Table of Dream (and Vision) Types for TTRPGs, with thanks to Steven F. Kruger

 I've been reading Steven F. Kruger's Dreaming in the Middle Ages of late, and I quite like it. It provides some great quotes that should be ample inspiration for people to bring dreams into their games more.

"Writers of the high and late middle ages ... saw dreams as dangerous, associated with pagan practices and demonic seduction. On the other [hand], they claimed that dreams could be divinely inspired and tell the future. After all, Saints' lives were filled with revelatory dreams." pg. 7

A fair number of people occasionally use a divine, prophetic dream or a mysterious nightmare, but I wonder how many make telling the difference between the two a challenge for their players? 

[Quoting Macrobius on the visum or spectral dream] "The dreamer thinks he is still fully asleep and imagines he sees spectres rushing at him or wandering vaguely about, differing from natural creatures in size and shape, and hosts of diverse things, either delightful or disturbing. To this class belongs the incubus" pg. 17

I just think this sounds like a wonderfully disturbing and tempestuous template for a dream description. 

"Most people can identify a dream as demonic only after it has had its intended pernicious effect ... a few people are granted a special gift that allows them easily to differentiate angelic visions from demonic ones ... but as Gregory [the Great] suggests, this gift is exceedingly rare - in his opinion, granted only to saints. 'The saints, however, can distinguish true revelations from the voices and images of illusions through an inner sensitivity. They can always recognize when they receive communications from the good Spirit and when they are face to face with illusions." pg. 51

There's an ability to make clerics mechanically distinct from other classes! 

[Quoting Prudentius' Hymnum Ante Somnum] "The spirit roams free through the air, quick and lively, and in diverse figures sees things that are hidden; for the mind, whose source is heaven and whose pure fount is from the skies, cannot lie idle when it is freed from care." pg. 53

And there's some interesting dream metaphysics that can be conveniently be slotted into almost any fantasy cosmology if you want an excuse to use this stuff in an established setting.

***

I'm generally of the opinion that people don't use dreams enough in TTRPGs. They're almost always either Freudian-style trauma nightmare or direct divine message, which means that if you're getting something where the symbolism isn't fairly obvious you can probably trust it! This is quite a modern view. Kruger's main project in Dreaming is turning theoretical treatises on the nature of dream into hierarchical lists of 'high to low' dreams*, from those which are completely useless to those where God straight-up tells the viewer what's going on.

Lists you say? Yes, lists. So, I decided to take what for my money is the most exciting of those lists, Albertus Magnus' 13 dream types from pg. 120, and mix it in with a few other ideas that I liked from elsewhere in the text (notably, Magnus compresses 'dreams that don't mean anything' quite a lot) to produce a 1-20 dream table. 

To use this table, roll on it whenever a character goes to sleep (and you feel it wouldn't break the flow of plot too much.) I have in the past found it useful to do a sort of 'dream turn' when one character is getting a helpful vision anyway, with everybody getting dreams to share the spotlight around. It might also be a good way of keeping a character occupied who gets knocked out in a fight. It can be used in any game where supernatural forces exist but aren't necessarily best buddies with their servants all of the time; it's probably best suited to medieval games, or games which want to deliberately move away from scientific conceptions of dream. This list, however, assumes you'll roll once per whole day, since some of the more powerful visions can come upon a character even in wakefulness.

Roll a d8 on the table if the character is nobody special, doing nothing special. Roll a d10 whilst they're doing something noteworthy that the powers might pay passing attention to. Roll d8+d6 if they have the direct attention of some divine power or other in the world, for good or ill. Roll d10+10 if a divine power is actively trying to get a message to them, like RIGHT NOW, or if they drink a Potion of Clear Visions or something. Just roll a d20 if you're bored and want the archetypal man with a gun to walk in to your PCs' psyches. 

