“Dreamsurfing” is the term Media Molecule uses to describe moving from one dream to another in unbroken succession through different aesthetics and genres; a journey through an eccentric subconscious. It’s a fitting new word, as Dreams is shaping up to be the most startlingly original and ambitious game to come out of the studio thus far.

“Dreamsurfing allows us to do something expressive and it means we’re not tied to only one particular time zone and type of character,” says Media Molecule director Siobhan Reddy, as we watch Molecule artist Maja-Lisa Kehlet dreamsurf with two glowing PlayStation Move controllers. “I’m personally so excited about what we’re going to do because I don’t know yet. We have at our fingertips a really powerful tool. We can experiment with this experience - and that’s so exciting.”

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The Curated Journey

Throughout our conversation, Reddy throws out words like “dreamsurfing,” “flow state” and “jamming”: the sort of esoteric terminology you’d expect from a musician, not a first party video game developer. But as I watched Kehlet begin to jam, pulling out pre-created assets to flesh out the bare bones of a forest scene with two little on-screen teardrops - Dreams’ “imps” - the lingo began to click into place. How else could you describe this weird, harmonious remixing?“We have a few guiding principles with Dreams,” says Reddy. “At the end of LittleBigPlanet 2 we wanted to side-step where we were going with user-generated-content and get on a new path, and we wanted that new path to be more about self-expression. When we looked at the screen, when artists were making themes and characters, we wanted people’s style to be able to come through.”A good theme to anchor this goal, Media Molecule decided, was “dreams”. After all, they are the most personal thing one can experience, and their abstract makeup can inspire incredible artistic expression.“We wanted people to be able sketch their dreams like a dream journal, but in a place where you could actually recreate it digitally,” says Reddy. “In order to be able to do something like that you need to get in a flow state, so that’s why we use the word ‘performance’, as it’s the closest analogy we have of that.”Watching Kehlet at work is indeed mesmerising. As she populates a forest with trees, she begins to turn them upside down, their hollow bases sticking out of the ground. “We call these happy accidents,” says Reddy.“One of the things that excites me about Dreams is watching someone play it. Because they’re in this flow state, it’s so interesting to watch. Game development has never been that interesting to watch.”

Media Molecule is also very focused on making Dreams interesting to play. While the aforementioned lingo might make creation sound daunting to the less technically-minded, the studio will ease new players into dreamsurfing and jamming through a “curated journey” that will feel a little more like a traditional Media Molecule adventure.

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“Our content is very much about kickstarting a community,” says Reddy, “and setting up the idea of dreamsurfing - moving between different characters and spaces. It will have adventure hallmarks but we’ll also be teaching people how to create.”Part of that teaching process is getting players used to using the imps. These little characters are essentially the “life-force” of Dreams, used to create its worlds, possess characters and interact with elements. Kehlet demonstrates by hopping into a bear, a grasshopper, a hunchbacked character called the “Sea-King”, a soldier, a space girl, a mech. Throughout, the imps would briefly depart their characters to lift up the roof of a house, jump into a painting (a beautiful approximate Cezanne) or build up a fence.“We’ll begin with teaching the player the basics, the picking up and putting down, the ‘collaging’,” says Reddy. “Finding things within scenes so you can use them within your own scenes. We want to introduce the melding of play and create within the curated journey, so that once they’ve spent a bit of time in there they’ve actually learned the create mechanics by themselves.”Although what I was seeing isn’t the final Media Molecule experience - rather, it’s the result of a series of “jams” executed for this particular press tour - it’s clear that the emphasis on individual styles will be at the forefront of this experience, as it was in LittleBigPlanet. But unlike that game, Dreams has room for almost limitless styles, so every dream will feel and look and simply be different.“With these tools, we want a wider range of people to be able to pick them up and express themselves and create very different looks,” says Reddy. “That self-expression - there was a breadth of people that was attracted to LittleBigPlanet but with this we wanted that expression, that look, to be so different for each person.”

The Molecule artists have already found their individual niches. The giant mech was created by John Beech. Jamie Adams is known for her flowers, Kehlet her environments and characters - she created the beautifully weird “Sea-King” - while Sackboy creator Francis Pang continues to explore emotional expression through physicality with his soldier that evokes the broken bosses of a Hidetaka Miyazaki game.

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Exploring Potential

“People will get known for the things that they’re good at,” says Reddy. “I’m really excited for the team in that sense, for people to see their works.”Although creation is at the forefront of Dreams, Media Molecule isn’t neglecting those of us who are more interested in being an audience member. Inspired by the Pinterest model of cataloging ideas, Dreams will allow you to pick and choose your favourite dreams and sort them into “playlists” based on artists and themes.“I love a good playlist,” says Reddy. “I’m really interested in looking at who people are following and what they’re following. There are some interesting concepts that we’ll talk about later regarding maps and how we’re going to share your journey with people.”The breadth of these playlists will be enormous. Before chatting with Reddy, I’d been struggling with the abstruse nature of a “dream” in Dreams. Are they games? Are they interactive art? It turns out there’s no firm answer to that, and Reddy is determined to attract more than just gamers - or at least the stereotypical idea of what a “gamer” is - to the toolkit to bend it into different shapes.“We want people to come to Dreams and make games, that’s a primary thing,” says Reddy. “But one of the very exciting things is that every time we speak to non-gamers, or non games-makers, like every time we speak to someone from theatre, or people who make music, or people who are pure 2D artists, their eyes sort of pop out of their head a little bit. Because I think anyone using the current generation of 3D tools can see within Dreams that it is a step on.“When we were in the USA we were showing people from Pixar and Disney and other studios, and they were were all impressed - it’s a new and strong way to create. So that was a great validation for all of us. Even the people using high-end tools are looking at what we’re doing at seeing it as real innovation. On the other end, there’s the non-technical people like 2D illustrators and on the theatre side, or acoustic musicians, and they have a different level of interest. Because for many of them, they’ve not been able to get their heads around complex menus or creating with a mouse before. And this is giving them a way to understand the digital space and make something that looks beautiful.”

Certainly, sharing Dreams is the next crucial step for Media Molecule. While exploring the toolkit themselves has given the team some idea of its potential, they know they won’t be able to fully understand it until it's in the hands of players. A public beta next year will be the beginning of busting it wide open.

“Next for us is getting ready to get it out to people,” says Reddy. “We’re now at this point where we know we can create really amazing worlds and characters. We’re bringing over the philosophy of gadgets and logic that we had within LittleBigPlanet but we’re giving it a Dreams facelift. And then basically getting the community tools ready so we can start getting it out to people.What’s so exciting about now is that we’re moving into the experience end. We’re moving away from the research and development period into introducing new people to Dreams and building our own experience in Dreams.”“Everything you’ve seen here are just Media Molecule’s dreams so far,” Reddy says, as the imps jump into a tiny rabbit in a cage in a zoo while an array of characters look on.“Already there are so many things to discover.”

Lucy O'Brien is Entertainment Editor at IGN’s AU office. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.