After going to bed after a couple of hellish hours solving Lolo puzzles, it wasn't uncommon for me to dream about the game. Tetris and Katamari were also common dream subjects after a bit of obsessive play.

All my dreams involve weird psychosexual scenarios which leave me confused, and slightly scared about my own deep seated desires.

I don't wish to share them, although I am making great progress with my psychiatrist.

Metadreaming: dreaming about dreaming. It's kafkaesque and totally avant garde. Try it sometime.

Well, after ruling out all the Birdo ones...

D'you know, for a long time, the most memorable game dreams I would have would just be ones where I was playing some sort of 3D game, that actually had a plausible sense of depth and distance to it. I would actually be taken aback by how far away the horizon was, and then I'd wake up, and wonder why games with that kind of 'deep' perspective are so rare. (For years, Shadow Of The Colossus was the only one I could name, but the new generation of hardware is finally starting to change that.)

Simon, I have to ask -- which store is this? Is it in SF?

wow -- I think I just did better by believing that your dream was real and transposing it onto the Bay. I am...slow today.

I haven't had any specific game dreams, but gaming itself often influences how I dream; sometimes I decide that the story I'm taking part in is actually a game, so if things aren't going so well I say "well, that wasn't a very good ending" and restore to an earlier point to do something different.

I don't know if this sort of thing (branching narrative / do-overs) happens even to people who've never played a game, but certainly when it shows up in my dreams my brain frames it as a video game very comfortably, even though the dreams otherwise have nothing to do with games, pixels, controllers, or anything besides the narrative structure.

I regularly dream Eve Online fleet battles, even down to the specifics of what tactics we're going to use and how the enemy makes a mess of things.

I had one dream a few weeks ago, where I got to interview Hideo Kojima. The best parts were playing the MGS4 demo, discussing the inspiration behind the Boktai series and convincing him to remake Snatcher.

The kicker? I didn't need a translator. I was fluent in Japanese, for some reason.

Dom Nguyen once told me about a dream he'd had in which he was Nolan Bushnell, circa 1977, plotting the spread of his Atari VCS console as if he were leading a military campaign. He later did a comicstrip about it on Megatokyo:

http://megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=509

I once dreamed about a beautiful game. Everything took place in the future at a large and expensive public university. You were free to roam around there, making acquaintances and exploring the area.

But as you progressed, you realized the beautiful campus was hiding some sort of dark secret. "Authorized personnel only" doors and secret passages could be found with a keen eye, and clues opened up through conversation.

The other thing I remember were terminals scattered about the campus, housing entire movies and games to while away the day. It was almost as if they were intentional distractions from the truth.

I ventured into the forbidden passages once, but quickly retreated. All I remember is the halls bathed in red light, and I never found out what they were hiding.

Funny thing is, I don't recall actually playing this game, but experiencing it. Yet somehow I knew this was a virtual reality.

Of course, there's also the Tetris Nightmares..