Interview: Ivan Carić on The Key of Dreams

Photo: Lemon Difficult

The Key of Dreams is a 24-hour-long immersive experience set within the grounds of Treowen, a 17th-century manor house in Monmouthshire, Wales. The experience combines fine dining, puzzle and escape room elements, improvised interactive performance, and branching narratives to create a one-of-a-kind, occult-infused immersive world that's driven by the audience and their choices. With only 30 guests per show, The Key of Dreams is also incredibly intimate, with guests dining alongside the cast and staying overnight under the same roof.

Since opening in 2024, The Key of Dreams has received critical acclaim, with BroadwayWorld UK describing it as a 'masterpiece of dark, intense immersion' and TimeOut calling it 'as epic as it gets'. In our 2025 review of the show's first chapter, we named it one of the best immersive experiences on offer anywhere in the world today.

The show's second chapter - Shadows Lengthen - recently won the No Proscenium 2026 Audience Award for the United Kingdom, beating out the likes of Secret Cinema and Sage & Jester.

We sat down with Lemon Difficult's Ivan Carić to discuss, among other things, the show's design, the importance of audience agency, and how a walk in the Welsh countryside led to the show adopting a three-chapter story arc that spans multiple years.

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Photo: Lemon Difficult

Immersive Rumours: Hi Ivan. Thanks for speaking with us today. Do you mind introducing yourself and telling us a bit about what your role is within Lemon Difficult?

Ivan Carić: I’m Ivan Carić; I’m the co-founder and creative director of Lemon Difficult. We were founded a couple of years ago with the idea to create immersive experiences that excite both myself and the team that I work with, and are unique, personal and touch people.

Immersive Rumours: For those who haven’t been to The Key of Dreams, can you give us a brief overview of what the show is about?

Ivan Carić: I still struggle to have a succinct elevator pitch about what exactly it is, but ostensibly, The Key of Dreams is a 24-hour-long immersive experience set within a Lovecraftian, weird fiction world with strong folk horror notes. In a lot of ways, it's a horror show with a small 'h', as there’s this feeling of creeping dread throughout rather than jump scares and lots of blood, but the audience is there as themselves to help investigate a series of stories and events that have happened within Treowen, a real 17th-century Jacobean manor house in rural Wales.



Within the show, there are a number of secret societies and cults that all have their own agendas that you can choose to get involved in, and you can choose to either help them or hinder them, but ultimately it’s about building relationships with the characters in the world and then making moral decisions either on your own or as a group that affect those characters. Different personalities and different combinations of people lead to different events unfolding, so it's a very bespoke and personal show because it is so responsive. Every show is different.

Photo: Lemon Difficult

Immersive Rumours: What does the overall structure and audience journey of The Key of Dreams look like, from arriving through to departing 24-hours later?

Ivan Carić: The show is structured in five parts, which follow the structure of a traditional ghost story, and they act as touchpoints for the things that are going to happen, whether those are scripted or unscripted. 



When you first arrive at Treowen, you're met by a character who explains the rules of the house before you head to your room and settle in. This section is called ‘Arrivals’. There’s a chance to explore the grounds a little bit and meet the rest of the audience, and then around 1pm, you have lunch and eat alongside some of the show’s characters. Over lunch, you learn a little bit about the world and what you're there to do, which is to investigate stories and things that have happened at Treowen. There’s an organisation that you're there to represent, but there are also some other organisations that become apparent later that all have slightly different goals.



Later in the day, after dinner, we move into what we call ‘The Descent’, which is when everything just goes batshit, and all of the weird stuff has been confirmed. It’s later at night, and you're investigating in depth and really believing the things that are going on before entering an extension of that section called ‘The Door Opens’, which is this liminal time where decisions can be made that can have genuine consequences. 
The night builds up to a fever pitch as people are frantically running around doing crazy stuff, and the pace speeds up. Things the audience has uncovered about different characters can be used as blackmail material or to try to help some of them.



The following morning, there's ‘The Aftermath’, which has the feeling of a hangover, where you’re looking at the consequences of the decisions made the night before, and there’s a final opportunity to make further decisions in the morning and see what happens to the characters.

Photo: Lemon Difficult

Immersive Rumours: As you’ve mentioned, The Key of Dreams is a 24-hour-long experience, and guests spend some 15+ hours investigating the house and interacting with the show’s cast. How does that day-long duration help shape the relationships and allegiances between audience members, and do you think a shorter version of the show would work in the same way?

Ivan Carić: It's a really good question because I’m constantly thinking about how we can do something that is shorter and if it would lose some of what makes The Key of Dreams so special.

