Monday 23 August 2004

Pic of the day: Playing this character helps. The guys that are being thrown around are villains from the Circle of Thorns. They deserve what they get. And I guess so do I, in this case:

Scary CoH dreams again

The last few days I have been bothered by scary RPG dreams again. I know I have written about this problem in the past. I had it with Daggerfall, and Morrowind as well, especially when I played new characters and when I played late at night. (Strangely, I cannot remember whether I had this with Dark Age of Camelot. Then again I played those other games in parallel with that. CoH tends to crowd out all other RPGs.) It does not come at once from one night of playing, but when I play day after day (and I do) it eventually settles in.

What happens is that I have a scary dream almost as soon as I fall asleep. The dream is based on my current favorite role playing game. These days that is City of Heroes, and takes the form of running into purples (high-level villains) and finding myself surrounded and panicking.

The "as soon as I fall asleep" part is intriguing. Normally we are not supposed to dream as soon as we fall asleep. We descend softly through drifting images and thoughts for a while into deep sleep, and stay there with little or no dreams for a while. Then we drift back up the same way, but instead of waking we have vivid dreams, then down again to deep restful sleep. Each such cycle takes around 90 minutes, and early in the night the deep sleep dominates, then REM sleep (with vivid dreams) take up more and more of the time as morning approches. That's what the books say. That's not what I experience.

One thing conforms to the books, though. We are supposed to have our most negative dreams in the beginning of the night, then our mood improves toward the morning. Quite a few patients with endogenous depression has it the other way around, they get more depressed and angsty the more REM sleep they have. These people benefit from drugs that cut down on dreamsleep, and generally should sleep less than the rest of us. With me, however, the worst dreams are the first. And the worst of all are those that come as soon as I close my eyes. They are almost always outright scary or at least creepy.

***

I solved the problem for this time though, I think. I started playing my level 22 tanker instead of the newbies. 22 is not exactly high level, but it is far from newbie either. At 18 we "invulnerable" tankers get a power that protects us more the more enemies there are nearby, Invincibility. From this time on we come into our own.

After playing this character, the symptoms disappeared for this time. A feeling of being in control is important to a human, I guess. Even if it is just in a fantasy world.