Video Games & the Importance of Wakeful Dreaming: Why We Need to Enter the Stories We Tell
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.ย. 2024
- I spent a lot of time playing video games as a teenager and young adult-enough that I felt guilty at times & worried I might be wasting my time. I had trouble defending video games against people who made such accusations. But in recent years I've come around to making sense of video games, putting words to the intuitive 'goodness' I sensed when I sat down at a keyboard or controller. And I think it has everything to do with DREAMS. In this video, I try to elucidate that connection.
I believe that video games are good, legitimate, and healthy because dreaming is good, legitimate, and healthy. Video games can be used in waking life, as dreams are used in sleeping, to further satisfy as well as augment the natural, necessary function of entering-entering as completely as possible-into imaginary worlds.
Like all good things video games can be abused (of course) which only means we should learn to use them well rather than not at all. Of course they can be misunderstood and maligned by those to whom they are foreign, which only means we should try to understand the dreaming mind. Of course some video games are trash, which only means that we should encourage good games to be made, as well as further teasing out the relationship between dreams and video games, in order to maximize the latent potential at our disposal in the gaming industry.
SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
Instagram: / empire_of_the_mind
Facebook: / empire-of-the-mind-102...
Patreon: / empireofthemind
Email: theempireofthemind@gmail.com
RECOMMENDED READING
"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" by H.P. Lovecraft
Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung
The Complete Poetry of John Donne
Byron: Poetical Works
The Novel of the Future by Anais Nin
SOME SOURCES
Dreams: Why We Dream and How They Affect Sleep
www.sleepfound...
Experimental research on dreaming: state of the art and neuropsychoanalytic perspectives www.frontiersi...
Why Your Brain Needs to Dream
greatergood.be...
Dreaming of a learning task is associated with enhanced sleep-dependent memory consolidation
pubmed.ncbi.nl...
Cognitive flexibility across the sleep-wake cycle: REM-sleep enhancement of anagram problem solving
pubmed.ncbi.nl...
Some stock footage from videvo.com yadayada
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The best undiscovered channel.
This channel is getting discovered right now. You are experiencing yt algorithm at it‘s finest.
When I got married, for a while I dropped gaming and felt like it was a waste of time. I actually got a bit depressed and lost my sense of purpose. When I got back to gaming to feel better, it actually did make me feel better and more hopeful, and more productive weirdly enough. Go figure :D
Long time ago i had a dream where is saw this painting of a large oasis, almost like a small jungle, in the a desert with sand dunes that went over the horizon. On the very lower left of the painting was a man riding a camel.
Then i sort of plunged into the painting and everything came to life right in front of me. The oasis was more alive than the painting showed it to be. The man on the camel was moving, continuing on his path. I could even hear the sound of the wind brushing on the palm treas.
The sounds, the lighting, the colors, everything was now "alive". I can't really describe it.
Cool. Last night I dreamt I was being chased by through an alleyway by a giant grizzly bear that burst out from beneath the snow. Not as pretty as your dream.
Some dreams feel very, very realistic and “alive” as you described. That’s sounds quite unique!
Fascinating content. A thinking man's channel.
Lawrence of Arabia Analysis was just perfect to me
Thanks: you have enboldened me to do as has been recommended to me by so many women, to dream on.
You got me. I lol'd.
I think video games should be treated with more caution. As meme analysis pointed out, they are much easier to get lost in than books or movies. It's very easy to succumb to the promise of effortless and endless dreaming and thus become addicted.
I've faced this my entire life. Alcohol-drinking, TV-watching, zombies, that love to point the finger at smoking weed and playing video-games. All my friends that played video games are stable individuals. The ones who watched TV are the walking dead. Long before they started discussing the possibility that we live in a holographic universe, I wondered if life was just some complex video game. And over time, I've become more and more open to the idea. When you understand video-games, how they work, and how they're made, you start to understand life a lot better too. As above, so below.
Indeed, it’s strange that people who watch sports for hours on end think video games are a waste of time. Both are fine methods of recreation, but we knowers are unknown to ourselves, I believe someone said.
In addition to applauding this as beautiful, inspiring, and thought-provoking, and want to thank you for your words at 17:52, which I believe are the first point in your script where you talk about your own experiences within the context of everything mentioned so far. It was really nice to hear a humanising voice behind what I had thus far experienced as an educational video, as opposed to a more personally-expressed thought-provoking, inspiring, and beautiful one, even if it was, for this channel, unsurprisingly so.
