Well, pleasant dreamers, as Kyle Machlachlan said in Dune, “the sleeper has awakened.” In this case, the sleeper has been not only the titular hero of the Legend of Zelda franchise, but also the Wind Fish of Koholnit, besieged by mysterious nightmares and beguiled by a fantasy island inhabited by otherworldly denizens and peppered with secret underground lairs. After all has been said and done, all the buttons pressed, hatches opened and shadow monsters destroyed in puffs of smoke as black as oil, the game has been finished, the great Castanadian owl having fulfilled his role as spirit guide on the vision quest that this portable experience has been. In true handheld fashion, the point of completion was reached out in the open on the Metro-North, and while this time I’m not sure I have anything significant to say in the way of portable-versus-console gaming culture, I’m pretty certain I’ve cracked some of what’s important about this game itself, and how it makes me feel about games in general. At the heart of this is the question of something I have been during the course of this game, because it doesn’t quite fall under the term player, just as Link and the Wind Fish have both merely acted as sleepers, instead of something else.

I, like you, faithful readers, have been a dreamer.

Now, I’m nowhere near the first person to make this observation about games. Tim Rogers coined the term “dreaming-in-an-empty-room” to describe how he felt MGS2 made him feel about the medium, but I’m certain he’s not the first to recognize the correlation, either. Really, creators and critics of every art form have, at one point, compared their method as being somewhat akin to the act of dreaming, both in design and experience. Most of the time we tend to think of dreamlike content as merely surreal, but the act of each medium’s roles of author and audience contain a lot of sonambulatory elements which reveal as much about what people think of dreams as they do about art. Reading and writing directly require the imaginative process more than other media, but that doesn’t mean they’re any more dreamlike than that of paintings or sculptures, which often involve as much careful thought and introspection initiated through free-roaming physical investigation and inspection. In the theater we essentially watch normal human beings sleepwalk on stage, pretending to be characters we all know better than to believe them to be, yet that isn’t inherently any more or less fantastic than sitting in a darkened room, surrounded by strangers and watching dancing shadows on the wall as false as those in Plato’s cave.

Mostly, each art form’s idea of dreamlike content asks a question as to what we consider dreams to be– invention or investigation? Games ask us to do both, and therefore offer a conception of dreams as something more active than mere observation, yet more benign than directly stimulating the mind’s eye. Literature and visual art present us with dead physical elements– ink on a page, oil or acrylics on a canvas, marble and masonry on the ground– which we then decode ourselves either, largely through our own creative process. Cinema and theater present us with animated action– either happening live or projected, pre-recorded, on a screen– mostly asking us to interpret with our analytic process. Games do something else– they put us in a space in which action is required of us not merely to decode or watch what’s happening, but to cause it in the first place. The role they put us in can be far more engaging than that of the other, more passive mediums, because they demand active participation, rather than merely allowing it, if at all.

Because of this, the game-definition of dreamlike qualities is going to differ significantly because of its basis on behavior– the focus on the dreamer, instead of the dream. Because of their passive qualities, we tend to think of dreams, as informed by previous mediums, as telling us something, giving us a message from somewhere external. Because of its active qualities, we may think of dreams, in the context of gaming, as showing, instead, and asking us to act accordingly in order to learn for ourselves, the lesson being slowly put together internally. Here, we may have the kind of dreams which teach and test rather than reveal or inform– instead of the psychoanalytic concept of the dream life being one of the unconscious proclaiming secrets to the dreamer during sleep, we may instead follow the dream life as being one of active, if not always conscious, work on the part of the dreamer to discover those secrets themselves. Instead of merely standing as a consumer of information, they act as a detective seeking it out.

Even the Freudian picture of dreaming seems game-like– the Id sneaking past or actively confronting the Super Ego on the way to reach the Ego. All it depends is on which side you personally relate to: the active Id or the passive Ego.

Where do game narratives fit into this? Think of a few sets of characters: Mario, Bowser and the Princess fit into the scheme perfectly, just like Snake, Big Boss and Metal Gear (or whatever their equivalents are in each particular episode). Ico, Yorda and the Queen don’t, exactly, and neither do Wander and the Collosi– Miyamoto and Kojima may fit the pattern well, but Ueda doesn’t, even though his work is patterned largely after the first. Link, Ganon and the Triforce certainly match up with the first two, as well, and it’s that fact which helps Link Awakening completely earn its position of dream-narrative. Why not structure a Zelda game as a dream if they’re all mechanically put together that way to begin with? Besides, it was by no means the first time one of these games has been dominated with the imagery of sleep, and therefore dreams. Zelda’s sleeping body was the first thing you saw in Link’s Awakening, dreams of the future have featured in nearly all of them, including Ocarina of Time, which put Link himself to sleep for as long as was needed to turn him into a young, strapping Rip van Winkle of the Hyrulian persuasion.

