Dungeon masters or game masters can have players roll a D20 (a twenty-sided die) to generate the following dream content for conversation, character development, plot prompts, or time-filler.

1. A shambling mound chases you in a swamp. You trip and get sucked into a sweet syrup and wake up suffocating in a sugary sweat.
2. Flowering trees along a gravel trail. The wind blows petals around you.
3. A picnic in an abandoned town after a war.
4. Dogs. Lots of friendly dogs.
5. A reflecting pool that did not show your face.
6. A talking rodent that lead you to an underground political rally for rodents.
7. A delicious squid sandwich. Wait, do squids exist in this world?
8. Kissing a frog, and then another, and then another, to find your prince or princess. (You never found them).
9. A one-eyed eagle picks you up by the talons and takes you to its nest to feed you to its young.
10. A suspicious package arrives for you at the traveler's inn.
11. A voiceless bard singing the lullaby your mother once sang.
12. You grow a very long beard but the hair on your head all falls out.
13. A necromancer raises an army of all the spiders, mosquitos, and centipedes you've ever killed.
14. You find a baby ogre orphan on the side of the road and decide to raise it as your own.
15. Your friend shows you a mysterious crystal that channels time. You decide to relive your favourite day ever. It was...
16. The blacksmith has finished your new shield, but it is a jigsaw puzzle and you have to put it all together.
17. As you stop to inspect a strange tree, you discover a bumble bee library with thousands of bee books and bee patrons.
18. You make a semi-underground home in a grassy hill only to find it is the side of a giant's head.
19. A sentient boat kidnaps your family and you chase it across the seas until it capsizes by a rocky peninsula.
20. While preparing the evening meal for your party, you accidentally chop of your fingers and put them into the soup.

Housekeeping was my first view of Marilynne Robinson's writing. My thoughts are still in processing, having just finished the book today. One reviewer called the protagonist's sister, Lucille a conformist, as though we are directed to view her negatively. However, I think she simply wasn't the protagonist, and that the frequent desire to label the protagonist as having a "right" way is a form of comfort and yearning for certainty that Robinson is challenging. We are often told the stories of laudable children with grit and how "successful" they are, a very Lucille perspective. Ruthie's story offers an alternate view and challenges the notion of success and the notion of suicide versus staying alive. It reminded me of Annie Dillard on writing, "Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?" (Dillard, The Writing Life, 1989). Our reasons for living and not living and our reasons for writing or staring out of a window or attempting to sew a dress and make friends are all really curious methods of coping with the same sets of problems of existence as a lone individual in a world we keep trying to ascribe meaning to.

The marvellously moving Auguste Rodin’s “Eve” in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow.
“Adam and Eve wept some human tears, but soon they dried them. Before them stretched the whole world, where they must choose a place of rest, with Providence as their guide. Hand in hand through the land of Eden, with slow and wandering steps, they began their lonely journey.” (Paradise Lost by John Milton, “translation” by Dennis Danielson)