Great work, as always. I've not seen a single video of yours where I've been bored or tempted to stop it earlier than its end, nor can I bring myself to binge on them, as I'm tempted to; they are too moving to do any the discredit of being forgotten in the thoughts and feelings of the next.
All of your videos always sent me down intellectual rabbit holes. Than you. I love it here.
Can't believe it took me so long to get around to this one. I was never a big gamer, but I've always found narrative to be so, so important to the human person. And yet as I've begun to write increasingly complicated stories, I occasionally find myself frustrated with the inevitable limits of narrative-how there will never be a perfect sentence, never be a perfect story, how sometimes there will never even be a perfect word for what I want to convey, and most of all, how there is ultimately a point where the reader can't go any deeper into the story. There will always be a page between them. I never considered ways to expand the borders of a story into something readers could actually enter until I saw this video. This is something I'll probably find myself thinking about a lot over the next few days. Amazing work, Empire, as always.
you are so underrated i loved you lawrence of arabia analysis
Yet again, a video that grabs the mind and doesn't let go, touché.
The act of dreaming itself has been an enigma to me as long as I know. I am convinced I learned to stear a canoe in a dream (where my brother taught me, before the day we went canoeing), so the learning aspect of dreaming has been greatly fascinating to me personaly.
Nevertheless your point of dreams being thoughs not devoid of emotion is quite striking to me. Truly the idea of the "driverless" mind (let loose, so to speak) during sleeping is on point. (I'm unfortunatelly not familiar with the literature). From the avantgarde plays driven ad absurdum to the schooling processes a sleeping mind might conjure, this aspect was hidden to me, while it being quite on point.
I've yet to see your link to video games though (with respect to other media/art). As an avid player (of past, unfortunatelly) myself, I do feel that given the media we could compare video games to (books, music, etc.), it's ironically the most constraining of them in my experience. Let me give you an example, I return from time to time to my favourite passage of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, where Harry Haller meets von Goethe. I slip everytime into a dreamlike state, seeing and feeling the scene in front of me, in a way a video game can in my mind hardly achieve. The scene is given, yes, but ways it outplays and feels and reaches out to me are seemingly endless. The ilusion of option might be the main bane of video games. They're more akin to a guided artistic vision, with little room left for self-interpetation and self-realization in my mind. The boundaries maybe hidden, yet they narrow the "playfield" quite a bit.
I hope I delivered my point in a somewhat coherent manner :D . Nevertheless I aplaud you for your videos, they've been a treat, especially concerning art, those were eye-opening to me, about caravagio being my favourite. It's a shame your content is not more popular.
12:30 thank you for putting into words the feelings one gets after watching a great movie. I always tried and never could put it into words.
This was a great video I have some friends who feel like fiction and dreams are meaningless. Ive always wanted to articulate some points to them but you did it in such a nice way maybe ill just link this video. It was very interesting
Thank you so much for this video. Your work is hauntingly inspiring.
You’re welcome!
This vid again is food for thought and inspiration for me. Kudos & thanks.
Amazing video as always. I do like to think that this quality of witnessing and not reading a book, or any other form of fiction, is one of if not the most important quality it may possess. I like to call this factor very plainly "immersion", it is that feeling of losing yourself to the experience, to replace reading, watching and playing with LIVING. Sometimes I believe that even in waking life one can be lost to the mechanical actions of day-to-day life, and forget to live, proper, to experience life and all it's meaning, to look around and past the how's and when's, and start seeing the why's.
I very much enjoyed this video. Wow. Thank you! How revitalizing!
This is a culmination of so much of my studying on dreams and consciousness lately. Thank you for sharing and for putting so much effort into your videos. Similar to a dream, discussing dreams is difficult and sometimes can’t be fully realized. Great work.
“Nature favors the creation of made-up narratives.” Love it.
You’re welcome! And thank you for the kind words.
For me, this is easily the most interesting channel on youtube at the moment. You got me interested in so many new subjects like philosophy and arts. It's insane that this video (at this time of writing) has so few views. I hope you continue your work.
Carl Jung describing NPCs is quite epic.
Thanks for making this episode! Video games are among the finest and most influential of art forms!
Good to see you back my man
It feels wrong that this channel is the smallest I am subscribed to
Thank you for the content!
It's funny how we could almost use a video game as a tool to create a world we would want to live in. Run it through a couple times, work out the bugs. See where the flaws are and patch. What is the goal though?
