Lately, with all this dream investigating that I’ve been doing, I’ve got sort of a working theory about dreams and trying to interpret them. It’s based around how the game Pictionary works.

For anybody who either has temporary amnesia or who’s somehow never played this classic game before, in Pictionary, you break into teams. During a turn, a team member gets a card with a word or phrase on it which they don’t show to anybody else. They have to draw out something quickly which will make the other players on the team guess what phrase had been written down. And you end up with a lot of hilarious mistakes and funny drawings, and things which somehow don’t make a lot of sense, but somehow still communicate your intent to other players.

And I think in some way, dreaming is like playing Pictionary with yourself, but on a much more elaborate scale. Like you have this other part of your mind, maybe call it the subconscious, which is really quickly putting together all these dream events, images, characters, feelings and situations, because this part of your mind isn’t able to use words & linear thinking in the same way as your conscious/rational/ego mind. (Or else it just doesn’t want to, and it likes to be elaborate, poetic and confusing - which seems very likely).

You can get into the same sort of situation with your dreaming mind too, which you’d get into with any long-time Pictionary partner. You start to develop a common visual/symbolic vocabulary, which you use elements of again and again in different variations. And you start to get a kind of sixth-sense with some people when you play it too, it’s really weird.

Besides Pictionary, there’s this other awesome party game which I found a while back, but have actually never played. It’s called “Eat Poop You Cat“. It’s more like a cross between Pictionary and that game “Telephone,” which is also called “Chinese Whispers.” In my other post about it, I wrote:

the first player writes a sentence on a piece of paper. The next person tries to make a drawing illustrating it. The third person only gets to see the drawing and has to write a caption for it. Then the next person only sees the caption and has to try and illustrate it. And so on and so forth.

I think this might be an even better metaphor for how dreams work. Cause in Pictionary, its too much of like a “X = Y” sort of thing you’re dealing with. This game is a lot more twisting and there’s no real end to it. The point is to play the game and to have fun, and look at all the things you created, and be like “man, this totally rules.” And you end up uncovering this sort of chain of associations and alternate meanings to “amplify” your initial symbol-set, as Jungian psycholanalysts might say.

I found some sites online with archived games people played of EPYC. I think this first one is my favorite. Something else cool that I read, about how certain symbols/themes never disappear from a game of EPYC:

Note that certain memes are nearly lossless: Nazis, devils, sex, Godzilla (sometimes loses to a gecko), people in crowns, elvis. Once these enter a pad, they usually will not leave.

I also think this sort of thing might not just be a good metaphor for how dreams work, but might also be a good way of exploring your own dreams, to sit there and play this game, and see what else you can uncover.