Dreamzones

20 Sep, 2025

A Lakelands setting post

Imagine a band of hunters ranges through the Lakelands, tracking a herd of deer. A heavy fog creeps up. By the time they begin to worry about losing their way, they have already done so; they decide to stay put until the weather clears, waiting in the grass above a creek. They wait a long time. As night falls and they try to coax a campfire out of the damp wood they've managed to gather, something strange cries out downstream. They listen a moment, and hear it again: a feeble call for help, in clear English. One of them pulls a flashlight out of his backpack, the battery saved for the most urgent occasions. This, he feels, qualifies. He points the beam through the fog, fixing the tunnel of garish white on a shape that struggles in the water. Seconds later he drops the flashlight, because what he sees horrified him: a creature with the body of a frog, but a girl's pleading face.

Unfortunately, this isn't the last such creature to visit them in the gloom, and they realize the fog will never clear. They have stumbled into a dreamzone, and it will take a great deal of cunning and resolve for them to get out again.

The Nature of Dreamzones

Source: Camilo Contreras, 2022.

Dreamzones are Weird places where matter, space, and time can alter in uncanny, impossible ways. Most cities in North America are now pocked by them, though they can and will form in rural and wild areas, as well. In a dreamzone, nearly anything might happen, though what does happen always responds in some way to the minds of the people inside it. Occupants' fears, obsessions, convictions, and memories become manifest. The dreamzone might recreate a person's mental furniture either as a spectre or by physically transforming some existing object or creature into a meaningful shape. What's perhaps worse, a dreamzone might also directly alter its occupants' minds, heightening or redirecting anxieties and desires. There are some who think that's all that happens, and the strange monsters that live in a dreamzone are only hallucinations; the monsters that leave the dreamzones are proof that these skeptics are wrong, and the transformations wrought by a dreamzone are very real indeed.

Dreamzones can be as small as a single room or as large as dozens of city blocks. They also vary in intensity. A potent dreamzone might create new spectres out of a person's mind within an hour of their entry and swarm with a veritable menagerie of strange creatures, or it might be identifiable only by the single ghost that wanders its halls. Size often correlates with intensity, but not always. Dreamzones both expand and grow stronger over time, but one can start wide and weak or small and potent. Regardless of its particulars, the dreamzone is always recognizably the place it was before it became a dreamzone: a country store and the fields surrounding it; a self-storage lot; the attic of a wartime bungalow. While its Weird activities typically conform to human categories, however, its own boundaries do not. Only half of a field might fall within one dreamzone's limits, while some of the street in front of the self-storage lot might fall within the other's. To make matters more confusing, space within the dreamzone is subject to change. Many are larger on the inside than their borders can justify, and the distortion is not always even throughout. Some seem to have a habit of subtly changing shape to prevent anyone from getting out, or to lure visitors to particular locations within; others make mazes and barricades to keep trespassers out of secret glades or chambers. Along with space, it can also distort time, dragging a single day out for months or contracting an hour for the outside world into a minute within. There is always a risk, when entering a dreamzone, that more time has passed than the explorer has bargained for.

A person might wander unwittingly into a dreamzone, but unless it is very weak, they will soon realize what kind of place they're in, because the dreamzone will have warped things to suit some visitors' psychodrama. Rigid human faces might appear in the lamp posts. Stalagmites and stalactites might choke an upper floor apartment. Every animal in the forest might be in some stage of metamorphosis between their original form and a phosphorescent tiger. In time, the visitor's own possessions will start to alter, and so too might the visitor's body. These changes take time, however. Eventually the songbird might be indistinguishable from a princess; until then, it has an intermediary form somewhere between the two, which could be beautiful but is more likely to be disturbing. (Of course, the nightmare character which the dreamzone is trying to recreate could already be a hybrid creature, equally grandmother and wolf.) As a rule, the change finishes sooner if the person whose thoughts it is based on is still within the dreamzone; if they've left, the transformation will continue at a much slower pace.

Some dreamzones are stickier, in a sense, than others. Some will play out a psychodrama long after the person who started it has left; subsequent visitors will find themselves dealing with someone else's neuroses, forced to work out a stranger's dream logic in order to survive. Other dreamzones will rapidly switch to a new visitor's concerns, so that within an hour every bizarre thing a team of explorers encounters will come from one of their own members' thoughts. It's hard to say which is worse: confronting a distortion of a stranger's mind, a friend's mind, or one's own. Many dreamzones, though, will be sticky in some respects but not in others, carrying forward bits and pieces of previous visitors but reinterpreting them according to whoever next enters. The paternal killer hunting a new hominid woman through the sewers might speak with the voice of her father, but it looks like Santa Claus, a folkloric figure she's never heard of before.