When you first arrive at Treowen, there's far more content than you can actually absorb, but that bewilderment is an important feature because it’s a much more satisfying experience once you've figured out how things work, and if you've come from a place of being slightly overwhelmed, you get this feeling of mastery which is a key touchpoint that the show’s duration allows for.

The idea behind The Key of Dreams was always that we would get people doing crazy stuff towards the end of the show that, if you told them at the start, they'd never believe. In order to take people out of themselves and genuinely immerse them, you need time.

The audience are in a world where they’re encouraged to play, but more than that, the actors get to develop a relationship with them and understand what it is that they're interested in and what they want to explore. That's part of what gives people the confidence and the understanding to behave in the way that they end up doing towards the end of the night.

One of the things that was really important to us when we were first crafting the show is that in the big Lovecraftian stories, there’s always some sort of giant, terrible thing that’s summoned, or the world's going to be destroyed. We obviously don't have the budget to do that, and I think it would arguably be less effective to have a big, huge set piece like that within the show, so the decision was made to get people to care about the characters because then the consequence of what happens to them and some of the moral decisions are more meaningful because you end up caring about them one way or the other.

Photo: Lemon Difficult

Immersive Rumours: Clearly, people do find themselves really caring about the characters that inhabit Treowen, because you’ve got a pretty sizeable and dedicated audience who return to Treowen again and again, right?

Ivan Carić: Yeah, absolutely. Around 20% of our audience at every show are returning visitors who are already invested in the world and the characters. The challenge is finding a way to not fall into just doing fan service, because that ends up distorting things. We look to find a way to honour their view of the world and the characters and the knowledge that they have, whilst not disrupting the experience or making people feel like they've missed out if they're coming for the first time.

Photo: Lemon Difficult

Immersive Rumours: Besides the duration, one of The Key of Dreams' most unique elements is the show’s setting, taking place around the house and grounds of a 17th-century manor house. In a lot of ways, Treowen feels like a character in its own right.

Ivan Carić: You're right in that the building and the setting are characters. You can look out at the landscape and feel like you could have been there 200 years ago, and it’s got beautiful grounds. It's also an extraordinary building in that it hasn't really been renovated. It's very old. There are a lot of stairs…

IR: As someone who stayed on the top floor, I can confirm. There are a lot of stairs.

Ivan Carić: Of course, the building has advantages and disadvantages. We can't physically change the building, but in terms of lighting, there's a lot that we do there, and it’s very effective. Treowen is a little battered and worn. There's no point pretending otherwise. So let's embrace that and make it a feature of what it is.

We ease people in and then invite them to believe, you know, there's a ghost, or there's this or that. The building does help that, but it’s equally to do with the approach.

Photo: Lemon Difficult

Immersive Rumours: Given how much agency the audience has to steer the experience, The Key of Dreams doesn’t have a traditional ‘script’ in the same way a lot of other immersive shows do. Can you tell us a bit about how you keep all of the narrative plates spinning behind the scenes as the story unfolds?

Ivan Carić: There are some scripted elements and particular scenes throughout the show that are heavily scripted. Laura, our lead writer, produces those, and they’ll get tweaked with the actors when we go through them in rehearsals, but a lot of the show’s shape is structured by those sections I mentioned earlier. It means that obviously, when it's scripted, it's scripted, and we know what it is and where it fits, but each of the characters also knows what sort of person they are, the key beats to hit, and the feelings to evoke during each section.

You’d never have a discussion about what Randolph Carter is going to be doing during ‘The Descent’, because by that point, he's fully committed to the terrible things that he's going to do and the little group of people that he's gathered together.

A good analogy would be if you were to look at Punchdrunk’s masked shows. They're like a precise Swiss watch. Everything is done according to a very tight schedule, with the repeating motif ahead of each reset, and it works beautifully. The audience’s agency is focused on their individual point of view rather than affecting the world. 

With The Key of Dreams, I was interested in looking at how you take something as structured as a Punchdrunk show and break it down into multiple interconnected systems, capabilities, tools, and resources that both the audience and the actors have available to affect change, to drive drama, and to create these moments of magic and opportunities for emergent play.

Photo: Lemon Difficult

Immersive Rumours: The show combines a lot of different elements - there's immersive performance, dozens of puzzles, interconnected storylines, and the audience has a huge amount of agency over how they approach their time there. How do you balance all of those elements so one doesn’t outshine the others?

