Dream To Nightmare

The track first appeared in Pump It Up Pro 2, where it served as that release's boss song. Its genre is breakcore, with multiple melodies shifting restlessly to keep the player disoriented. It is credited to Nightmare, an alias used by French artist Canblaster. One unusual trait is that its lowest difficulty is S19, high for an arcade song; for that reason, alongside Vacuum, it remained a track that many lower-level players never really got to know.

The general shape misleads early with tricky rhythms, then chains simultaneous steps toward the end. In the arcade, most charts sit below their level or feel overrated: the S19 hinges on a long trill as its brek-on point, the S21 comes down to handling the burst of triple notes in the middle, and the D22 doubles as a 22 entry chart for some players. The D23, demoted from a former 24 in XX, asks more thanks to its leg splits and a higher run density. The quest zone versions, by contrast, push these traits to the extreme: Prime 1's D25 "EXC Step" earned the nickname gorilla step, while Prime 2's D27 "Nightmare's Fefemz" reforges an old D26 UCS by FEFEMZ* into something brutal.

The BGA was originally intended for In The Groove and shares its structure with several neighboring animations, with a recurring dragon in the eyecatches; some of its 3D layers were reused in later BGAs. The Pro 2 version differs slightly in those layers, and the current BGA has been in use since Pump It Up 2013 Fiesta 2. A second Double S21 chart, nearly identical to the standard S21, once existed but was removed in Prime and XX precisely because there was so little difference between them.