With just over a week to go until the fundraising campaign, the historic Palestinian game Dreaming on a pillow has surpassed its crowdfunding goal of $200,000. This amount is less than half of the total $495,000 that the developer says it will have 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 money raised through a Muslim crowdfunding platform LaunchGoodthe team of nine will be able to plan out the game, build the story and work on the mechanics, prototypes and a ‘vertical slice’ (another word for a polished part of the game) needed to more money, according to the LaunchGood page.
Dreaming on a pillowcreated by Palestinian developer Rasheed Abu-Eideh, is a “a pseudo-3D stealth adventure game about a land full of people being transformed into a nation without a land.” It is set during the Nakba of 1948, when Zionist forces forcibly expelled more than 700,000 people from Palestine during the establishment of the State of Israel. In a 2024 interview with Time Magazine, professor of Palestinian and Arab history at Rice University Abdel Razzaq Takriti described the 1948 Nakba because it has two dimensions: “The humanitarian catastrophe involves loss of land, loss of property and displacement of the population. The other dimension was the political catastrophe, which entailed the suppression of indigenous sovereignty. These two aspects of reality persist to this day.”
In Dreams on a Pillow, Omm is a young mother from an olive farming family in al-Tantura. Throughout the game, the player traverses historical events and stories about the Nakba as Omm attempts to escape to Lebanon in the north. Whenever Omm gets a chance to rest on her perilous journey, she dreams of her youth – reliving a rapidly fading memory of a pre-Zionist Palestine. Using historical documentation and images, twenty years of untold Palestinian history are carefully implemented and beautifully depicted to refute the common propaganda myth of “a land without people for a people without a land.”
Omm’s story is devastating: a young mother flees the invaders with her newborn child after her husband’s murder, only to realize in panic that she has grabbed a pillow instead of her child. Abu-Eideh said on the game’s LaunchGood page that Omm is not an action hero, but a terrified civilian. As she puts down the pillow, the reality of her new world begins.
Abu-Eideh, who currently lives in Gaza’s West Bank, is also the developer of the 2016 game Liyla and the Shadows of Wara game set during Israel’s 2014 war against Gaza. The award-winning game is short and gripping 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.
Next Liyla and the Shadows of WarAbu-Eideh opened a nut roasting business 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 while Israeli settlers terrorize the roads of the West Bank, making his home unsafe coffee roasting trips,” reads a comment on the LaunchGood page.
“Rasheed – unsure of his continued safety in the face of brutal settler attacks in the West Bank – has set his sights on continuing the path he was forced to abandon a decade ago: using games to not only tell the story from 1948 to tell. 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 said.