1-5 - Dreams of the Stomach - the dream is a response to the character's immediate physical disturbances and mood. It will not be a revelation of past trauma - if horrific violence or a feeling of fear manifests, it's more likely to be linked to present stress or a bad fish stew.
6-8 - Dreams of weak divine form - the dream responds to the latent magical and divine power of the surrounding region; thus, a dream in a Temple of Asmodeus might feature the characters being chased by prancing devils or dancing with a mysterious, dark stranger. It's not consciously directed by whatever outside force inspires it, however, but a mere echo of its ambient power.
9 - Select or randomly determine a divine power relevant to the characters or their situation - its current will for them (perhaps as little as 'make the usual sacrifices and move along') is revealed obscurely and distantly, through confusing and abstract metaphor mixed with meaningless symbolism or even pataphor. Note that a power can only give messages relating to things it knows, and that certain forms of representation may be beyond it, but this does not mean it's incapable of presenting itself deceptively within those bounds. A devil may come in radiantly beautiful human form, dressed all in white, to whisper of corruption.
10 - As 9, but the message is conveyed in reliable and appropriate metaphor.
11 - The character sees images of things which will actually occur (these may be true prophecy or plausible reconstruction depending on how your gods interact with the future) or have occurred. No explanation is provided, however. What the images are of will depend on where the relevant divine power's focus lies.
12 - As 11, but a figure appearing within the images of the dream** discusses and describes what is going on 'in words and figures' - that is, indirectly, evasively, veiled in figurative language and perhaps incorrect (requiring discursive correction) in its precise interpretations. The PC has a degree of agency, being at minimum able to talk.
13 - As 12, but the figure is explicit and correct in its interpretations of the images.
14 - "Without images, intellective truths are presented to one who is asleep" - that is, a character has an idea or revelation. Give them an Intelligence roll or some such to realize something important in that muzzy half-asleep way. If they fail, it's on the tip of their tongue and leaves them with a terrible feeling of frustration; describe vaguely what the idea was about without giving it to them.
15 - The character has a waking vision, in which (as per 9) they see some abstract, symbolic image.
16 - A waking vision dealing in reliable symbols, as per 10.
17 - "A waking vision occurs in which the images seen are also explained" - for example, the voice speaking out of the burning bush. Obviously, the character has full agency in how they respond for this and above results - they have access to all their physical capacities.
18 - "A waking, imaginative vision occurs in which future and occult things are clearly understood." - That is, it's still symbolic but the character intuitively understands what the symbols stand for, and even if there's still a layer of interpretation in what they're doing the general gist is got.
19 - "A waking vision directly presents images of future events." Or present events going on somewhere distant. The mirror of Galadriel, etc. You see what's happening/going to happen exactly as it is.
20 - "Bona occulta" [concealed good things] are revealed, which are correctly understood by the waking seer" - like the idea or revelation above, but whilst waking and potentially greater in scope. This is the true prophecy, done "'etiam absque magna sensuum aversione' [even without a great turning away of the senses]."

If you don't like the 'waking vision' bits of the table (for example, because you'd prefer to use the night-time 'dream turn' I suggest above) then consider replacing those with realistic-feeling dream visions of equivalent types where the character exists in a kind of 'Dreamlands' (as seen in Lovecraft) and apparently has all their normal agency over their own actions. The important part of the dream is the vision rolled, but it takes part in the context of an actual scenario which can be confronted using normal gameplay procedures. You should probably drag the other PCs along for the ride, unless you're running a special session for it or something.

There's probably a way of making this a cross-referencing table with some more combinations of level of symbolism and explanation on, but I need to work right now so I won't. Likewise, would be good to add some more levels for the kind of dream where the character is drawn directly into the divine presence - that could go under option 20 for a waking vision, but overall feels like it should be more distinct. Ah well - future project.

If somebody's curious about the exact reasons why the gods can't just send a message whenever they want - basically, they have a lot of priests, a lot of prayers, a lot of angels (or whatever) to deal with on top of managing fundamental forces of the world. As they will, so it is done, but at the lower levels of the table you're just getting whatever of their will filters down - they're too busy to directly commune with you at the moment. This was an argument used effectively for hundreds of years - in slightly more complex form - to justify the confusing dreams sent by an omnipotent being, it should be fine for the small-g gods of most fantasy settings. A quote from Kruger illustrating this:

"Albert here constructs a hierarchical description of visionary experience, of dreams, waking visions and prophecy. Dreams ... are lowest on the scale, because it takes the least celestial power to affect someone who is asleep: sleep quiets sensory process, allowing the "motus coelestis" [celestial motion] to be more easily perceived ... in the last two stages of vision, true prophecy is attained"

* Often with quite a bit of structural mangling in the process that I'm not 100% convinced reflects the ideas of his sources, but this isn't a piece critiquing Kruger.
** Perhaps a dead idol, like Dante's Virgil, or a guardian angel, dead relative, etc. Maybe even the god themself, if they're quite minor and not too busy otherwise.