The great thing about lucid dream, if one has managed to master it, is that it is free from outside's logic. No longer are you subjected to just be a mere spectator inside your own dream, and no longer does your subconsciousness look down upon you and make you its bitch. No, this time you are in full control over your own goddamn dream. Forget daydreaming and any written piece of fiction; lucid dream is escapism at its finest. Nothing can restrict you from doing whatever you want in there. Hell, you can be a Mary Stu, you can make a dragon appear out of nowhere and annihilate her with your bare hand if you want to, and no one would complain. It is, after all, your own dream; it is all about you.

So now, what if you, for reasons I would not otherwise dare fathom, want to turn your means of escapism into a personal hell? And not just your everyday hell, but a hodgepodge of Salvador Dali and David Lynch's appalling imagination, mixtured into one, seasoned with one hell of a dosis of LSD and vomited through the deranged mouth of Lovecraftian's elder gods. Such a silly question, right? After all, such surreal depiction is a common setting of a dream world.

But is it considered common for such nightmarish concept to be applied into a, say, video game? Not really, I guess. And that is perhaps what drives a particular Japanese developer named Kikiyama to create a game called Yume Nikki (or "Dream Diary" in English). Made in 2004, this game, along with Ao Oni, will later spawn numerous fangames based on them and be a pioneer of a game that is made using RPG Maker, yet is not exactly an RPG game.

It tells a story of a girl named Madotsuki, who always has her eyes closed and at the beginning of the game is standing motionlessly in the middle of her room. Here, Madotsuki can go to the balcony, play with her game console, turn on her TV (which has no channels), and sit at her desk to save her progress. She is not able to, however, leave the room using the door adjoining the TV. Attempting to do so will only result in her shaking her head. It is not explained why; maybe she is a shut-in, or maybe she just can not open the door. Whatever the reason is, this leaves her no other choice but for her to check the only thing she has not checked yet.

The bed.

When she did so, Madotsuki begins to drift off to sleep as a three-second countdown then appears on the top left corner of the screen. Once it hits zero, the screen then blurs out and Madotsuki is... in her balcony - although with different background? Either way, as she exits the balcony, she finds out that, while her room is still identical to the real one, there is a notable difference in there. Her game console has suddenly disappeared. Turning the TV on displays an eye now. Sleeping on the bed again pretty much does nothing, and neither does sitting at the desk... or does it?

In any case, it appears there is nothing else to do except check the door. And so, Madotsuki passes through the door...

...into the room of madness.

This is, some would agree, the game's subtle way of saying, "Oh, so you dare playing this game, this is what you're gonna get. Ladies and gentleman, welcome to Yume motherfucking Nikki."

Or something like that.

And yes, that is actually how the game starts. It provides no explanation, no plot, and no dialogue whatsoever. That is, however, actually part of the appeal of this game. It is just that minimalistic. And because of this, it is very likely for a first-time player to not be able to clear the game without the help of a walkthrough. What, you think you would actually know what you are supposed to do just by reading the instructions at the beginning of the game?

Ah, yes. That instruction might as well be the only time the game "talked" directly to the player, as well as the first and the last time the game would attempt to explain what is the goal of the game. And even though it is stated there, it is still quite unclear: