The Computer Game: Bedtime Story

This tranquil sleep story follows an autistic boy enjoying a peaceful moment in the woods. Perched in a tree, they listen to distant birds, cuddling a teddy bear. The child delves into a daydream, envisioning themselves and the teddy in a 2D platform computer game. They navigate through various challenges, including traversing a hotel, sailing a river, scaling a mountain, and solving a temple puzzle. Emerging from the daydream, they climb down and leave the woods, replaying the game in their mind. That night, they fall asleep, curious about future daydreams.

Transcript

So as you listen to me telling this story you can just take a moment to get yourself comfortable and to begin to relax and allow your eyes to close and I don't know whether you'll relax deeper with the sound of my voice or the spaces between my words or perhaps you'll relax deeper with each out breath that you take as you listen to this story in the background and the story is about a child and the child is out playing in the woods one day they're running around in the woods running through the leaves of plants around the trees grabbing hold of tree trunks as they throw themselves around different directions,

Cracking twigs as they go,

Running through the undergrowth and they can hear birds around them they can hear the sounds of other animals they can notice the way light occasionally shines through the treetops and as they run around the trees they can feel the bark of the trees under their hands and smell that smell of the trees and feel each footstep as they run and after a while they begin to get tired of all their running around playing in the woods,

They find a tree,

They jump up,

Grab a branch,

Pull themselves up,

Grab another branch and start climbing up into that tree and they carefully climb higher and higher into the tree climbing up into the branches so they can't be seen from the ground they then rest themselves on one of the branches leaning with their back against the trunk of the tree they attach themselves safely securely to the tree as they've done many times before and they begin to just sit and relax and listen to the sounds around them while they cool down from their playing they listen to the birds in the distance how the birds seem to communicate with each other they hear the rustling of the leaves as the wind blows a breeze and they just allow themselves to relax and while they relax they get a teddy bear out of the backpack they've got with them they rest that teddy bear on their lap and as they relax they just gaze at their teddy bear sitting on their lap keeping them company helping them to relax deeper and more profoundly and then snuggling their teddy bear they close their eyes and they begin to allow their mind to wander allow their mind to drift into a daydream and as their mind starts drifting into a daydream they begin to imagine themselves walking with their teddy in a computer game and in this computer game they climb up on blocks they throw up whips that manage to hook onto ledges so they can swing from one ledge to another and so they can climb up higher ledges pull themselves up to those higher ledges and any bad guys that come along teddy fires out a big fist that knocks them down and those bad guys disappear and then teddy jumps on the child's back onto the child's shoulders as the child climbs up walls runs along ledges ducks things that come at them dodges and acts out this video game and the whole time the child's doing this they can hear the video game music playing in the background and they can tell what kind of environment they're in by the music that's playing and every move they make they find has a musical sound whether it's teddy throwing out a punch whether it's jumping,

Ducking firing their whip out to swing across gaps or pull themselves up onto ledges and in this video game they're heading for a hotel and it's a spooky hotel and as they get closer they can tell that they're approaching that spooky hotel because of what it looks like around the hotel it has that typical old school spooky hotel look on a computer game and they run along the edge of the wall around the hotel and then head into the entrance through the wall leading down a very long driveway to the hotel and on arrival at the hotel the music deepens and changes and teddy and the child enter the hotel and they slowly begin to walk through the hotel and they can hear that repetitive music playing in the background as they continue walking through that hotel and the child jumps up on a ledge,

Runs along the ledge fires their whip out,

Swings up to a higher ledge runs along that ledge,

Drops down onto a lower ledge running along that ledge just like a 2D platform game sprinting,

Doing a long jump to the next ledge and then the child comes to a ledge that they jump and fail and they try again and they jump and they fail again and they try and fire out their whip but the whip can't reach the other side and they don't know what they're supposed to do and they look around and they try and figure it out and then after a while of jumping and trying to figure it out the child notices a balloon just hanging in the air they jump up towards the balloon and the hand instinctively grabs the balloon lifts them up higher and moves across and they let go as they're over the ledge,

Landing the other side and the child and teddy work together as they continue through this hotel until eventually they reach a wall and they can see that there appears to be a passage up in that wall and again the child runs and tries jumping and can't get up there tries using the whip and can't reach tries searching around and then realizes that they can move a chair near a table and so they move that chair over to the wall they jump on the chair and then can jump up use the whip to pull themselves up to that hole they walk through the hole having a sense of the screen sliding along they move forward and drop down into a cavern and the music changes again and in this cavern they see what they assume is the big bad boss of this game and the boss starts leaping around and the child throws teddy off of his back and then teddy fires his fist at the big bad boss and the child jumps over the boss as the boss flies down towards him and lands and teddy jumps back on his shoulders and then the child runs across the floor turns,

