Nightmare Sequence / Video Games

• Absented Age: Squarebound: In the Warehouse Driftworld, Karen is captured by the Gangers and has a nightmare where they slowly take away her identity while her friends reject her existence. Eventually, she wakes up in her Heart's Core, where she meets the talking flower. The flower tells her that she only experienced a nightmare, but if she gets too absorbed into it and succumbs to her fear of rejection, it'll have become real due to her own belief.
• In Ambridge Mansion, at the beginning of the games, you play through Silas' nightmares. You wander around a creepy monster-infested house until you die in your dream.
• Baldur's Gate has multiple dream sequences throughout. Most consist merely of Breaking Speeches, although the one you get just after receiving the Slayer Form is kind of creepy...
• In Bastion, The Kid walks right into one of these while exploring Jawson's Bog, thanks to the hallucinogenic properties of the place. In his dream, he has to fight his way through a series of unsettling landscapes... with the Narrator actively speaking against him.
• The battles with Scarecrow in Batman: Arkham Asylum are this, thanks to copious amounts of fear toxins.
• In Bloodborne, both the Hunter's Dream and Nightmare of Mensis are formed by two rivaling Great Ones with surrogate hosts, The Nightmare of Mensis was formed by Mergo using Queen Yharnam and Micolash as the host to grant insight to the School of Mensis, while the Hunter's Dream was formed by Moon Presence using Gehrman as the host in order to undo the Great One's unintentional madness brought to Yharnam, and this is the exact origin of the Hunt. The entire story of Yharnam revolves around the two rivaling nightmares, and you can explore the two nightmares to uncover the truth of the dreams.
• In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, Catie suffers from strange nightmares throughout her adventure, always involving three unknown women and a host of mysterious voices crying for help. It turns out to be the three missing pieces of her soul trying to reunite with her before it’s too late.
• Burial at Sea Episode 2 begins with a happy dream in Paris that quickly turns into a nightmare, with Elizabeth chasing a girl through the dark and stormy streets, passing a picture that foreshadows Atlas's torture of her, and ending with Elizabeth surrounded by screaming children trapped inside burning vents.
• Vincent's nightmares in Catherine. He has to make his way up staircases made of blocks to reach the top. If he fails (falling off the stage, crushed by falling blocks, caught in traps or being killed by the weird creatures that pursue him), then he dies in real life.
• Dark Messiah has a few nightmare cutscenes, which are made worse by the fact that they're in first-person like the rest of the game. The worst part of those dreams was they turn out to be the truth, and the thing you thought was real was the ACTUAL dream.
• Horror puzzle game DARQ is set entirely within the nightmares of a boy who has become aware that he is dreaming and needs to use what control he can exert over the nightmares to try and escape. This allows him to walk up and down walls, twist and warp the world like a rubik's cube through the use of conveniently-placed handles, and in one extreme case, cut off his own head to use it as the final piece of a puzzle, but he also has to avoid horrible monsters that will kill him if they get their hands on him.
• The Deep Sleep Trilogy has the protagonist stuck inside of a lucid-nightmare, being chased by figures who resemble moving shadows. This is ultimately played with though, as it turns out early in the second game that these are more than just dreams and the protagonist is actively stuck inside it.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Vaermina, the Daedric Prince of Nightmares, exists to cause these in mortals. By inflicting a mortal with ceaseless, horrific nightmares, she can cause a full blown Mind Rape.
  • Morrowind:
    • After a certain point during the main quest, the Player Character will start to have these everytime he/she rests due to the corrupting influence of Dagoth Ur.
    • If the player character is inflicted with Vampirism, they will have nightmarish dreams when attempting to rest. Notably, resting no longer restores health, forcing the vampire to absorb it from other people and/or rely on potions/spells/enchantments to heal.
  • Oblivion:
    • In the quest "Through a Nightmare, Darkly", the PC uses a magical amulet to enter the nightmare world of a mage in order to rescue him. In his or her skivvies, no less.
    • In the Daedric quest of the aforementioned Vaermina, Vaermina sends the PC into a nightmarish world of burning corpses, molten lava, zombie-o-rama, only to find that the entire quest is the never-ending nightmare of a wizard who stole an artifact from Vaermina.
    • Like Morrowind, a vampire player character will have these when attempting to rest if your "stage" of vampirism increases.
