1: I did not plan very much when making this game. (To this day, I am not a very big planner.) The only thing I really recall planning was that the world would be a 16x16 grid of rooms. But eventually I became discouraged by my progress and reduced the target size to 16x8. The BRICK area was really just made to hold the fun platform-building gimmick. The URCHIN area was one of the last created IIRC, and really was just meant to be a fun thing that filled a hole in the map! I wish I had used version control back then. It would be neat to see the history.
2: I don't think there is any evidence of those areas being planned to have dreams. I don't believe there are any unused dream rooms, either. I don't remember being bothered by this when I finished the game, though... Reading your post today, I didn't realize that those were the only two areas that didn't have dreams!
3: The world of this game is very abstract and bizarre, and I thought it would be appropriate to show the connections between the different areas in novel, unorthodox ways. I think there is some interesting ambiguity created by the dream rooms spilling into the world, but I don't recall there being any concrete explanation for this. I like your theory that the areas are "invading" each other.
Thank you for your questions. I sincerely appreciate it.
