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Now, see, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about when I wonder whether I obsess too much over RPGs. An online acquaintance in the Unknown Armies newsgroup describes a dream (or, as he puts it, a “meta-dream”) he had about Unknown Armies, in which the rulebooks themselves are handled with the same occult significance as the world they describe.

Before I go further, you need to know a bit about Unknown Armies. It is billed as a game of modern horror, and it has horror elements, but that’s not the real focus. Unlike other horror games, people are at the center—indeed, are all there is. No vampires, no gibbering things from beyond time, no demons. Well, okay, demons, but demons are the angry souls of dead people, ready to do anything to get a taste of life before hell. So still humans. What supernatural elements exist are a byproduct of an obsessive and probably self-destructive lifestyle. Not just any obsession will do, however; there must be a symbolic tension, a self-defeating nature to the obsession. A flesh-working adept, for example, gains control over the body by mutilating himself, symbolically demonstrating mastery over the flesh and providing a graphic demonstration why you’d rather not have that magical power all in one act. You can have an obsession without the magic, but not magic without the obsession. That explains some of the strange, self-imposed taboos of the mystics.

Unknown Armies can handle any setting, any cast of characters, but the default protagonists are petty hustlers in the mystic underground culture, each trying to make that one, big score, and trading, stealing, or fighting over the arcane resources necessary to satisfy their obsessions in a cosmically significant way.

Okay, so now that you’ve got some context, let me describe the dream. Our hero finds himself dealing with a woman in a dark alley. Her collection of UA rulebooks and supplements isn’t complete, and, as some tiny part of her obsession, she wants the rulebooks the dreamer happens to be carrying. Presumably, she’ll go to extreme and dangerous lengths to get them. Luckily, they’re all spares and duplicates, so he can afford to give them up. He says as much. “Lucky?” she asks. “Yes, because I don’t want to be stabbed today!” And then they laugh like old friends.

The problem is, within the context of the dream, that she can’t just take the books; she has to trade something of value for them. Another self-imposed taboo. So, again out of deference to her pathology, and not for his own profit, he joins her in negotiations over what she can pay him with. In perfect dream logic, this woman who is trying to assemble a complete set of UA supplements has copies of some of the real UA books, the books of secret knowledge to which the UA game, if read properly, leads you, in the fashion of Kabbalah or alchemy or Masonic lore. And oh, these books. They’re like the rulebooks we enjoy in the real world, but…moreso. Deeper. Creepier. Truer.

Here the narrative of the dream breaks off. I don’t know how it ended; if it’s like my dreams, it didn’t end properly, but drifted instead into a confusion of meaningless elements, almost certainly before he got to read the dream books of True Knowledge. And, in the nature of dreams, I’m sure it grew out of thinking about UA. A lot. Obsessively, if you will.

I, too, think so often and intensely about RPGs that I dream about them. I never dream within a game’s setting, however. Instead, I dream about being a player, especially in a LARP. I no longer dream about being on a space ship; I dream about sitting on perfectly ordinary chairs in a convention hall, pretending to be on a space ship with fellow geeks. I no longer dream about being lost in the jungle; I dream about sitting around a kitchen table, discussing being lost in the jungle. When I begin to dream about a fantastic setting, it quickly becomes a dream about role-playing a fantastic setting.

Unlike this guy in the UA newsgroup, I don’t enjoy a direct, if imaginary, experience of a cool world. Quite the contrary: if I begin to enjoy a direct experience of a fantastic world, my brain rapidly translates it into a mundane act of “let’s pretend.” Perhaps this is the easiest way for my subconscious to make sense of some very nonsensical events. RPGs are supposed to be a vehicle for me to experience fantasties more directly. Instead, they become a vehicle for draining the more vivid fantasies of my dreams away, turning them to mundane experience.

There’s a symbolic tension there. A symbolic tension attached to an obsession. But no magic yet. What am I doing wrong?