• Fable II has a sequence in which after you are shot by Lucien, you enter a dreamlike state where Rose and your parents are still alive, and live on a peaceful farm. At first, this is very pleasant, until nighttime. You wake up to the sound of a music box and leave the farm, but your sister follows. If you head down a path beyond a now-opened gate, your sister begs you not to leave and eventually vanishes with a desperate Big "NO!", and the area outside turns out to be full of fire and dead bodies, all while a music box is playing in the background.
• Fear Equation uses these as a means of indicating whenever the omnipresent fog is attacking your passengers by manifesting any recent nightmares they claim to have had. The effectiveness of said attack depends on what defenses have been constructed.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VI, the creepy music and imagery in Shadow's first dream.
  • Final Fantasy XV has a nightmare sequence wherein Noctis finds himself fighting off Imperial soldiers and magitek armors, only to be robbed of his magical abilities.
• Gabriel's recurrent nightmare is a very important plot point in the first game, Sins of the Fathers. It is actually tied to Gunter's last moments, and has been tormenting his descendants for 300 years.
• First Encounter Assault Recon is chock full of these.
  • In the first generation, a lot of Foreshadowing is involved, such as hinting that the Point Man shares a bond with Alma, since, as Paxton Fettel says "She cannot see into your mind, but you can see into hers" or that lieutenant Chen will be killed by a monster in Perseus Mandate.
  • The second game uses these as a sign that Alma is trying to approach Becket sexually.
• If the Player Character avoids socializing on her wedding night in Guenevere, she's rewarded with a dream of being brutally murdered in her wedding dress, capped off with the appearance of a threatening, ominous young man.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Except for the one with Zelda, any dream, hallucination, transformation sequence, flashback, abstract idea, or dizzy state in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is overflowing with nightmarish elements.
  • Nightmares open both The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. In Ocarina, it's a precognitive dream foretelling Ganondorf chasing Impa and Zelda out of Castle Town. In Skyward Sword, it's a dream about the Imprisoned.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has one induced by Lanayru. It serves as exposition about the origin of the Fused Shadows. The images shown are very surreal.
• In a similar vein as the above, LSD: Dream Emulator is just as disturbing.
• Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete has a brief but remarkably puissant sequence of nightmares. As Alex sleeps in the middle of the woods, we get treated to a cutscene of his nightmare. The kidnapped love interest, Luna, appears against a black background. Her singing can be heard in the background, along with her crying out Alex's name twice and a strange gurgling sound. The camera begins to zoom in on her and her shouts become more frantic. Suddenly, the singing stops and her voice warps into an unnatural low pitch, and a bloody liquid suddenly floods the bottom of the screen.
• Shepard in Mass Effect 3 has several over the course of the story, reflecting their Survivor Guilt and increasing weariness as the Reaper War drags on. They consist of Shepard slowly chasing the young boy who died on Earth in the prologue through a desolate forest, while the voices of dead former squadmates echo in the background. When Shepard eventually catches up with the boy, he bursts into flames while Shepard is forced to watch. In the final sequence, Shepard bursts into flames as well.
• Zero's opening cutscene in Mega Man X4 has Zero waking up only to be ordered by Dr. Wily to destroy his arch-nemesis. Zero then suffers a headache as he's being forced to carry out those orders. The scene cuts to a laboratory, followed by Sigma screaming for his life, then we're treated to still shots of some Reploids brutally murdered with their mangled body parts and blood splattered throughout, Zero's blood-soaked hands, more dead bodies, then a close-up of one of his victims before finally waking up for real. Zero implies that he has this nightmare more than once.
  • Zero's ending in Mega Man X7 has him standing in the middle of nowhere when X suddenly appears, charges his buster, and fires at Zero. Zero promptly wakes up as soon as he is hit.
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has a nightmare sequence that doubles as a minigame. If you save your game while Snake is in a prison cell, then load that save file, you'll get a brief minigame where you play as a hook-sword wielding warrior fighting zombies. After a few minutes, Snake jumps awake, and the game resumes as normal.
• Neopets has a random event where everything goes wrong but it turns out to all have been a bad dream.
• Neverending Nightmares is basically a one huge Nightmare Sequence.
• In the same vein of the series above, Nightmare House 2 has several of these. It's actually Romero trying to mess with your head by using his mind control Core.
