From: mol@df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson) Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction Subject: Dreamhold Interpretation 1: harp, lead, apple Date: 16 Dec 2004 10:11:30 GMT Organization: DF Computer Club Lines: 135 Message-ID: <32d5aiF3k2j7uU1@individual.net> I promised to post my interpretation of _Dreamhold_, and here's the first part, regarding some of the so-called red herrings: the harp room, the lead door, and the apple room. Note that I've mostly played the game in tutorial mode so my description may not agree with your experience if you've played it with "tutorial off". S p o i l e r s f o l l o w The harp room doesn't seem to serve any purpose in the game (except in the trivial way of being the location of an important object). There's a harp that doesn't do anything, a beckoning door that there doesn't seem to be any way of opening, elusive harp music outside the room, and a strange transformation of the entire room into an outdoor scene. People have - reluctantly, I suppose - concluded that the room is a red herring. Perhaps it is, gameplay-wise, but I'm convinced that it's not a red herring plot-wise: in fact, it seems that the author is saying something important here. The following is a tentative interpretation which may turn out to be totally off-base. I'm aware that I'm not exactly the sharpest kid in class when it comes to interpretation of literature (lacking all the formal lit-crit training, and much of the required reading, to start with), so I'll make a psychological rather than a lit-crit approach. I think that the harp represents the emotional side of the protagonist. The harp is burned and useless; the protagonist has suppressed his emotions to become the callous monster we see in the two fragments of the black mask. This has clearly not been an easy process to judge from the state of the harp - and the backstory revealed by the masks tell how the protagonist has been burned emotionally. So what's on the other side of the door, that's so heavy that the door won't budge? I think it's all the rich emotional life that the protag has been suppressing - it shines tantalizingly through the cracks, the protag knows it's there and wants to get at it, but the sheer weight of those emotions is so huge that it will crush him if he lets them in, hence he can't open the door. Note that the door isn't locked - it just has a latch, indicating that the protag is shutting something out voluntarily. He surely intended to open the door some day (or he'd have locked it and thrown away the key, like with the lead door - see below), but now he finds that he can't. The harp music that can be heard at certain points in the game seems to indicate that the protagonist is regaining contact with his emotions. One of the themes of the game is that losing his memories also means losing parts of his assumed personality (in Jungian terms, his persona - which is the Latin word for an actor's mask) which gives him the ability to change (regaining that last part of the black mask just turns him back into the person he was before the game started). And the mysterious transforamtion of the room? I think this is what happens when the door is finally opened, or at least it's what the protagonist fears will happen. It's a refreshing change of scenery, of freedom (the ocean commonly symbolizes freedom, but also the subconscious, and, of course, peril) but the protag is in a perilous situation, alone on a pillar with no way of reaching the mainland - reflecting his isolation from humanity. Lost on an ocean of emotion, perhaps? Regaining contact with his emotions doesn't solve any problems; it's just the beginning. I mentioned the lead door: unlike the door in the harp room, it's locked, and there's no key, showing that the protagonist is not supposed to enter. Perhaps he locked it himself and threw away the key; perhaps it was locked by someone else to keep him out. To me, lead singifies death - lead coffins, grey Hades. There's also the alchemical association with Saturn/Chronos, god of time and decay (and it's hardly a coincidence that the apotheosis ending involves a tan, ringed moon which must resemble the planet Saturn). There are parts of our psyches where we simply do not want to go, memories we'd better leave alone. Or at least we think so. The apple in the cage is a bit of a mystery to me, but both it and the room seem to have something to do with the passage of time and the irreversibility of change. The apple is in stasis; as long as it's locked in the cage, inaccessible, it remains fresh (perhaps like a cherished memory that's too precious to approach?); once the cage is opened so it can be accessed, it decays, becomes worthless. The tutorial voice makes a point of the irreversibility. As some people have commented on r.g.i-f, the sole purpose of the apple seems to be that the tutorial voice can teach the player about "undo" - but perhaps it's the other way around - the irreversibility is the true point, and the little lecture about "undo" is a meta-comment about how a game may allow us to undo, but reality doesn't? And undoing is of course very unrewarding in this case, leaving the player with a sense that something important remains undone (in both senses). The mosaic of the birds - well, that also seems to indicate the irreversibility of time. Every time you enter, the room is different. You can observe the migration of the birds, but you can't do anything about it. So does the apple symbolize something particular? Perhaps the protag's memories of his son, before the rebellion; idolized, preserved in memory in an idealized state of innocence? This leaves as many questions open as answered, and maybe my interpretations say more about me than about the game; perhaps they're just free associations. Feel free to pick them apart, or to use them as starting points for your own speculations. -- Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se) PGP Public Key available at http://www.df.lth.se/~mol