Influenced by the Twilight Zone television show, Night Springs is the name of fictional TV series that players can watch episodes of in their travels across Bright Falls. There are six episodes that you can watch, which will earn you the Couch Potato reward.
Location:
Episode Four. The Anderson Farm. After Barry and Alan break into the red barn on the Anderson Farm, the player has the option of turning on the TV located by the stairs. Barry will make comments about the episode while it plays.
Overview:
A man trapped in a dream is wondering who is the dreamer.
Recording:
Transcript:
NARRATOR: Sleep. We all spend a third of our dreams in its soft embrace, somewhere between fantasy and oblivion. But dreams have a way of forcing themselves into waking life, or vice versa, in Night Springs. Tonight's episode... The Dream of Dreams.
(A man walks through the fog and stops behind a queue of people. He cranes his neck to look past them.)
NARRATOR: We join Mr Jones as he explores the endless dreamscape, only to be brought to a sudden stop by a decidedly mundane situation, a long line of people.
(A man in a hat turns around to greet him.)
MAN: Hey, Jones right?
(Jones nods)
MAN: Listen, we're gonna have to wait until your Highness over there is good and ready.
JONES: Oh wow. Who's that?
(Jones points to a sleeping man who turns over.)
MAN: You don't know him? What are you, new? He's the guy dreaming us... well, not just us, he dreams everything. All of this!
JONES: But, wait... no. I'm the one who's dreaming. I'm asleep. Isn't... isn't this my dream?
MAN: Oh yeah. (Sarcastically) Sure! Get real, pal. You're just another dream. I'm a dream. You're a dream. The weirdo in the diving suit in a dream.
(The aforementioned "weirdo in the diving suit" puts on his diving goggles.)
MAN: And the girl made of smiles and sunshine is definitely a dream.
JONES: But I'm pretty sure I'm dreaming this.
MAN: Well, maybe you're a really confused dream. What am I, a shrink? All I know is I'm going with the smart guys, and they say that's the guy doing the dreaming. Right there.
(The man points to the sleeping man once again.)
JONES: I don't know what that means.
MAN: It means we can keep him happy. No sudden falls. We make sure he has his clothes on when he goes out in public. No chases where the monster is nipping at his heels and he runs like crazy but his legs don't seem to get him anywhere. None of that. 'cause if he wakes up in a cold sweat-
JONES: Ohhhh.
MAN: Yeah. Precisely. So wait until he wants to move on. Keep things nice and calm.
(A ticking clock slowly appears. Its sounds become louder.)
JONES: Hey, something... something's happening here.
MAN: Yeah? What's that?
JONES: What?! Can't you hear that?
MAN: Oh God, help us, it's an alarm clock! Oh it's you isn't it?! Please, man, I have a wife and kid. Please don't wake-
(Static covers the screen.)
Notes from Dream of Dreams:
- The Sleeping Man. Alan Wake's writer, Mikko Rautalahti, stars as the sleeping man. It wouldn't be his last appearance in a life action portion either, with him reappearing in Alan Wake's American Nightmare (as one of Mr Scratch's victims) and in Quantum Break as an extremely Finnish Night Springs audition. Mikko also worked on the Night Springs episode, as the literal man dreaming up the characters.
- The Sudden Stop. The narrator references "a sudden stop", mirroring the title of Wake's most recently-published work, The Sudden Stop.
- Cold Ending. This Night Springs episode is the only one in the series which ends abruptly without a narrator closing out the scene.
- Episode Rewatch. As the voice-over and live-action segments were recorded separately, Remedy was reluctant to share HQ versions of the TV shows. As there was interest from the community, the shows were released via Joystiq to celebrate the Night Springs-based game, Alan Wake's American Nightmare. While Jostiq closed down, these recordings can still be found online.
Barry Wheeler's Commentary
- When the TV is turned on. "Wow, Night Springs! Man, brings back memories. Hey, remember when I got you that gig? Your first real writing job, what got you started! Oh, is this one of your episodes?"
- When the episode's title is mentioned. "Aw, that's by someone else."
Night Springs in American Nightmare:
In Alan Wake's American Nightmare, Alan expands on what Night Springs is and its meaning to him in a series of manuscript pages:
- Alan Wake, The Writer. "My name is Alan Wake, and I’m a writer. I didn’t become one overnight. Like most writers, I struggled with it -- a short story here, an article there. Then I got lucky and spent a year as a staff writer on the Night Springs TV show. It wasn’t the great American novel of my fantasies, but it taught me discipline and craft, and the difference between wanting to be a writer and actually writing."
- Night Springs, the Cult TV Show. "Night Springs doesn’t exist. It’s a fictional town from the TV show I used to work on. It was Anyplace, USA, a place we used as a backdrop for whatever strange story we had that week. One of the stories I wrote for the show involved a man, “the champion of light,” fighting his evil double, “the herald of darkness”. It was something I’d written back in the real world -- something I had a link to, a framework I could build on. I adapted it into a new story. This story."
