You're asleep and the whole purpose of the game is to wake up in the morning, not in the middle of the night while startled from a nightmare. You play in a dreamworld, reprising many of the staple dreams people usually have, including getting chased by an angry mob or thieves wanting to steal from you while running through strange mazes and obstacles before they get you, then the dream changes and you're looking at your buck naked third person avatar from behind and in order to get past to the next stage, you must sneak around a crowded party full of people without no one noticing you.
You'll also get to fly with the ditinct sensation that you're actually falling and going to crash. Then there's the stage of the dream where you're at school and you must take a choose-your-answer test with questions you haven't studied for (the game could have really difficult questions to force players to pretty much guess and hope for the best)... then if game ratings are not an issue, the game should have a wet dream by the end, where the player gets to see young, beautiful scantily clad women (or men) but if he stares too much or focuses the screen on the wrong area, his "excitement" meter may burst.
And that's how you lose. Get caught by the mob, laughed at by the party, crash while flying, fail the test horrendously or burst your excitement meter and you wake up in the middle of the night. The difficulty could be set so you can only wake up once or a limited amount of times, before falling back asleep and continuing your dream. Extra difficulties in the dream could include avoiding bodies of water or the sound of streams of water, since that would raise your bladder meter (in later stages, cold environments could also do the same trick). Signs and letters in all of the dreams would look blurry and in a haze to make them difficult to understand. There would be no map whatsoever, giving the player that open ended and utterly lost sensations dreams have (hell, the scenery could change when you try to go back even) and there should be other stages of popular dreams... They just haven't popped off the top of my head yet.
Making it a dream environment could let designers go flat out of their minds coming up with the weirdest scenarios imaginable, pooling their strangest dreams and picking the best for things to see on the game (I once dreamt that whenever I bent my arm, a new blue, three toed arm would pop out of my elbow and retract when I stretched my arm back). Since these aren't common dreams, they should just be part of the scenery or of things you can watch and witness, like it sometimes happens in dreams. These scenes should be random, taking place at different times and places to give the game replayability.
I checked online to see how many dream or nightmare games there were and found a couple of flash nightmare ones with a scripted story and of course, there's Psychonauts, which deals with people getting inside other people's heads, but I guess the art design could make the experiences be pretty different.
edit: Oh crap. I just noticed the "tell me in about a paragraph bit!" Oh well... I could have turned it into a huge block of text but that would have made it more unreadable.
Post edited March 07, 2011 by El_Caz