How does one experience all the dreams at Erana's Garden/Staff without the screen refusing to go beyond fading to black? I read elsewhere it might have something to do with time synching or something like that, but I haven't been able to find anything here or a fix.

When you say fading to black, is the game actually freezing up, or are you just sleeping through the night without a dream happening?

I do seem to recall that some of the later dreams are dependent on plot progress (and for one of them, your character class), so if you're doing this while just idling in town or training skills, without actually completing any objectives or the like, you may not be eligible for them yet.

OP means the game freezing.

It happens to me occasionally, but not consistently enough for me to help.

The game freezes except for the music. So far, this has only happened during the dream in which the hero kisses Erana, and it happens every time, no matter whether it's in the garden or at the staff. It happens whether I'm at normal speed or whether I've sped it up with Alt+F12

As far as progress is concerned, pretty much the only things left for me to do are to rescue Tanya and then the endgame.

I had this problem too. It would happen consistently, but I slept in the inn that night instead and then killed a day of time and the next night the game didn't freeze during the dream. Not sure what causes the bug to happen or not happen, but hopefully that helps.

It's a game bug, and a very old one. QFG4 uses "lowmem" in DOS and was extremely prone to memory leaks. On PCs of its day it was obvious when these leaks would start getting bad, as the game would slow down gradually and substantially. At that point you knew it was a good idea to save and restart the game. In DOSBox on modern PCs, it's usually impossible to tell until it's too late. The "Erana's kiss" dream sequence seems especially sloppy in terms of memory consumption / leaks, and this goes double for the swamp tomb sequence as well. Before and after either scenario, it's a good idea to save and quit and then restart the game. Annoying, but still nowhere near as buggy as the game was for those of us who bought it when it was contemporary.

It's not just about memory: the QFG4 engine developed an increasing number of timing errors as CPU speeds increased beyond what was typical during development, and several known hangs and crashes (leaving the swamp tomb, the dream sequence, the sliding path outside the cave, etc) were the direct result of this.

If you're having trouble in these areas, do shut down and restart the game from a point before you entered the screen (the garden, in the case of the dream sequences) and turn down the DOSBox speed setting. I'd try cutting it in half each time until things work. A related tweak is to set the in-game speed slider to max and in-game detail slider to min; this helps to mitigate the timing issues.

In the case of the swamp tomb, there's one other known issue not directly related to timing: the screen goes black on entry. This is triggered by entering the area with Reversal active. The chernovy use Dazzle and close in for close-quarters combat, but the engine doesn't handle this properly. This can be avoided by not having Reversal up (and not activating it on that screen - kill the chernovy without it).

They're not casting Dazzle, they're casting a darkness spell. Try Juggling Lights.

It's their version of Dazzle, and while Juggling Lights will counter it, the game engine still has a tendency to burp at that point (though it's less sensitive than the upon-leaving error). It's safer to just not have Reversal going since the chernovy shouldn't be too difficult to deal with without it unless you're there really early in the game.

I've actually never had the game "burp" at that point, but then I don't enter the screen with Reversal, I cast it after entering.

I mean, sure, it's easier to just cast it at them and take the hits like a champ, but I like to take as little damage as possible and the battle screen makes it easy since a fully charged spell counters any projectile the enemy throws at you.