With just over a week left to its fundraising campaign, the historical Palestinian game Dreams on a Pillow has surpassed its crowdfunding goal of $200,000. This sum is less than half of the total $495,000 the developer says it’ll need to fully pay for “salaries, outsourcing, and asset creation,” but it’s enough to bring the game to production in the short term. With the funds, raised via Muslim crowdfunding platform LaunchGood, the team of nine will be able to plot out the game, build the story, and work on mechanics, prototypes, and a “vertical slice” (another word for a polished section of the game) necessary for seeking out more funds, according to the LaunchGood page.
Dreams on a Pillow, created by Palestinian developer Rasheed Abu-Eideh, is a “a pseudo-3D stealth adventure game about a land full of people being made into a people without land.” It’s set during the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist forces violently displaced more than 700,000 people from Palestine during the creation of the state of Israel. In a 2024 interview with Time Magazine, Rice University Palestinian and Arabic history professor Abdel Razzaq Takriti described the 1948 Nakba as having two dimensions: “The humanitarian catastrophe entails loss of land, loss of property and expulsion of the people. The other dimension was the political catastrophe, which entailed suppression of native sovereignty. Those two aspects of reality continue to this very day.”
Here’s how Abu-Eideh describes the game:
In Dreams on a Pillow, Omm is a young mother from an olive farmers’ family in al-Tantura. Throughout the game, the player traverses historical events and stories of the Nakba as Omm attempts an escape towards Lebanon in the North. Whenever Omm has an opportunity to rest on her perilous journey, she dreams of her childhood — reliving a rapidly fading memory of a pre-Zionist Palestine. Using historical documentation and imagery, two decades of untold Palestinian history is carefully implemented and beautifully rendered, to disprove the common propaganda myth of “a land without people for a people without land”.
Omm’s story is a devastating one: A young mother flees invaders with her newborn child after her husband’s murder, only to realize in the panic that she’s taken a pillow instead of her child. Abu-Eideh said in the game’s LaunchGood page that Omm is not an action hero — she’s a terrified civilian. When she puts the pillow down, the reality of her new world sets in.
Abu-Eideh, who currently resides in the West Bank of Gaza, is also the developer of 2016 game Liyla and the Shadows of War, a game that’s set during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza. The award-winning game is short and poignant, following a Palestinian girl through the realities of the devastating attacks. In 2016, Apple blocked the game from the App Store, stating it was “not appropriate in the Games category.” Apple later reversed its decision and published the game in its games section.
Following Liyla and the Shadows of War, Abu-Eideh opened a nut roastery in the West Bank to support his family, but is currently unable to travel to the business due to Israeli occupation: “Today, the building sits empty as Israeli colonists terrorize the roads of the West Bank, making travel to his roastery unsafe,” reads a note on the LaunchGood page.
The Gaza Health Ministry reports that more than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023. Large parts of Gaza have been destroyed in bombings, and parts of the West Bank — including businesses and whole streets — have been flattened by Israeli bulldozers.
“Rasheed — unsure of his continued safety in the face of relentless colonist attacks on the West Bank — has set his sights on continuing to following the path he was forced to abandon a decade ago: using games to not just tell the story of the 1948 Nakba, but to let people experience it through a game. To share the catastrophe that has haunted generations of Palestinians with displacement, apartheid, occupation, and violence,” the LaunchGood page reads.
Dreams on a Pillow’s funding page will remain open until Jan. 13 at 4:45 p.m. EST.
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