Universal Landscape: Total and utter escapism; mindless thought.
Dreaming Lens: Were you playing a video game in your dream? Was someone else? Did you want to play and weren’t able to? Was someone else trying to play? What was the game being played? Was it a satisfying experience to play? Were you inside a video game environment?
Personal Focus: Video games are a modern phenomenon that will have very different symbolic meaning based on your personal relationship to them. While the Universal Landscape connects to escapism, the diehard gamer will have a joyous experience of that escapism, while a critic might hold a more judgmental perspective. Where you stand on this continuum will furnish the full picture for your interpretation. There is a perspective of video games that connects to a type of skill building; however, those skills have very little practical value outside of the realm of playing the game repeatedly. This is where the element of “mindless thought” enters into the symbolic meaning of video games.
Most video games are environments unto themselves, where a whole world is recreated in the digital realm. The player merges with that world through the act of playing it. This informs the part of this symbol’s meaning as “total and utter.” It is not uncommon for people to play video games for hours at a time, getting completely lost in this alternate reality. This provides the element of “escapism” in the Universal Landscape. A dream is also an alternate reality in which we seek to find meaning and self-discovery. The presence of a video game in a dream is an ironic appearance of detachment and should be considered as a possible defense against what the unconscious mind may be attempting to express. If someone in your dream is playing a video game, understanding the Character Aspect of that person will identify for you what area of your self is avoiding reality.
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