Hideo Kojima’s Dream Journal Is Pure Nightmare Fuel With "Voluptuous Nude Women," Reanimated "Decomposing Bodies," and More
If there’s one thing fans of Hideo Kojima know, it’s that his imagination doesn’t have an off switch. That apparently includes when he’s asleep.
The legendary creator recently dug up what he called a “nightmarish memo” from a bad dream he had back in early 2017, and it reads like something ripped straight out of one of his games.
Sharing the story on X, Kojima explained that he’s “always had a lot of bad dreams,” and that someone once suggested he keep a dream diary. That advice didn’t exactly fix the problem.
As he put it, “the nightmares didn’t stop, and I eventually gave up,” but one entry clearly stuck with him enough to share years later.
The dream begins with Kojima alone, relocating “to some hot spring town.” He ends up living in a boarding house with “only a back entrance,” tucked away in an area “surrounded by narrow alleyways.”
He goes into detail about the setting, writing, “The alleys twist and turn, and because things are piled up everywhere, they're so tight that only one person can pass through at a time.”
Trying to be a good neighbor, Dream Kojima decides to tidy things up. He opts to “clean up the surrounding paths that serve as everyday walkways,” which are made of “packed-down dirt.”
He decides to “walk around spraying water with a hose” to “keep the dust down.” That’s when the dream takes a sharp left turn into full-on Kojima territory.
“As I do this, I start running into various local residents. Most of them are voluptuous nude women who look as if they've stepped straight out of figure sketches or croquis drawings, or scar-covered elderly men who speak in foreign languages,” he writes.
Things escalate fast. After finishing his cleanup, he heads back to his room and notices something deeply wrong. “Then I suddenly notice that, as if the soil has dissolved from the water, four decomposing corpses are buried along the path. They remind me of artistic swimming: only the upper halves of their bodies are exposed above the ground, neatly aligned.”
Faced with reanimated, half-buried bodies, his instinct is logical. He decides he needs to “call the police.” He doesn’t get far. “At that moment, all of the corpses begin moving at once. As if nothing were wrong, they shuffle toward my room and start relaxing inside, as though it were their own home.”
Just when it seems like the dream can’t get stranger, the doorbell rings. Kojima continues, “Then the doorbell rings, announcing a new visitor. At that signal, the decomposing bodies revert to the forms of young men wearing relay race uniforms.
From the entrance, a man who seems to be their coach steps inside without removing his shoes and begins scolding the athletes. What the coach was angry about, I can no longer remember.”
This all feels right at home in Kojima’s creative DNA. Kojima didn’t say whether he plans to share more entries from that abandoned dream diary, but if this is any indication, it’s probably a goldmine of unsettling inspiration.
Even when he’s sleeping, Kojima’s mind is still building strange worlds and unsettling images.