HomeNewsDreams On A Pillow
Dreams On A Pillow is a game about the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the creator of Liyla And The Shadows Of WarNow seeking crowd-funding
Now seeking crowd-funding
Image credit:Rasheed Abu-Eideh
Image credit:Rasheed Abu-Eideh
Here’s a description of the game, via press release.
Image credit:Rasheed Abueideh
Omm’s principle possession is the pillow, which serves as both a terrible reminder of her lost child and a kind of coping device. When carrying it, she’s not able to interact with objects or do things like jump, crawl, throw rocks and climb ladders. Putting the pillow down, however, triggers Omm’s guilt and trauma, provoking nightmares that “reveal dangers of the mind, and shroud the dangers of the real world”. The immediate practical challenge during the stealth-adventure sections, then, is to complete whatever objectives are at hand and retrieve the pillow before Omm’s delusions overwhelm her.
As such, Abueideh iscrowd-funding the game via the LaunchGood platform. He says he’s using LaunchGood, which focuses specifically on projects from Muslim people, “because most popular crowdfunding platforms do not recognize Palestine”.
The announcement of Dreams On A Pillow comes in the middle of open warfare between the Israeli armed forces and Hamas, the government of Gaza. The current conflict began in October 2023, when Hamas struck across the border and killed over a thousand people, while taking 251 people hostage. Since then, Israel has carried out a ground invasion and bombing campaign that has killed well over 40,000 Gazans and injured or displaced hundreds of thousands more.
In the process, Israel hasdestroyedmany Palestinian cultural institutions and sites, including universities, libraries and museums. While set many decades before, Dreams On A Pillow is an assertion of Palestinian heritage and rights in response to this on-going erasure. It aims to shore up connections between present bloodshed and the violence of the Nakba, while rebutting what the LaunchGood page terms “the common propaganda myth” of Palestine as a “land without people” prior to Israel’s founding.
