Dreams On A Pillow is a game about the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the creator of Liyla And The Shadows Of War

Palestinian developer Rasheed Abueideh has announced Dreams On A Pillow, a mixture of stealth-adventure and interactive documentary set during the Nakba - Israel's violent displacement and dispossession of Palestinian Arabs in 1948, shortly after Israel's founding. Created by "a global team of veteran game developers", it's the story of a Palestinian woman grappling with the loss of her baby after fleeing a bloody assault on her town.

Here's a description of the game, via press release.

"Dreams on a Pillow is a pseudo-3D Stealth-Adventure game based on the true Palestinian folktale of Omm - a Palestinian mother who fled the massacre of her town with her new-born child. After running for an hour in sheer panic, she realized that she had carried a pillow to safety, instead of her child. Inspired by the story, Dreams on a Pillow explores Omm's life story, showcasing both the history of Palestine before the ethnic cleansing of the lands, and the trauma borne from the violence that was inflicted upon the Palestinian people during the Nakba."

According to the announcement materials, Omm's journey as a refugee takes her through the sites of several atrocities, including concentration camps and attacks on Palestinians near the Lebanese border. Whenever she is able to rest, the game switches into a documentary mode, "reliving a rapidly fading memory of a pre-Zionist Palestine" by means of archive imagery and text.

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.

Abueideh is the developer of Liyla & The Shadows of War, a freeware game released for PC and mobile in 2016, which follows a Palestinian family's struggle to survive during Israel's 2014 war on the Palestinian territory of Gaza. The game drew headlines when Apple initially refused to list it in the Games section of the Apple Store, requesting that it be categorised under "News" or "Reference" instead. They reversed their decision a week later following an outcry and accusations of double standards with regard to games about or by Palestinians.

While Liyla & The Shadows of War has won or been nominated for several awards, Abueideh says he has struggled to make headway in the industry ever since, something he attributes to publisher wariness of the politically sensitive subject of Israel's long-running occupation of Palestinian territories. He says it has proven "impossible" to find a traditional publisher for Dreams On A Pillow, nor has he been able to muster the funds independently. After releasing Liyla & The Shadows of War, Abueideh opened a nut roastery in his home town of Nablus in the Palestinian West Bank, but he says it's now unsafe to visit the building due to the nearby activity of Israeli colonists.

As such, Abueideh is crowd-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 has destroyed many 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.