Concept Package · Original IP
Every nightmare you have ever had, in a row, and no way to wake up.
The Concept
Not a story — an anthology. A shortlist of the nightmares everybody has had: stairs that never end, running without moving, teeth coming loose at a mirror, something standing over the bed. The engine of the maze is recognition. The guest does not learn what is happening; they already know, because it has happened to them.
The Sleep Lab is the threshold — beds, wires, staff behind glass — and it is the only room with colour in it. In its far wall a hole has been torn through the blockwork, and the hole is the only thing in the room with no colour at all: grey bricks, grey cracks spidering out into the paint, fog rolling through at floor level. The guest walks through it, and the colour never comes back.
The cast are stretched people — distortions of ordinary faces above completely ordinary clothes. Nothing bleeds anywhere. And in every single room, a mannequin of someone asleep: peaceful, undistorted, and easy to stop noticing. Which the maze is counting on — because exactly one of them, late in the route, is not a mannequin.
Look & Feel
Black, white and grey, and nothing else — after the one colour room. Dream logic rather than realism: proportions slightly wrong, a door too small, a ceiling too low and then suddenly too high.
The Guest Journey
Room by room
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01The Sleep Lab
Nine wired sleepers, staff behind the glass — and full, ordinary colour
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02The Breach
A torn hole draining the world grey. The way in
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03The Bedroom
Someone awake who cannot move, and something that will not
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04The Bathroom
Teeth in the basin, and a cupped hand at the mirror
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05The Teeth Corridor
The same dream past logic — thousands of them, hanging
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06The Stairs
Flights that join where they should not. One figure, one flight above
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07The Doors
Every door is wrong, and one opens onto a room that cannot fit
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08The Slow Run
Deep soft floor. It only walks; you cannot go faster
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09The Shadows
More shadows on the wall than people in the room
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10The Fall
The furniture hangs overhead at falling angles
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11The Deep
Everything drifts upward, and there is no water anywhere
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12The Faces
Blinding white fog, and nobody left with a face
Moments
The Cast
The Weight — it does not move
The Grin — it offers you what is in its hand
The Tall One — always one flight above
The Doorway — built to fill a frame
The Slow One — it only walks
The Hanged — a face seen upside down
The Drowned — never touches the floor
The Blank — finale only
A Sleeper — one in every room
Design Notes
The colour rule
Colour is the waking world. It exists in the Sleep Lab, dies at the Breach, and never returns. The guest doesn't walk into a monochrome maze — they watch the colour leave.
Deformed by their own dream
Each creature is the physical shape of the nightmare it lives in — stretched tall for the stairwell, spread wide for the doorframe, featureless for the room where nobody knows you.
The one that moves
The sleepers are props, and the guest teaches themselves to stop checking. One performer, placed once, late. It works because they were right every previous time.
Concept imagery generated with AI from the author's written design direction. Story, world, route, cast and design are original work.