Ivan Carić: I think trial and error. The idea was always that you could choose to engage exclusively with one element of the show, whether it be the puzzles, the characters, the stories that need investigating, or the secret societies. We’ve got a 3:1 guest to cast ratio in The Key of Dreams, so the characters can easily guide people and nudge them in a particular direction if there seems to be too much focus on one thing, but there’s this organic balancing that happens because the characters are developing relationships with them personally.

It might be, for example, that you’re following a particular story, and the characters might identify that one person is interested in doing that, but there's another person who's looking a little bit lost, so they can put those two people together in a non-forced way. It's obviously always down to people's individual choices, but they might be gently nudging people towards these moments or towards checking a particular room where there are some puzzles that they know have some elements that might be of assistance.

Backstage, we have management of what's going on, but a lot of it is delegation. This comes down to the collaborative approach we take to the characters alongside the actors themselves, who then can provide that assistance.

Photo: Lemon Difficult

Immersive Rumours: When you were creating the first chapter of the show, how did you go about researching all of the real-life local history of not just Treowen but the surrounding area and weaving it into The Key of Dreams’ storylines?

Ivan Carić: As a team, one of our passions is around this idea of imagined history and local folklore mixing with real history. Many of the people mentioned in The Key of Dreams were real people. There's a delight in using these real elements, because it makes the world feel more real.

Within The Key of Dreams, there's the story of the house itself, starting with when it was built and why it is the way it is. For example, the top floor is split in half because half of it fell into disrepair in the 17th century. We take that little historical element and then add our own layer to it, so in the show, there's a story to do with the Witch of Treowen, who is essentially being driven out of her own house.

The woman who built the house, Anne Jones, if you look at the parish records, lived for 150 years. She obviously didn't because ‘Anne’ and ‘Jones’ are very common names in South Wales, and parish records in the 17th century weren’t great, but if you take that as a starting point, and then you say, ‘Okay, she did live for 150 years, so what did she do to prolong her life?’

We base a lot of the stories that are being investigated on existing works of weird fiction. There's one that's based on Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Yellow Wallpaper, which is a story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Laura, our head writer, will rewrite it in the style of the authors but using elements of several stories that are then combined with this overarching conceit that they happened at Treowen.

One of the authors that we draw on is local to near Treowen, a man called Arthur Machen, who was a giant of early 20th-century weird fiction. He literally grew up 20 miles away from the house. In fact, the owner of Treowen actually knows the people who are living in the house that he grew up in. It’s a small world once you start looking for patterns.

There's a word I've not used in a few months now, but I was mocked by the team for using it constantly. The word is 'apophenia'. It's a medical condition that was coined in the 60s, and it's about seeing patterns and connections when they are not there. Our brains obviously are pattern-creating devices, and that's part of the joy of what we do. We’re trying to induce, in the nicest possible way, this feeling of apophenia in the audience, where everything could be linked, but you can still tug at the various strings and make sense of it.

Guests should really be questioning if something is there because it’s part of the show or if it’s just part of Treowen. You want to surprise people, but often with the horror stories that I like, the big reveal at the end may be beautifully done and may be a surprise, but the journey up to that point should be delightful and interesting on its own.

Photo: Lemon Difficult

Immersive Rumours: We came to review The Key of Dreams last June, but since then, you’ve concluded the first chapter of the show with a two-day-long final show, and you’re now well into the show’s second chapter. Can you talk us through how you landed on the idea of updating The Key of Dreams' story every couple of years and the impact that finale had on shaping the show’s story in Chapter Two?

Ivan Carić: I'd love to say that right at the very beginning, before we were designing the show, we knew that we were going to have a three-season story arc and were going to have these season finales at the end of each one, but that's not actually true.

The idea came up maybe a third of the way through what was the first season. I’d been on a walk with one of the actors in between shows just to get a bit of air, and the idea of having an ending and letting the audience decide how things would play out if we brought one of the characters back from the dead came up.

We decided to make it into a special, one-off show that ran for two days. Most of the people who came to the Chapter One season finale had been to the show before - not everyone - but I think 27 out of the 30 had been before, so we built an acknowledgement that they’d been there before into the show.

One of the things about going back repeatedly to an immersive theatre show is seeing how the world responds to you having been there before and whether you're using knowledge that you shouldn't have. If you go to a Punchdrunk show, some people want to have the one-on-ones so they know roughly where to stand in the hope that they're spotted, or there are particular scenes that they missed and want to observe, but it’s not acknowledged by the show.

For us, we needed to acknowledge that people had been to the show before and they’d built relationships with the characters and not pretend as if the show’s events hadn't played out before. There was a reason why the stories kept repeating, built into the world.

