Some are terrifying, most are simply bizarre, and all contain “effects”. Madotsuki chooses one – any one, because the game is fully open – and begins to explore. Symbols and illustrations of monsters cover the ground, and doors lead off in every direction. Madotsuki steps out into… well, no one is sure. Nothing inside the room has changed, Madotsuki’s lonely life is exactly how you left, although oddly her gaming system is gone. There’s a glow toward the bottom of the screen that suggests dawn, though it isn’t comforting. The sky has changed colour, and maybe inverted. Madotuski wakes up – or doesn’t – on her balcony. It’s as stark and intimate a depiction of depression as you’ll find. Your only way to move forward in the game – and Madotsuki’s life – is to lie in bed and drift off to sleep, hoping to dream. When Madotsuki goes to leave her apartment, she simply stands at the door and shakes her head: “no”. The game has no dialogue whatsoever, and no opening exposition. Yume Nikki is from 2003, but the hikikomori have only grown since. Estimates place the amount of real-world hikikomori in Japan at over half a million: some have begun to refer to them as a ‘ lost generation‘. They subsist in their own tiny, closed-off sections of the universe, unable to move forward in their lives. Madotsuki is an extreme ‘ hikikomori‘, a term that refers to a growing phenomenon of intense shut-ins that never leave their rooms in their family homes. It looks out on nothing at all, just the shifting, black clouds that obscure the moon outside. We’re confined to her tiny room, her tiny bed, and her balcony with its empty laundry rack. If there is more to her life we never see it. It’s a tiny space containing her bed, her desk, a stack of books and a television attached to the gaming system on the floor. But the game doesn’t begin in Madotsuki’s dreams: it begins (and ends) in her room. You play as a silent girl named Madotsuki, who finds herself wandering the doors of perception in her mind and unlocking them one by one to explore the dreamscapes inside. Yume Nikki is a phrase that means ‘Dream Diary’, and on the surface level that’s what the game is about. Life trapped in an apartment, can you imagine? It is also an exploration of the mind’s capacity to dream itself an escape when no other seems to exist. Yume Nikk is a horror game, an art piece, and a meditation on the nature of dreams. Or maybe it’s hell, or heaven, or perhaps her own mind. She lucid-dreams an escape and finds herself trapped in a Dadaist purgatory. Yume Nikki is a game about a girl trapped in an apartment. And then I’ll lose a shoe or something and everything will kaleidoscope into a Dali painting. My greatest fear now, according to my dreams, is accidentally finding myself in high-Covid risk scenarios. In quarantine they’ve taken the form of shifting crowds and the sudden realization that I am among them, the shock that comes with avoiding human contact for over 8 months. I can’t control my dreams anymore, but I still get nightmares. I lucid-dreamed an entire second world that lived in my head every night after bedtime. When I was a kid my dreams used to be straightforward, and for a while I could even control them. Even my nightmares are weird – more formless dread than slasher-flicks. In 2018 I had nightmares almost every night, punctuated by the odd bout of formless, surreal dreaming. Like a lot of sleep disorders, if gets worse if I’m stressed out or overtired. I have a sleep disorder that results in frequent nightmares.
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