OH! okay check this out. I made a game about dreams because of how close VR is to lucid dreaming. Like if you fly in VR your body will fill in the missing physical sensations like it does when you fly in a dream. Since our game was associated with the concept of dreaming, it became very powerfully linked to the actual dreaming state from within my subconscious. So like I said before, my dreams started taking place within my game world. And that's where the problems started, the dreams were so vivid I couldn't distinguish them from my VR game while within my dreams. Since I had freedom to do whatever I wanted within the game (as a designer), my reality checks didn't work anymore in the dream.
But what if, what if,... I created a VR experience specifically designed to walk you into a WILD lucid dream. Essentially a bridge between your waking mind and the dream world, that you would use as you fell asleep. My theory is, if you fell asleep in a VR world that could not ever possibly exist in real life, then you wouldn't even need a reality check when you entered into that world via WILD. All you would need is a VR check, and that would be achieved by the VR subtly reminding you that you cant do something in the VR environment unless your asleep.
For example (and I'm going to nerd out here so bear with me)
Have you ever played Kingdom Hearts? In the beginning of the game you are in a very dark, neutral setting with a column of light a short distance in front of you. You have one written instruction, "Step into the light. Can you do it?"
What if I put you there, but didn't give you the ability to step into the light with your waking mind? As you try to WILD, every time you open your eyes and attempt to step into the light, and nothing happens, you know it means your still awake. But as soon as you can step into the light, or can no longer read the instructions telling you to do so (reading part of your brain often shuts down during sleep) then you know that your not in the VR world anymore, your in the Kingdom Hearts world! This is so freaking appropriate because the setting in the game is called "The Station of Awakening", and the main character enters it while dreaming. He then goes to all sorts of different fantastic worlds throughout the remainder of the game.
AH! I don't know if this will actually work but I'm doing it!
***EDIT***
Oh man! and what if it also helped you with dream recall? I imagine it would already since you will always have a consistent starting point to trace back to, but what if it helped more? Like it trained you by using a series of flashing lights to at intervals to wake you up when your going out of REM sleep, so you could write down your dream and then jump back into the station of awakening when you your ready to fall back asleep. Haha and like for fun, within the VR simulation Namine could explain to you how the waking up lights work, since she is so associated with memories.
Actually,.. wait a minute. Is Kingdom Hearts a game about dreaming? Now that I really think about it, there is a LOT of dream related imagery and concepts within that game...
Sorry if your not really a gamer or don't dig Kingdom Hearts, like I said I'm nerding out but the concept is really what I'm trying to get across.
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