Throws teddy off again teddy throws a punch at the boss knocking the boss,

The boss flashes the child jumps over the boss again teddy jumps back on their shoulders again and the child jumps over the boss again throws teddy off teddy fires a punch at the boss the boss flashes stays stationary for a while and then flies down at them as the child jumps over them gets teddy on his shoulders again and they repeat this a number of times before all of a sudden the boss changes what they do and they start heading left and right rather than diagonally down and they start accelerating and becoming more erratic and the child continues to jump the boss and run under the boss and throw teddy off so that teddy can throw a punch and then go and collect teddy and after a while the boss flashes and flashes and flashes some more and then disappears and some pleasant music appears and the child floats up into the air with teddy on their back and then the child finds themselves at what seems to be another level and they find themselves on a rowing boat and they've got that kind of 2D old school water and they're rowing through that water and teddy has to throw punches forward to knock barrels that seem to be in front of the boat to stop the boat from smashing into the barrels and the child travels through the water with that music in the background with teddy throwing punches at barrels as they appear in the water suddenly popping up from under the surface and then teddy will throw a punch and throw another punch and the barrel will get destroyed and there were some barrels that were a different colour that took a few more punches to be destroyed and would get closer to the boat before teddy managed to destroy them and then seagulls started diving down from the sky they'd be flying left across the screen,

So left above the child and then right above the child and then they would suddenly dive down on the child and teddy would throw a punch up at the seagulls as the child dodged the seagulls as they dive-bombed towards the sailboat and then after a while the seagulls disappeared,

The barrels disappeared and another boss appeared a boss in a floating flying machine that dived down towards them similar to the previous boss and they fought it in a similar way jumping over,

Running under throwing teddy off so that teddy could throw some punches collecting teddy again jumping over,

Dodging under teddy throwing some more punches the boss flashing jumping over,

Jumping under,

The boss changing routine jumping and dodging this new routine of the boss and this boss took longer and was a bit harder to defeat this time but eventually the boss flashed and flashed and then disappeared and then the child realised that this next level was the final level of the game and they knew that this level was different to the other levels there wasn't a big boss at the end and for this level they had to work their way up a mountain and so they started ascending that mountain and they'd work their way along a path they'd jump over from one ledge to another but the ledges were slippy so they'd have to turn their back to the ledge and walk slightly the other way as they skidded along the ledge so they didn't fall off the end and then they'd jump to another ledge and turn around jump to another ledge and turn around and in some areas they'd have to fire their whip up at branches that stuck out and swing from one ledge to another and then they'd have to use the whip to fire it up to higher ledges to pull themselves up and climb up the ledge and then they'd have to jump up a slanted pathway run around a few more ledges,

Jumping from ledge to ledge swinging in places,

Climbing up the sides of ledges in places until eventually they reached the top of the mountain after a lot of hard work and at the top of the mountain was the temple and they entered the temple door and inside the temple,

Light flickered around the walls and they walked through the temple they could hear the rhythmic music in the background as they walked through that temple and occasionally things would fly down at them and they'd have to duck and sometimes things would move at them that they would have to jump and they had to jump from ledge to ledge at times and duck and crawl under other bits at other times and eventually they arrived at a room deep in this temple they entered that room and they saw a block of stone in the middle of the room and they knew that what they had to do was carve a sculpture that had to be the perfect sculpture and the only way to complete the level was to get that sculpture right and they had to work out what the sculpture was supposed to look like they started exploring the walls,

Looking at the images on the walls trying to work out the codes,

Trying to work out the pattern of what was on the walls and they started moving squares around,

Moving bits and pieces around on those walls trying to make it fit and make it look like a pattern that they can carve and they moved some bits up and left,

Some bits down and right and then they would stand back and take a look and then move forward and move some more bits trying to line up all the different lines that were on the movable squares until eventually they managed to make it so it looked like what they imagined the sculpture has to look like then they went over to the sculpture and they knew that that sculpture had to look like what the image looked like from the perspective,

From two foot marks on the floor so they started chipping away,

Carving away at that sculpture until eventually they managed to make it look like the image on the wall and as soon as it looked like the image on the wall so the temple seemed to fall away a bright white beam of light shone down from above onto the sculpture and seemed to send out beams of light in all directions like light reflecting off of mirrors and the music changed and that light seemed to spread out in all directions into the land and then a trophy started descending through that light until it was just above the sculpture and the child lifted Teddy up over their head and Teddy reached for the trophy,

Took the trophy and passed the trophy down to the child and the child told Teddy how they'd earned that trophy together they couldn't have done it without each other and then this video game began to disappear and the child shifted a little bit on that branch as their eyes began to open as their eyes began to open and they found themselves resting in that tree,

Teddy on their lap feeling good,

Feeling comfortable feeling a sense of achievement,

Of accomplishment looking at Teddy,

Smiling placing Teddy back in their back descending the tree wandering back through the woods finding their way back to the path that leads out of these woods following that path playing that computer game over in their mind as they walk humming the music to the game reliving the experience in their mind's eye and they go home,

They have tea and then that evening they settle down in bed and they begin to drift comfortably asleep dreaming about their experience,

About that daydream about what else they can daydream what other adventures they can go on with Teddy as they drift and float and fall comfortably and relaxed asleep