• NiGHTS into Dreams…:
  • In NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, Helen feels guilty for constantly spending more time with her friends than with her mother. Shortly into her opening cutscene, she is walking down the street with two friends when she stops and sees something that reminds her of her mother in a store window. As she starts feeling guilty again, her mother's image appears faintly in the window. She gives Helen a sad gaze, but this abruptly turns into empty red eyes and a hideous snarl. The expression is just distorted enough to be creepy, and the suddenness of it makes it as good as a screamer.
  • Technically, every boss battle in both games is one of these. Most of the really creepy, surreal ones are in Journey of Dreams, but Wizeman is horror in either.
• Nightmare Ned, one of Disney’s more obscure video games from the 90s, where you get inside the head of a 10-year-old boy and enter some pretty horrifying nightmare worlds and help him make sense and overcome his fears.
• Oni features one when Konoko visits her father's lab. It's a particularly tough level, featuring consecutive boss fights against the game's Big Bad Muro, Konoko's superior Griffin and finally Konoko herself, interspersed with trippy imagery.
• Planescape: Torment has loads of these, most of which are your own memories, the rest being sensory stones (devices which store and can recall memories, experiences and sensations).
  • One particularly nightmarish example is a sensation through which a night hag Ravel Puzzlewell decides to contact you. Upon touching a sensory stone, you find yourself inside the body of a traveller who once sought her out. She took both of his or her eyes, the tongue, both arms and hacked off the legs below the knees. The night hag then tells the traveller to return to Sigil to deliver her message, or else "ANOTHER bite shall she a-take". While you listen to the message, you're trapped in that traveller's body, with all sensations that come with it.
• Quest for Glory IV:
  • The game has literal Nightmare Fuel in the form of a Cask of Amon Tillado, a wine that gives the drinker dark visions of the local Eldritch Abomination rising to destroy the world.
  • Also the nightmares you have when you sleep in Erana's garden or under her staff.
• Entering a little girl's dreams in Yume Nikki? That can't possibly be so-OHMYGODWHATWASTHAT!? Madotsuki, you have problems.
• This comprises the latter half of the Runescape quest Dream Mentor.
• Each episode of Sally Face starts with Sal's nightmares, ranging from memories of losing his face to meeting an oversized horribly emaciated nightmare-faced My Little Pony to being chased by a huge slug-like Eldritch Abomination with a television camera for a head.
• During the two nighttime stages in Scratches, both vaguely centered on an evil African mask hidden in the mansion. And each time Micheal wakes up, he hears scratching noises coming from the basement.
• Early in Shenmue, Ryo has a nightmare of Lan Di murdering his father.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri has the "Dream Twister" Secret Project, which gives the known and liked Mind Worms a 50% bonus to their psionic attack by (judging by the cinematic) allowing them to tap into their victims' specific fears.
  • The clip that's played when the project is completed is based on the Silent Scream from Baraka.
• Silent Hill: Shattered Memories has sequences where monsters chase you down, and all you can do is run and hide. They are referred to as "The Nightmare" by the game tutorial, but since Harry is the only speaking character to experience them, they barely get acknowledged, much less referred to by name.
  • In Silent Hill 3, the opening level is a nightmare, which is ended by Heather being killed and waking up in a diner. Turns out dreams come true in Silent Hill.
  • Silent Hill 2 shifts into this type of experience both during and after exiting the hospital. This is the only time of the game where the town becomes dark, for one. The character is lead to a "Historical Society"; from there, James encounters features unlikely to exist, such as a very-very long stairway, and very deep man-made-looking holes that don't cause injury from jumping into them. Also, one room has a deep hole that is protected by a prison bar-gate, with doors and ceiling features on the walls making this a hallway that has been rotated down 90 degrees. Additionally, James encounters a labyrinthine area with dead-end halls occasionally found. The nightmare seems to end after James gains a significant insight, and this places James back into the foggy town from earlier. This gets foreshadowed in the game with a mystery door that ominously states "The door that wakes in darkness, opening into nightmares."
• This happens whenever you sleep in Spaceship Warlock, often depicting unsettling visions of the Kroll empire and the mysterious Stella Starbird who was brought onto the ship with you and her father. They end abruptly when Captain Hammer wakes you up with your next mission objective.
• Total Distortion makes a couple of minigames out of this trope, where the general goal is to avoid nightmares that drain your mental energy, while solving a puzzle or collecting falling "Zs" to gain mental energy.
• In Toy Story, the first Boss Battle happens when Woody has a nightmare of being attacked by a flying, real-laser-shooting Buzz Lightyear. If he dies in the nightmare, he dies for real. It's also a particularly hard boss fight.