There was this fabulous sense of almost relief from the audience when they realised they had permission to talk to each other about it, and interestingly, it then made them more complicit in the whole thing and made the experience feel more real. We planned some potential outcomes, although not the outcome that in the end actually happened, but this is where collaboration with the actors made an awful lot of difference.

The audience pushed the characters towards terrible, terrible decisions. Some very bad things happened. And then the audience almost went, ‘Oh my God, what have we done? This is a real person here that's actually on the ground broken because of these things that we encouraged them to do.' The next day, there was an attempt by the audience to show care towards the characters, which was an unexpected thing.

The balance in the story of The Key of Dreams has always been that the audience is where a lot of the humanity comes from, and they contrast against the bleak existential pointlessness of Lovecraft. You wouldn't want to live in that world, but it needs to be there because that's what the story is about. The audience’s betrayals and collaborations are a counterpoint to that.

The way the audience reacted to the new character coming back from the dead not only had implications for the change in relationship between the different characters, but it also informed how we designed their relationships for Chapter Two. As for the stories, we learned a lot from Chapter One, and the writing is a lot tighter this time around. It's a lot more interesting to investigate, and we’ve had good feedback on that.

The bulk of the audience effect has really been in how they treated the characters, the sorts of things they encouraged them to do, and then the consequence of that. Those relationships have then informed, to some extent, the show’s social mechanics, mainly that what the secret societies want is based on what the audience did during that Chapter One finale.

Photo: Lemon Difficult

Immersive Rumours: You’re also working on expanding the show’s world to exist outside of those 24-hour-long runs at Treowen. Can you tell us about what the future holds for Lemon Difficult?

Ivan Carić: We're hoping to go to a big Lovecraft convention in the summer, and there are a couple of things that we want to take apart from ourselves. One of them is this video recording of The First Harvest, which was filmed throughout the two-day season finale. The idea is that we produce a short, 40-minute mockumentary of the events that happened. The working title is the extremely snappy ‘Ancient occult traditions in modern rural Wales’, which is going to pack them in at the Odeon. We’ll come up with a slightly tighter title, but the idea is that it feels almost academic. We're hoping to get some folklorists and historians involved and interview them as part of this imaginary mockumentary. The idea is to create something that stands on its own feet but also acts as an introduction to the world as well.

There's a horror podcast that we're looking to create. We’ve got a shape for the first season that involves some of the characters from the show. It's called ‘The Dee Sessions’, and it's John Constantine meets The Sopranos, asking, ‘What if a broken occultist goes into therapy?’.

As an offshoot of that, Laura has written a script for an episode of William Moore's podcast, The Grimoire Diaries. It’s to do with folk horror, but there are fairytale and nursery rhyme elements too. In Season Two of their podcast, there’s going to be an episode set in Treowen with their characters coming into our world. That’s a fun thing, and we’re looking forward to seeing how that collaboration pans out.

We also have a partnership with a company that does residential role-playing experiences, which is likely to happen in 2027 as a four-day residential tabletop role-playing game, similar to D&D in a Castle but with Call of Cthulhu and set within The Key of Dreams world. 

We're going to write a campaign, and based on that, we're going to have these three different tabletop sessions happening simultaneously, where there'll be some element overlap. We want to bring in some magic that I've not really seen at these sorts of events before and produce a series of ARG-style videos before the show that people can use to investigate, inviting them and immersing them in the world before they start.

During the three days of tabletop role-playing, there will be… at the moment we’re calling them cutaway scenes… but the idea is that we have 30-minute scenes where all of the different players participate in something like an auction of Randolph Carter's possessions after he's kind of disappeared off.



There's elements of story that emerge, but also there are actors to engage with, so it's not a LARP, but it's something that enhances the experience. There’ll also be puzzle and story elements in the house that, in between sessions, people can engage with, and then they can use any information they discover from those in the role-playing games.



We also want to run a series of what we’re currently calling ‘A Slice of Lemon’, which will be an overnight makers' workshop. We’d have some of the performers there, us from the direction side, and later have a writing workshop. People can come, stay at Treowen and produce a short piece of work alongside the performers and get feedback from the other people at the workshop and us as well.

Photo: Lemon Difficult

Review: The Key of Dreams by Lemon Difficult

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The Key of Dreams runs at Treowen, just outside of Monmouth, Wales, on selected dates across 2026. Tickets are priced from £450.00 per person, excluding accommodation. You can save 15% on tickets to all May 2026 dates with the code 'A-TONE'.

For more info and to book tickets, visit thekeyofdreams.co.uk