DREAMLAYER - Night Shift

DREAMLAYER - Night Shift

Something has learned to ride the sleepers home. It waits for the moment their eyes open.

2041. Somnagate Decompression Ward-04, 03:00. When we sleep, every mind joins one shared dream, the dreamlayer. Something lives there. It has no body, so it hides inside a sleeper's dream and waits for them to wake up so it can walk out inside them.

It is good at hiding, but it isn't human. It always gets something wrong: a shadow that falls toward the lamp, teeth where teeth don't go, a reflection that doesn't follow, words that repeat.

You are the night triage officer. Read what each sleeper expected to see, then inspect their live dream projection.

• AWAKEN the clean ones and they go home.
• SEAL the infected and the parasite stays frozen in the dream.
• Make three bad calls and the ward overruns, with you inside it.

How to play

• Click a cryo-pod (or press 1–8) to inspect a sleeper's dream.
• Compare the dream with the dossier's reported dream. If the dream disagrees with the dreamer, something else is dreaming it.
• Press L for the neural lens (scroll to zoom). The best tells are small.
• Hold W to Awaken, hold Q to Seal. Esc returns to the ward. Space continues dialogue.
• Fear is not contagion. Nightmares are human; only mistakes are not.

Features

• Two nights, 16 patients. Night One is Ward-04, with a climax built around your own supervisor. Night Two is Ward-07 · Deep Stasis, where the parasite remembers you.
• A living cryo-bay. Pods visibly open, freeze under clamps, or shatter as black tendrils spread across the floor.
• A 30-second animated briefing film that explains the world without words.
• Reveals after every call. Each verdict circles the anomaly, or the evidence that proves the dream was clean.
• Morning reports. Each night ends with an S/A/B grade and an aftermath line for every patient.
• Fully synthesized audio (Web Audio, no audio files). Headphones recommended.

How DreamLayer was used

Every dream projection in the game, the images you inspect for clues, is a DreamLayer render. The core mechanic is finding the parasite's mistakes in those images. That turns DreamLayer's output into the detective game itself.

• Night One: 8 dream projections. [Confirm how you made these. If they're DreamLayer renders, say so here.]
• Case 06 (the ballerina) was remade with DreamLayer image-to-image. In the original, playtesters couldn't find the clue. I used it as the reference to keep the studio, light and framing, and changed only the poses. Now her arms are raised while her reflection's arm hangs limp, and its hollow eyes only show under the lens. (See the before/after screenshot.)
• Night Two: all 8 dreams were generated with DreamLayer text-to-image. The prompts placed one small anomaly per image: a living eye in a mounted stag, a modern guard in a 1924 film still, fingernails on an automaton's wooden hand, a continent shaped like a hand. Clean cases had to be truly clean, so two of them were regenerated after review. One had rain falling indoors; the other gave a man four hands.
• The final climax is DreamLayer's render of the player's own observation booth. Dr. Ward is turned in your chair, smiling at you, while every pod behind her stands open.

Credits

• Design, story and direction: Soham Jadhav
• Dream projections: DreamLayer
• Engine: none. Plain HTML5 Canvas + Web Audio in a single HTML file, built with AI coding assistance [credit the tools you used]
• Made for DreamLayer Jam #1