Another thought, imagine if you had all the data and a big computer, you could kind of do the same thing, for a small group of people. What would be their goal?
Comment in support of great channel!
One of a kind content with great presentation.
Now... let's start!
Solid analysis. I largely disagree with the concept of video games, but I enjoyed your argument nonetheless & see your point clearly. Well done
The differences in aptitude between dreamers and non dreamers is interesting. Haven't heard that before, I wonder if it's more a symptom of good quality sleep allowing the brain to enter deep sleep and dreams to be had
Thoroughly enjoyed that! Thank you!
How the hell this video (or any other video from this channel) has less than 5k views?!
Hmm crazy idea but maybe mid-evil and classical man were not trying to do bad science but we're participating in a ultimately neccessary higher reality with thier mythmaking. Hopefully us moderns would not try to impose our arbitrary scientific categories on traditions we do not understand and thus lose the golden thread. 🤔🤔🤔 (Sorry I have to let this out somewhere).
The Ancients and the Medievals are greatly misunderstood, greatly maligned, and much wiser than is appreciated. They had a greater skill and capacity for Meaning than Moderns.
@@EmpireoftheMind 👍 Iv been captured by ancient Christianity in the form of Orthdoxy. Give name and tend gardens all day.
Beauty is worthwhile. It's amazing that we could lose that as a value.
I personally hate dreaming. Bad dreams lead to waking up panicked or in fear and good dream lead to me waking up disappointed. I find no value in dreaming David Spade sent resident evil dogs after me lol. Thats actually one of the least weird ones I can remember.
Intriguing video none the less. Thanks for sharing.
Could someone please identify the painting shown at about 15:20 (three views of the same gentleman)?
Triple Portrait of a Goldsmith
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Portrait_of_a_Goldsmith
It really captured me but I have to disagree with the videogame point.
The creativity is inpersonal other than for the producer and therefore it's not comparable in any phycological way to the images the mind called in by a book or dream.
And now I’m sad I never remember my dreams
Excellently said good sir.
Video games are quite the time suck though. I feel much more fulfilled and refreshed after reading, drawing, or writing a new song.
I think it just depends on how you schedule your time. But I do agree, there’s something particularly invigorating about creating, and knowing that you’ve brought something new into the world. At any rate, ‘Nothing in excess,’ used to be a popular proverb…
. . .you are the music while the music lasts.
The dream is the tail of the ego.
from the beginning I have viewed the video game as a form of literature.
No. video games are not like dreams because they are programmed by someone else, not us, it is not a world we create, but one created by others that shapes and controls us, it confines us in the guise of freedom. In this way it does not allow the free exercise of our creativity, we cannot reshape this world with the passion of our emotions and all the material we collect in a day that (as you note with the Jung quotes) gets embodied and expressed and expanded upon in a dream state. Games are dead space, we do not direct, we do not shape, we do not imagine into existence anything, but are directed. I am surprised you landed this way. I myself have never played a game that did not leave me feeling like I had wasted time, feeling less, feeling empty.
What is the effect of entering this new type of projected "dream" without being initiated by the necessary neurological processes? I'm not sure it is, or can be, as benign as the author suggests. Is the author sure confirmation bias isn't in play?
The author knows of no one more biased than himself.
@@EmpireoftheMind I guess by author you mean the author of the comment. Hell, that's true!
With human interfacing video games will get to the point that people will choose to simply live in them, possibly having some if not all their relationships with fake people, the future of video games is hedonistic and degenerate imo.
I think Plato’s cave will always be relevant.
Even if dreams are "good and healthy" and not merely the excretions of a troubled mind, how does it follow that videogames are likewise good and healthy?
Algorithm, I summon thee! Send this channel upward!
Thank you
You’re welcome!
Kids ("young adults") who play videogames totally lack all imagination of their own tho. Their only reference is other video games
Dreaming is a literal defrag machine; when we go through are days the memories are placed quickly. Dreaming reorganizatives memory more efficiently
I was just about to buy a collection of short stories by Anais Nin called " Under a Glass Bell " when I heard your comment about her. You dont care about her because she's a bad writer or its something else ?
I think she is, technically speaking, a very good writer-I just don’t care for her subject matter and her overall attitude toward life, if that makes sense. But I can still learn from her and appreciate her work and skill.
Geeat
Hmmmm...
Kainoth Katissis?
καινός κτίσις
Just for the algorithm
I didn't like the read in this one as much as your previous videos. It feels forced, or rushed... I'm can't put my finger on it.