Just over a week away from its fundraising campaign, the historic 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 will need to pay in full for “salaries, outsourcing, and asset creation,” but it is enough to get the game into production in the short term. With the funds, raised through Muslim crowdfunding platform LaunchGood, the nine-person team will be able to map out the game, build the story, and work on mechanics, prototypes, and a “vertical slice” (another word for a polished section of the game). . game) needed to search for more funds, according to the LaunchGood page.
Dreams on a pillowcreated by Palestinian developer Rasheed Abu-Eideh, it is a “pseudo-3D stealth adventure game about a land full of people that turns into a landless village.” It is set during the Nakba of 1948, 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, Abdel Razzaq Takriti, a professor of Arab and Palestinian history at Rice University, described the Nakba of 1948 as having two dimensions: “The humanitarian catastrophe involves the loss of land, the loss of property. and the expulsion of the people. The other dimension was the political catastrophe, which involved the suppression of native sovereignty. Those two aspects of reality continue to this day.”
In Dreams on a Pillow, Omm is a young mother from a family of olive farmers in al-Tantura. Throughout the game, the player goes through historical events and stories of the Nakba as Omm attempts to escape to Lebanon in the north. Every time Omm has a chance to rest on his perilous journey, he dreams of his childhood, reliving a rapidly fading memory of a pressureist Palestine. Using historical documentation and images, two decades of untold Palestinian history are carefully implemented and beautifully depicted, to refute the common propaganda myth of “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
Omm's story is devastating: a young mother flees invaders with her newborn son after her husband is murdered, only to realize in a panic that she has taken a pillow instead of her son. Abu-Eideh said on the game's LaunchGood page that Omm is not an action hero, she's a terrified civilian. When he puts down the pillow, the reality of his new world sets in.
Abu-Eideh, who currently resides in the West Bank of Gaza, is also the developer of the 2016 game. Liyla and the shadows of wara game set during Israel's war in Gaza in 2014. The award-winning game is short and moving and follows a Palestinian girl through the reality of the devastating attacks. In 2016, Apple blocked the game from the App Store, stating that 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 warAbu-Eideh opened a nut roaster in the West Bank to support his family, but is currently unable to travel to the business due to the Israeli occupation: “Today, the building sits empty as Israeli settlers terrorize the roads of the West Bank, making his toaster is not safe,” reads a note on the LaunchGood page.