Of all the dream-oriented titles, however, A Link to the Past contains the most pressing ones. Besides highlighting the vulnerable position sleep puts us in, making us watch hypnotized damsels levitated and zapped into another dimension by the dark wizard Agahnim, the game begins in the bedroom, our hero seemingly waking from troubled nightmares, a trick which Link’s Awakening cribs and quotes disturbingly well. The landscape of the SNES’s second overworld would feel right at home in a painting by Bacon or Bosch, while that of the Game Boy’s title would work pretty well in that of Lewis Carrol or David Lynch (toned down, of course). The tragic nature of the narrative Link’s Awakening sets up is one which goes against the impulses of A Link to the Past, however, in how it positions its status-quo waking lives with its out-of-this-world dream lives– one game is about returning the world from threatening dystopia/post-apocalyptic wasteland to that of a peaceful kingdom while the other is about returning to a world of danger and strife from one of friends and adventure. ALttP is structured as a nightmare you want to wake up from, while LA becomes a dream you desperately want to stay in as long as possible.

This is what makes the game’s ending really difficult, both in good and bad ways. I admire how the game sets you up to fall in love with Koholnit Island and its inhabitants, only to slowly discover, piece by piece, that they’re all part of the Wind Fish’s dream, and that once all the typical Zelda quests have been finished they’ll vanish from existence, even more insubstantial than the ghosts of Brigadoon. Now, this is a nice little allegory for what goes on in a game– you inhabit a world, grow attached to its inhabitants yet must eventually bid them farewell after the adventure’s done. Dreams work the same way, too, as I’m certain nearly everyone’s had one or two in their lives that they genuinely didn’t want to wake up from. Watching all the characters I’d come into contact with via Link’s adventures dissappear one by one, I couldn’t help but feel a little sad, but not quite guilty, partly because of this– while the game accomplishes the desire not to leave NeverNever Land, it doesn’t really embrace it, and that’s the part which makes the ending difficult in a genuinely emotionally difficult way.

See, during the game you’re collecting instruments in all the dungeons to play in front of the giant egg on the mountain in order to wake the Wind Fish inside. Koholnit’s resident Princess stand-in, Marin, happens to be a singer who teaches Link to play a song on his Ocarina which is meant to wake the Wind Fish. I expected there’d be some revelation in the game that Marin was one of the “instruments,” that you’d have to save her from a dungeon like all the other Nintendo damsels and that she’d be the one to sing the song, wake the Wind Fish, etc., and that there’d be a big dramatic moment at the end where Link has to look her in the face as she dissappears, or something. Now, none of that happens– in the end, all you can do is return to the town, offer a last goodbye to her and then leave to go wake the Wind Fish.

To a certain extent this is a really interesting approach, because it denies you the closure you want from this game, its world and its set of characters. You don’t get to come to terms with losing them, or anybody, because they’re not real, and all you can do is move on. This made for one of the best game experiences that mimicked the stage of the mythic hero’s journey in which the protagonist must go off and face a confrontation alone. After all Link’s done for this community, he’s got to go up against the mysteries of the Wind Fish all by his lonesome, largely because he’s the only one there who really exists, or rather the player is, but then we all know Link serves as a 4th-wall breaching stand-in for us all. Link is just a dream character we inhabit for a time, a set of clothes we wear and a handful of tools we carry, but at the end of the day he’s just as much a phantom as the people of Koholnit. If there’s any consolation at the end of this not-so-ancient mariner’s tale, it’s that by the conclusion we get to see the Wind Fish flying in the sky above the wreckage of Link’s boat– at least it turns out the albatross wasn’t a hallucination, after all.

There’s a moment in the middle of the game where the Owl (I’m not kidding about the Castaneda type role he occupies) visits Link after the player’s just discovered a temple which more or less offers the first direct admissions that Koholnit exists only as the dream of the Wind Fish, and that all its inhabitants will vanish if the hero accomplishes his task. The Owl doesn’t deny this is probably the case, but also keeps open the possibility of other interpretations. “Just as you may never know what treasure lies inside a chest until it is opened,” he says (or therabouts), “you cannot know whether this is all a dream until you reach the Wind Fish.” Link’s Awakening is both a treasure chest and the dream inside of it, tragically nostalgic from its beginning as memories of star-crossed lovers trapped oceans apart, armed only with pen-pal carrier pigeons to keep their lives afloat. Alongside MPO it remains the standard to match for portable gaming, and just might be one of the sadly overlooked installments of a major franchise. It’s certainly the most underrated Zelda game, except maybe for Link’s Adventure, but that, as they say, is another story…

That’s it for this one, folks. When I next return to these boards, I’ll have a few new Dispatches to begin– one you already know about, and a couple of surprises which, by and by, I’ll add to the mix. Until then, pleasant dreamers, remember that just because owls are not what they seem doesn’t mean they’re always albatrosses in disguise.