Every sleep brings with it dreams, often really horrific things, sometimes terrifyingly enormous storms that are also beautiful. Recently, I have had…different dreams.
“Different” itself is a bit of a hard term to define, given that I have used vague terminology to describe my dreams instead of fine details. What “different” means here is a new experience that doesn’t really make sense — dreams of grandeur. Not in the eye-popping sense of enormous natural or unnatural structure that are awe-inspiring, but in a very personal, “I’m not sure where this is coming from” sense.
Getting into it, I’ll use the example from the last sleep (which I can actually say was ‘last night’ for once). Again we dive into Fallout 76, which has gotten a lot of my gaming time since Destiny 2’s Festival of the Lost closed and I finished the Season’s 100 level list of goodies — I paid for the pass, would do it again, fight me. In FO76, you can claim “workshops,” areas designated on the map as player-obtainable in which you can build things with some limitations (no wallpaper, boooo!) and usually have at least one event to defend from 1–5 waves of whatever enemy. The longer you are playing and in the world, the more likely you are to face multiple of these Defend events, and some folks opt to just let whatever enemy it is take over so they’re not facing 5 waves of critters/robots/Scorchbeasts spawning in from sometimes stupid sites. There are 20 or so of these workshops (it has changed since launch, whereupon you could originally take the workshop on top of Spruce Knob and now it is Foundation, which I talked about here), with some of them being more inviting to lower-level players or the lazier folks who don’t want to deal with some of the stupid spawning or enemy types. Federal Disposal Field HZ-21 was a fun one to take — not highly sought-after, varying enemy types (sometimes Scorchbeasts), good amount of nuclear materials. It also has a really neat real concept brought into it with the Field of Thorns, but we’re not talking about the Disposal Site for this dream.
We’re talking about the Tyler County Dirt Track.
Pre-war it was set up as a dirt track to race beautiful vehicles on. If you squint you may be able to make out the adorable Fusion Fleas sitting on a trailer — imagine taking those into a pit of destruction!
Tyler County Dirt Track is appealing to low-level players who haven’t left the Forest region, or folks who want an easy workshop to defend. Its build limits are decent enough, and the spawning points for enemies make setting up turrets for defense a breeze. It also was the focus of this dream of grandeur.
In this dream, I cleared out all of the rusty vehicles and tires and started to set up what seemed to be an epic playground for folks — doing the math of 24 people per server, I had an idea to break it down to 4 teams of 6 people each. In reality, you can join public or private teams in up to 4, so…6 teams I guess? or more, really.
The idea sounded fantastic to me, making me feel some degree of elation that is foreign. I’d have folks responding to this entire concept with applause, bringing their teams together to perform in impossible, fantastic ways. Here we have people doing some marching band stuff, here we have a free-for-all kill center, with non-participating players in the stands or enjoying free foodstuffs, giving each other gifts, crafting new weaponry and armor for lower levels. It would be a server-wide series of events that would draw in folks as much as actual events like Fasnacht or Scorched Earth.
Of course, much of this also played on the idea of the field being even, instead of potted with holes to drop resource miners as it actually is. Plus the seats are not usable, so more would need to be set up elsewhere. And getting folks together randomly? not likely. Even posting this on the FO76 subreddit would probably result in half the comments being some variation of “this is stupid.” Player-created “events” do sometimes bring in a lot of players and people have a good time, but I don’t think I have what it takes to make it work.
These dreams of creating something brilliant are new and weird to me, as I don’t have any aspirations to do significantly remarkable things. I like the quiet approach of making an individual’s day a little brighter and I loathe the idea of being well-known. I actually did have that in what I am now calling a past life: I was the pioneer into a niche aspect of a market, carving a path that many folks followed and it has ultimately changed the larger and mainstream market in that world for the better. It’s not something I ever set out to do, and even making that claim feels wrong to me although it can be independently verified. Instead, what feels right is to say that even though I made that little path in the first place, everyone who came after me turned it into a paved highway, everyone else made it functional, and the improvements to that market is a banner that they all rightfully hold. I’m proud of all of them and what they’ve done. I digress.
The dreams first started with music, hearing some track that was phenomenal (arguably, but we’re not getting into “good” music because that is a type of pretentious I am not here for), later coming up with this amazing piece of music. There have been a couple about making some indie game with a compelling story, even if short, or fun gameplay loop. Prior to last night’s dream, there was one about a story that would make a great movie. These are all skills that far exceed whatever ability I have, and I have to say there’s nothing particularly exciting that I can drum up in any of these fields. I wrote a garbage book once, I’ve pieced together garbage music, I have some okay ideas for games but hardly have the art skills to put together anything consistent, let alone anything close to programming (I did have fun with Doom 2016’s SnapMap, or what I call Baby’s First Programming).
Dreams seem to have something to do with conscious and subconscious thought, so the next step here would be to ask: Why dreams of grandeur? I’ve already stated it’s not something I’m interested in achieving. Maybe it plays into something else that’s been on my mind this year? While I opened up the original “Worthless” document to free-write all of my extremely depressed and self-defeating thoughts, it was a reminder that I did enjoy writing. I’ve missed drawing a lot too, and somehow starting this profile has brought me back into trying my hand more at that. I need to create things, and creating consumable things is of particular interest. The exhilaration in the dreams is a little extreme, but I can’t deny that I get a modicum of that when I’m doing things I love and folks enjoy it.
Maybe I could workshop the FO76 workshop idea a bit, and maybe some folks would have fun. Or they’d roll up and destroy everything, which I guess…okay, as long as you’re having fun? Or maybe I just go back to building up my camps in ways that folks want to wander in and have a look around. Those little thumbs up reactions do give me life, after all…although I’d much rather be telling others they’ve made something awesome, or they’re generally just great to play with. Gotta get that dopamine somehow.