It is not only matter and space that a dreamzone can change. Perhaps worse, it can also alter the visitor's mind. Thoughts, habits, memories, preoccupations, hates, loves: these can bleed between companions who have stumbled into a dreamzone. Echoes of previous visitors' longing might reverberate in newer victims, if something held them in the meantime. Maybe a pond stays frozen year-round, and any who look into its dark depths will leave behind one of their own intentions and adopt another that was left by someone who came before. Most often, though, it's those people who explore a dreamzone together that share or exchange mental phenomena. Strangers who find each other in a haunted wood might all come out believing that the same child is their daughter, though she only recognizes one of them. These changes are not fleeting, and leaving a dreamzone does not erase them. Any enmity or attraction, memory or anxiety that a person carries out within them fades only in the normal way and at the normal rate.

Just as people changed by a dreamzone remain changed when they leave, so too do the creatures and objects. Most of the Weird fauna of the Lakelands emerged from one dreamzone or another. And sometimes, too, do the spectres and ghosts that frequently form there. These ephemeral beings cannot exist in the mundane world unless they ride something out. Many spirits can possess people or animals and will leave the dreamzone with their host, wrecking havoc in more mundane places. Therefore it can be dangerous just to venture near a dreamzone, because monsters often venture out. Of course, it is still more dangerous within.

Why, then, would anyone go purposely into a dreamzone? To start with, magic can be done in such places. In the regular world, all spellcraft requires elaborate rituals with multiple participants. In a dreamzone, a practiced occultist can perform wonders with only a series of thoughts. Of course, even in these places a ritual helps, and what's made in one is powerful outside it. Blood ritually spilt in a dreamzone is called dreamblood, and it's a fundamental ingredient in many preternatural drugs and medicines. Objects can be enchanted with remarkable properties, too, or even conjured out of trash or soil. Even a person who lacks any skill in the occult might venture into these places if they've heard stories of what can be found there: herbalists might follow rumours of a panacea, sport hunters reports of dangerous beasts, or urchins tales of a wishing well. And of course the dreamzone sometimes sit atop more mundane treasure, if it happened to form around a jeweler's shop, a factory of specialized goods, or even just a hardware store.

Opinions vary on what exactly dreamzones are. Could they be places where the physics of this universe conflict with the physics of the Unfolding Emperor's? Are they actually a kind of ephemeral being, more responsive and changeable than a spectre or egregore? Or are they a tactic or technology that the Unbound use to attack areas they can't otherwise reach? Most people, of course, don't bother to have an opinion at all, recognizing it's well past their ability to understand. A few relevant facts are widely known, however:

• Dreamzones can form spontaneously in remote regions, but are far more likely to appear in place with many sapient minds. This is why the cities of North America fell.
• Dreamzones can respond to the symbolic content of thoughts and language.
• Though some people claim they can communicate with dreamzones, no one has actually proven that these places have thoughts or intentions of their own.
• Dreamzones, or something more or less indistinguishable from dreamzones, form around every Unbound, idol, and egregore, but not every dreamzone hosts one of these lesser gods. Most in the Lakelands don't.

Some other facts have been suspected or deduced by a few:

• Every spell creates a temporary dreamzone around it, and some can make that dreamzone permanent.
• Every single sapient person projects around themselves either a tiny dreamzone or some kind of proto-dreamzone.
• Ghosts can only exist in dreamzones, so every place with a ghost must at least be a very weak dreamzone.
• More of the Lakelands is in dreamzone than most people are aware.
• The overall percentage of the Lakelands that is inside a dreamzone is always, necessarily, growing.

This last fact, to those who have discovered it, is especially concerning. So far no one has figured out how to live inside a mature dreamzone for more than a few weeks and still remain themselves.

Sample Dreamzones

The Kingdom of the Beasts
In the horror-infested ruin of what was once Detroit is an evangelical-aligned non-denominational church haunted by its congregation. As eldritch terrors entered the world and everything seemed to collapse, the parishioners gathered in the worship space, fully believing it was the end of days; nearly a century later, their ghosts are still there, awaiting the Saviour's return. After all this time not much is left of them but their frantic excitement, equal parts of terror and jubilation, in anticipation of Christ's coming glory. It is dangerous to linger there too long, for the spirits' ecstasy is catching, but the church is also the only sanctuary from what prowls outside.

