This is a game about going out into the world, finding adventure, and coming back home. It’s called The Dreaming House. 

The mood of this game is dreamy, wistful, strange. It has that mist-wrapped feeling dreams tend to have, of surreality and half-remembered nonsense. Even things that are disturbing or frightening are somehow beautiful, too. 

It starts in a room. Just a tiny white room. But there’s a door, and outside there are adventures. There is a mist, a blank page, a stage waiting for actors. There are infinite possibilities. When we leave the house, we can find them. There are people and places and stories, connexions and attachments. When we go out to meet them, we create new stories. We bring back Mementos of our travels out into the Dream and the stories there. When we bring these Mementos back home, into the Dreaming House, we use them to make it more beautiful, more true, more us. We use these Mementos to decorate our Dreaming House. Adventures comprise our decisions and our emotional attachment to those decisions. The importance of a memory is signified/embodied in the Memento we bring home.  In time, a room becomes cosy, and then a room becomes a suite, then a house. The more adventures, the more Mementos, the bigger and more beautiful our house. We can make it a place we love, a place to come home to. 

If a Memento has weight and attachment in it, it might lead you back there again. The emotions of a place, the truth and story told there determines the strength of the Memento - which in turn, can lead us back to form ever deeper connections and truths.

* Imagine: A quilt on our little bed, lovingly stitched by the tiny village we helped preserve. 
* Imagine: A lantern, given for the walk across the bridge, the long darkness. 
* Imagine: A key to the city, pressed into out palm during a daring escape. 

I have a gold coin, from a carnival. If I pick it up and hold it, I can go back there again. I can change the colours and shapes of that place, change the stories I tell in that place, with those people. I could even change it enough that my Memento is something else - changed, remembered with new colours and shapes. 

Wherever we go, it’s Mementos we bring home, and Mementos that lead us back again to the places and people we remember, that hold places in our emotional gallery. The Mementos that signify these adventures can be deepened, strengthened, added to. They can even be changed, but that changes the landscape of our collection of Mementos, and thus the overall design of our house. 

Here is the secret: Dreams can leak into conscious thought and mimic actual memories, and have a deeper effect on waking lives. Just as the our adventures decorate our house, making it lovely and comfortable and homey - or strange and unsettling and curious - our waking lives decorate our interior spaces. Our attachments to others, our truths and our stories, they fill our minds just as the paths we walk in dreams fill our Dreaming House.

How to play:

* agree with some others to play, and read these rules together;
* choose someone to begin;
* have that player ask another player what's outside the front door;
* have that player leave, for real, the place of play through the front door;
* and bring something back.
* The player who travels then tells the other players the story of what happened and how the Memento came to be in their hand,
* and the players together discuss how the new Memento has changed the Dreaming House.
* If desired, another player may then make a trip, optionally taking a Memento with them.

Asking another player what's outside the front door need not be formal. "What's out the front door?" is fine. "What can you see out there?" might net you a more mysterious beginning. (Games can be ongoing: suppose you live with another player, and you're heading out for work or on an errand. You might ask, "if I were leaving the Dreaming House, what might you see out there?" Or simply pick up a Memento and say, "I was thinking of taking this with me.")

The player answering the question has a lot of options and a lot of impact on the game. When in doubt, answer the question according to something you actually see - let its shape or nature blend with ideas about what sort of game the assembled players would like to have, and produce a single, sketchy sentence. This sentence is just a seed - it doesn't have to have a whole story premise in it. (Another way to seed a story: crack open a book at a random page and grab a word or two to start with.)

As you travel, bear the story in mind. You're really taking two trips: the one you're literally taking, and the one you create by reading the world around you. Starting from the seed of what you've been told awaits outside the door, look around you for things that follow on from it. Sights that stand out to you might be characters, fixtures of the landscape, or portentous events. Remember, though: you're reading the world, not skimming it for things that you've already decided are coming up next. Be open to what's written in front of you. Recall, also, that all you need to do is see or meet someone or something striking, ideally with some sort of interaction. You don't need a whole hero's journey or a foe to vanquish (although, if it presents itself, sure); you just need a travel story.

Selecting a Memento to bring back is often the most variable, interesting, and high-stakes part of playing the game. Sometimes it's decided for you, though; if in the real world you've gone to the drugstore to buy a mop, that's a fairly tight constraint on your story. (Perhaps that isn't the real Memento, though. Or perhaps it's enough for your Dreaming House for you to go on a grand quest for a trophy! Who knows? It's up to you.) Other times, the search is nonetheless easy: found objects in real life can already seem to shimmer with power. (Don't just take things because they aren't nailed down, though. Be sure they are refuse or otherwise free.) Remember that in the Dreaming House, nothing needs to remain the thing that you find it as: you can end up saying the stone you picked up is a necklace, or vice versa.

Perhaps the hardest way to play The Dreaming House is to simply have to leave, and find a Memento. Now you've got to find a story too, without the benefit of a framework for your movements. You may have to do more, travel further, or interact with someone or something you otherwise wouldn't, to invest the right amount of energy into your story and make the Memento apparent. (Or you can just go down to the coffee shop. Bringing back a cup of coffee or sandwich as your Memento, however, is frowned upon.)

Upon your return, tell the other players the story of your travels, what the Memento is, and how you came to have it. The players may ask questions, or ask you to expand upon details. The most important work for the other players after your return, however, is to place the Memento somewhere in the play space, and for all the players to discuss how the new (or changed) Memento has altered the Dreaming House. The player who answered the traveler's question at the start of the trip might begin by asking other players questions: "How does the front room look? Is there a new corner or corridor we didn't see before?" Come to agreement, and then place the real-world Memento someplace appropriate. (An ongoing game might have a dedicated Memento shelf, as well as a blank book for keeping notes.)

On the next round of travel, another player can take any one of the things that others have brought back as Mementos. It's not required, and if there are only a couple of Mementos, it will probably make for a richer Dreaming House going forward if you set off looking for a new one. If you do feel moved to take an existing Memento with you, this changes the way the story proceeds: you're very likely to meet the person, or find yourself in the place, that the Memento last had to do with. Bear this in mind as you travel. Your next encounter may be more than a glancing one, or the person, place, or Memento may change in nature.

The Dreaming House can be played by just one player. Source your initial glimpse outside the Dreaming House from a book, or image, or book of images, then play as normal and write down your stories. Decide on your own about the shape of the Dreaming House after each one, using the above questions or others. Note that the designers of this game take no responsibility for any effects on your sanity; we rather think it will be beneficial, but your own consciousness is yours to look after.


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De Profundis, Michal Oracz
My Secret Hideout, Andrew "Zarf" Plotkin






































Here is the secret: as play unfolds in full, the Dreaming House will insist on peeking into your real life, dipping a toe in here and there. Your adventures in the game will have a tendency to impact the real-world choices that inspire them. Did you mention a rose-colored forest or a temple with a threefold priestess to the clerk at the supermarket? Wouldn't it be a shame if this game of adventures remained insulated, an escape from an unadventurous life? By making a new choice, you might escape yourself.