Intimate, personal, and limitless. Whether you lust for the extreme or the obscene, the newest immersive experience from Pseudonym Productions gave you everything you could possibly dream up.
Across just 5 nights leading up to Halloween 2017, ‘A Study of Dreams’ was not a haunted house nor an escape room. There were no “boo” scares, startles, clowns, or chainsaws. Instead, this was a slow descent into a tale of horror, a mad world designed for you to get lost in.
Drawing from the world of immersive theater, A Study of Dreams was the latest original concept developed by Pseudonym in which participants (“players”) found themselves in an open world, making choices that determine their fates. As with every Pseudonym production, the more players put in, the more they got out of the experience, no matter how far it was outside their everyday comfort zone.
After successfully producing The Republic, When Shadows Fall, and Catharsis, Pseudonym has amassed something of a cult following, creating buzz leading up to A Study of Dreams. Tickets completely sold out in a matter of hours, making this boutique experience the hottest Halloween ticket in town.
Departing from the old warehouses of Pseudonym’s previous productions, A Study of Dreams was set inside an old house near downtown Orlando, with elaborate set designs transforming the space into a dream world. The live interactive experience was limited to just 10 players at a time in a journey lasting roughly 1.5 hours. Players stepped beyond their everyday consciousness into a realm of mystery, where they controlled their dreams – unless nightmares took control of them.
Just how personal was this experience? The website for A Study of Dreams answered the question “Will I be touched?” with a pitch-perfect reply: “If you’re lucky.”
A Study of Dreams transported players into a collective dreamscape, filling them with extraordinary new sensations while opening doors to the ever-desired lucid dream, where they were in control and anything became possible. And when Pseudonym Productions lived up to the claim of literally “anything” becoming possible, leaving participants stunned, shaken, frightened, intrigued, aroused, and – for some – dripping wet.
The choices were ultimately up to participants. Available to each and every player were literal menu options offering to reveal secrets of purportedly perfect awareness, depraved and obscene scenes discovered behind closed doors, and more than a few wild temptations. Even the most timid quickly found themselves overtaken by the dreamy atmosphere and enticing characters that allowed inhibitions to be shed in favor of carefree fun, without risk or judgment.
While adult themes were present throughout the experience, and increasingly available to those who chose to push boundaries to their fullest, safety and consent was of primary concern to Pseudonym. Before the experience began, repeated instructions were very clearly stated to every player ensuring that while they were free to act on their desires, they must do so with the respect of everyone around them at all times.
And even within the story, consequences followed every choice players made, and not every dream played out exactly as expected.
Within the tangled threads of lust, violence, and insanity was a moral – to live life to its fullest, shying away from unobtainable fantasies and focusing on what’s real and right in front of you. It was a bold and unexpected message that became increasingly clear through the final moments of the experience, in which the full audience jointly decided whether characters and themselves, would live the rest of their existences chasing dreams or returning to the real world with a heightened sense of value.
But no matter their choices, this experience was certainly one dream no one would soon forget.
A Study of Dreams left Pseudonym’s thousands of loyal fans eager for more. After the experience concluded its short run, Pseudonym revealed this production was a test for a much bigger concept in the works, with the goal of a more permanent presence in Orlando, should the right partners (and investors) come along.
Those who want to find out more or are interested in assisting Pseudonym with their vision should visit PseudonymProductions.com and sign up for their new mailing list, keeping all updated on the newest experience details when they surface.
Note: I was a co-creator of A Study of Dreams with Pseudonym Productions and will be continuing to assist them in dreaming up new experiences with the goal of establishing a permanent home for many more productions to come.
