Thread: Dream control + Dream Sharing: I was thinking of something funny.

A very good question. Dream combat is a matter of distracting your opponent, based the first two rules of dreaming.

1. Everything requires your attention to exist.

2. The more attention you give something, the more related detail it creates.

Take pain for instance. You only feel pain in a dream if you stop to focus on it. This is what you want to accomplish in dream combat, to capture you're opponent's attention. Not necessarily with pain, but for anything.

Shared dreaming doesn't take place on a stable dreamscape where both dreamers experience the same thing, each dreamer is experiencing their own dream. You can't affect your opponent with something from your own dream, you have to get them to focus on it so it becomes part or their dream. Basically, you can't hurt someone in dream combat, you can only trick them into hurting themselves.

The more you opponent focuses on something, the more real it becomes to them, and only then can it affect them.

I've posted about this before. If you do a search on "dream combat" for posts by me, you should find more on this.

One of the most basic move you could do is tell someone "OMG, you're hurt!" and then point somewhere on their body. I tried that move on Man of SHred, but he didn't fall for it and called me an idiot. I still maintain the theory is sound and it was worth a try, but I guess it was rather insulting to try such a basic move like that on him.

Take that scene from Friday the 13th, where Freddy is walking along scratching his claws on the wall, making sparks and a nasty sound. Something like that would capture your opponent's attention (especially if they didn't know any better) and make those claws more real to them. Once they are real in your opponent's dream, then it will affect them. But if they were to ignore those claws completely, they wouldn't have any effect.