In the city blocks surrounding the church, the end remains nigh. Four powerful spectres call the dreamzone home, each approximating a different figure from the Revelation to John: the Dragon, the False Prophet, the Scarlet Beast, and the Whore of Babylon.¹ These spectres always possess a host if they can, slowly becoming how the evangelical congregation imagined them to be. Several times in the past some band of heroes has ventured into the dreamzone and slain one or two of them before falling to (or fleeing before) the rest. Killing a spectre's host will not kill the spectre itself, however, so soon enough it will inhabit another unlucky person or animal and begin the transformation anew. At any given time, therefore, the four spectres will be in different stages of transformation: one may look like little more than an oddly-formed dog, while another may as well be a full beast of the apocalypse, bearing atop its towering necks seven heads with ten horns and seven crowns. When they're strong enough, they demand worship from anyone they capture, but they're only satisfied if that worship is alloyed heavily with dread and despair, and at times they forget themselves and devour their worshippers. Otherwise they will set their congregations to building their likenesses out of the most valuable materials to hand and erecting them throughout the dreamzone. These statues will, in time, begin to speak.

The area is periodically choked with smoke, clouded unnaturally in darkness, or battered by raining fire. Small creatures that stray into it will gradually morph into locust-like chimerae, variously with metal plates, lion's teeth, scorpion stings, and odder parts yet. Any standing water is poisoned. Although the dreamzone seems staunchly committed to the images of the apocalyptic fervour that spawned it, it overlays these with new forms its visitors associate with what they see. Pocket hells, for instance, dot the area: a smoking sulphurous pit has opened in a parking lot; a tattoo parlour has become a torture chamber that's always filled with screams, even when no one's inside. Some lesser spectres have also appeared in the form of warrior angels who claim to take battle to the beasts. Like all spectres, however, these false angels compulsively inflict fear and confusion on those who witness them and will try to possess unwilling hosts, and these ones are eager to ride their hosts out of the dreamzone and into the wider world.

The Snake-House
Forty years ago a small coven of sorcerers performed a series of rites that transformed a venerable farmhouse into a nightmare for its occupant; in other words, they made a small but potent dreamzone of it. The woman who lived there was terrified by snakes. It was not masses of serpents that disturbed her thoughts, but the possibility of suddenly coming across one in hiding: the snake in the grass, the rattler camouflaged in gravel. Her house, on becoming a dreamzone, obliged. It hid snakes in cupboards, in the couch cushions, coiled on bannister posts. No matter how many times she called for help exterminating the creatures, more appeared. When she was finally ready to quit her childhood home for good, the house tried to stop her from leaving, warping the layout of the rooms so she could not find the door, shrinking the windows so she could not crawl out of them, and eventually trying to lock her in the basement. She did in the end escape, but she couldn't bring herself to burn down her ancestral house. It still stands there today, known by locals as the Snake-House.

A large two-story brick farmhouse with a rotten porch and an unfinished attic and basement, the Snake-House continues to make and hide snakes. Its walls, ceilings, and floors are riddled with holes for them to slip out of, while every decaying piece of furniture and ornamentation contains hollows and ridges in which a snake might be resting. None of these creatures is quite right. Even when the transformation is advanced, few of the serpents resemble real species but instead jumble together bits of garter snakes, rattlesnakes, hognose snakes, racers, and milksnakes. But the dreamzone must make the creatures out of something else, and few of them at any given time have completed their transformation. Some were once other animals that wandered into the house, be they invertebrates like ants, wasps, silverfish, harvestmen, and snails, or small mammals and birds that somehow survived a nest of serpents long enough to become one. Other snakes were once parts of the house, and might have a head still shaped like an extension cord plug or bear a pattern like floral wallpaper. These last are especially good at camouflage and can lay in plain sight without being seen, at least until they move. So long as they stay within the dreamzone's bounds, the snakes can survive with muddled organs, inorganic tissues, or empty stomachs. Those that try to leave will die if their bodies don't work in mundane space, so in the wild-run yard around the house are the corpses of various misbegotten hybrids. Some of these snake-things are robust enough to survive out of the house, however; more than a few serpentine rats and skittering centi-snakes have turned up a kilometre or more from the place.

Not all of the farmhouse lies in its dreamzone. Half of the kitchen, and half of each of the two guest bedrooms above it, are outside the dreamzone's boundaries. Still, the snakes don't observe these limits and might slither into the more mundane sides of the rooms. Any part of the house inside the dreamzone is changeable, however. Doors might stick, disappear, turn out to be false, or open onto the wrong room. Stairs tend to reliably go up but don't always go down – except in the basement, where this is reversed. The windows are either too small or too high for anyone to climb out of them. In a dozen small ways, the house thwarts attempts to leave. It is not truly malevolent, of course, but unlike many dreamzones it was made for a mortal purpose, and it continues at that task long past irrelevance.

Sycorax's Wood
North of Five Stages, between neglected weedy fields, is a moderately large patch of trees with a stream flowing through it. That little scrap of forest is the heart of a dreamzone that encompasses the cattle farm and the fuel tank factory on one side of the forest and has expanded into the fields around them. Those fields look inconspicuous, except that no one has bothered to claim and clear them. That's deceptive, however: once someone has crossed the threshold, they cannot easily leave, and walking parallel to the wood will nonetheless bring the traveller into the trees. Visitors and residents of Five Stages, often well-versed in the plays of William Shakespeare, call it Sycorax's Wood, but the farmers, trappers, and hunters who live nearby just call it the Bush.

