Dreamwalks

Dreamwalks is a series of playful participatory experiments that use live-action role-playing (LARP; larp) as a method to explore what it means to dream collectively.

The project was developed in collaboration with artist Jana Romanova.

“Jana Romanova is a multidisciplinary artist working with games, performance, and photography. Through role-playing, social games, and various playful experiments, she researches liminal spaces, (in)visible systems that shape us, and what agency, care, and ecological imagination might look like when we playtest other ways of living together.”

We invited her to explore the liminal spaces of Enschede and imagine games there that could help us explore the concept of dream in all its interpretations. The result of this collaboration found its form in a publication with the rules of every game that emerged from the peculiarities of each space visited.

Crystal Bath - Dreamwalk #1

The first Dreamwalk explore role-playing as a form of collective lucid dreaming, where meaning doesn’t need to come first, but can emerge through play. Can a dream be shared? Is it the same dream?

Flying Field - Dreamwalk #2

A story about a group of childhood friends who used to play at an abandoned airfield, and who promised to meet there every year. They try to keep the promise for decades, until one day, they can’t make it anymore. This dreamwalk explore dreams as fantasies of the future. Will your dreams come true as you imagined?

Parking lot - Dreamwalk #3

What if there was nothing else left in the world but a parking lot? What kind of a new world would make sense around it? One that would explain its existence?
What if a group of demiurges is trying to fix a glitch in their world-building process. They erased everything they didn’t like, but the parking lot stayed. What rule do they need to change for it to disappear? And how to dream of a better world?

Dream Architecture - Dreamwalk #4

This larp explores the idea of infiltrating someone else’s dream. If we could do that and alter that person’s dreams, whose mind would we want to inhabit? Could we hack the dream of a dictator? Could we influence their decisions? How will seeing his dreams change us?

Files

If you want to read more about each of the larps or want to download the assets to play them, you can find the files here.