where a dreamer has the opportunity to manipulate an element(s) in their dream to change the course of the dream. Gamers are also braver than their non-gamer counterparts in their dreams, empowered to overcome any obstacle. Gamers also do not experience as many nightmares as non-gamers, or do not perceive their dreams as scary in comparison to non-gamers. However, what the biggest detail of this study could be is that gamers who dream end up dreaming of games that lack interfaces. Which is pretty true. I feel as if I'm in the game whenever I'm dreaming about the game. I will admit that I have plenty of nightmares though, but I think that is in correlation with something very different. Attached is the interesting study, and it is a highly recommended read if you've ever experienced a dream after playing a video game. So gamers, do you dream about anything differently? Do you dream about the games you play? How often?