More visitors to Five Stages get lost in Sycorax's Wood than really should, because for the last few generations a warg pack has deliberately driven travellers into the dreamzone and torn down any warning signs that people put up along the road. Perhaps this diet of playgoers has given the dreamzone a sensitivity to theatre, or perhaps it just happens that many of its former victims were thinking of plays while inside it. Either way, the psychodramas it creates tend to be especially theatrical, and it will rapidly blend the plays its occupants best remember with whatever frustrated desires preoccupy them. Costumes, props, and set dressing often appear scattered throughout.

Its most potent spectre, condensed from the fear of a meaningless universe, takes the form of a witch. Long ago it possessed a screech owl, which it has warped into the semblance of a hunched, cloaked woman, five-foot-eleven tall, though anyone who is unlucky enough to get a close look will see the talons, feathers, and hooked beak of the bird it once was. The original thought which gave the spirit its shape might have imagined Sycorax from The Tempest, but it might just as well have been one of the Weird Sisters of Macbeth instead, or a Mother Shipton puppet, or a composite of these and other witch characters. The residents of Five Stages call her Sycorax regardless, while locals call her the Bush Hag. She lairs in the fuel tank factory and has been around long enough that she's more complex than a fresh-minted spectre. She doesn't like change and will violently resent being disturbed by whatever pageantry the dreamzone's most recent visitors have started.

At the moment, the current such pageant is focused on four youths now lost in the wood. Inspired by a showing of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a young man and a young woman planned to elope to Millbank, but were chased off track by the wargs. The other two, a young woman in love and young man loyal to his friends, tracked them and followed them into the wood. All of them have seen Shakespeare's play and recognize parts of it in their own complications, and the Bush is making pieces of this recognition reality. It has heightened the girls' passions dangerously; they alternate between trying to kill each other and, for the sake of their friendship, kill whatever boy comes between them. Currently this is the fourth young man, who has had no romantic interest in either of them but toward whom the dreamzone has redirected both of the women's desires. Moreover, one girl's eyes have become the same colour as the other's, who in turn has developed freckles matching the first's. As time goes on, they will become more and more physically alike. The original object of their affections suspects the dreamzone is recreating A Midsummer Night's Dream, and is trying to take control of the story by casting himself as an Oberon-figure; he's searching for whatever the forest is turning into the fairy-queen Titania (which happens to be an ash tree), but if he finds her he risks becoming Bottom instead. The dreamzone has also nearly finished turning a stray cat into a lion-monster with the voice of a nightingale and a human face on its chin and throat, based on a literal reading of the Rude Mechanicals' play.² This panther-sized chimera is aggressive and will attack any person it comes across. Sycorax is only a little more discerning: she specifically wants to find and kill the youths who have caused this mess, but is willing to maim anyone who tries to protect them.

Media to Inspire a Dreamzone

None of the following depict exactly the same thing as a dreamzone, but all of them get partway there and can suggest the sorts of things PCs might encounter inside one:

• Sir Orfeo (late 13th or early 14th century), or any other medieval story which involves a voyage into the Otherworld
• William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595 or 1596)
• Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" (1907)
• Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939), because of the way Oz's cast reflects Dorothy's Kansas life (and so Baum's novellas aren't on the list)
• Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959), or any other story about a haunted house, forest, hotel, etc. in which it is the place more than the ghosts who do the haunting
• Chris Van Allsburg's Jumanji (1981), and Joe Johnston's 1995 film of the same name
• Dianna Wynne Jones's Hexwood (1993)
• various of Stephen King's novels, but especially Desperation (1996), The Regulators (1996, as Richard Bachman), and to a lesser extent It (1986)
• Barry Levinson's Sphere (1998)
• Silent Hill 2 (2001), which I have not played but which I have read enough about to suspect it is relevant here
• Guillermo del Toro's El laberinto del fauno (2006), better known in English as Pan's Labyrinth
• Mass Effect 2 (2010), specifically the effects of the derelict Reaper on the Cerberus crew studying it
• Rupert Sander's Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
• Mike Flanagan's Oculus (2013) and some of his television shows
• Alex Garland's Annihilation (2018)
• Richard Stanley's Color Out of Space (2019), which isn't good but is suggestive
• John Griffin's From (2022 - present)

Of course, any story can stock a dreamzone of denizens and phenomena if the story is important to one of its victims.

#cosmic horror #horror #post-apocalyptic #the Lakelands #the Weird #weird fiction