If Media Molecule’s Dreams still seems like an enigma to you, you’re not alone. Even its creators aren’t quite sure what they have on their hands.

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“We don’t know what Dreams actually is,” says Media Molecule Creative Director Mark Healey during a behind-closed-doors demo at Paris Games Week.He’s being slightly facetious. Media Molecule knows very well that it has a toolkit on its hands with enormous potential; it just can’t be fully realized until it’s in the hands of players.“It’s going to be defined by the community,” says Art Director Alex Evans, “but seeded by amazing Media Molecule content”.Dreams was born from Media Molecule’s experiences with its last ‘play, create, share’ project, LittleBigPlanet. “One of the more frustrating aspects of building LittleBigPlanet”, says Evans, “was the separation of ‘play’ and ‘create’. In Dreams we’ve combined them. You’ll meet a character and she might say “trim a tree” and you’ll do that and share whatever you create with the community”.It’s a somewhat unremarkable example, but it does help define the Dreams experience, which, in part, is grounded in remix culture. You may start in a level that somebody else has created but find yourself compelled to bend it and twist it in new ways; a traditional ‘racing’ level, for example, might house an underwater shark adventure if you poke around in it enough. And then you build on that, and so it continues, presumably, infinitely.“It’s like lucid dreaming,” says Evans.Characters in Dreams are built from the same tools as the environment. Media Molecule jumped into a ‘from scratch’ creation of a bear-type-thing with skull earrings, purple hair, and Rodin’s The Thinker as a pièce de résistance atop its head. All built from assets available in a create menu, complete with a sound that warmly evokes LBP’s popit sound effect.There will be infinitely more assets at your disposal in Dreams than there were in that game, however. “If you want a fingernail, search ‘fingernail’”, says Evans. “If you want a tree, search ‘tree’. Or maybe you want to search for an entire creation kit, and this is where Dreams gets meta. Creators could put out customized kits for anyone to use – you could search for ‘snowboarding kits’, for example.”More ambitious creators don’t have to use existing assets, either - they can build their own within Dreams’ toolkit. “I imagine some people will just focus on pure sculpture,” says Healye, who then passed around a series of intricate little models that the team built in the game and 3D printed.“The technology that we’re using here,” says Evans, “we’re working with several billion voxels.”“We actually have no idea what the community is going to do.”Not that this means we’ll be seeing landscapes filled with penises. In regards to managing its massively creative – and therefore potentially unruly - community, Media Molecule has more experience than most developers.“We’ve been down this road,” says Evans.As well as a rating system for assets and levels, there will be a big focus on following Dreams’ creative ‘superstars’. “The key for me in our own usage is all about following superstar creators and curators. Following them and discovering what they’re into.”“You can have a favourite dream that you return to over and over”.If all of this sounds a little daunting (some of us played LittleBigPlanet for the platforming alone) Media Molecule promises it will help ease new players into the Dreams experience.“We’re going to put in a Media Molecule boost, or a seed, an experience or a story", says Healey.But for the studio, the beta that’s landing early next year will be key to defining exactly what Dreams is, and what it possibly could be.“We don’t exactly know how it’s going to work”, says Healey. But his smile suggests he’s very excited to find out.

Lucy is Entertainment Editor at IGN's AU office. Follow her o n Twitter.