Dreams

Despite the prevalence and significance of dreams among all individuals, cultures, and species, dreams are still mostly unknown. All species must dream, surely as all who can say they can tell of dreams; even those who cannot have had their minds proped during sleep. Well, not all individuals can dream, a few individuals, for an unexplained reason, lack the ability to dream.

What is a dream exactly? A dream is an ephemeral something that happens while being asleep, something that leaves a lasting impact on the individual in the form of memories. One can remember a dream, the sights, sounds, feelings, even slight somethings unintelligible. Others can also partake in a dream, though when emerging, they will also be none the wiser to what they experienced, however awake they may be.

While Sleeping

Sometimes, a being hallucinates, bringing about a dream-like state. This is not a dream. A dream occurs when during sleep only. The quality of sleep and dreams is unable to be replicated, a state almost everyone experiences and is un-sharable with those who do not.

Dreams occur during REM, a humi-based term as several species sleep with eyes open or their lids do not quiver. This is a common scientific statement that isn’t entirely true. Dreams can occur all throughout sleep, hypnagogia and hypnopomic sleep occurring outside of the REM state. However, the vast majority of dreams occur within deep sleep, the most powerful wake there, too.

Sleep puts people in an altered state where their aura shrinks (or disperses) and their body becomes less active. The relation to death is obvious. Dreaming, some would speculate, is a glimpse into the afterlife, sleeping a tether to the living world. This, like all theories about dreams, has neither been confirmed nor denied. Though the symptons that lead to this conclusion are widely known.

The Dreamless

Cases of individuals, never an entire species or collective peoples, have been documented over the years where they cannot dream. It’s unlike those who never remember their dreams or those whose dreams are diminutive, no, these people are incapable of dreaming. Doctors who monitor and psychologists who enter their minds come up with nothing, a nothing that sits wrongly with them. For the individual, they are always born dreamless, not knowing anything else. Because there is no control group, there I no information on how becoming dreamless mgight effect the individual. This is a problem as those who are dreamless have no strangeness about them other than that. They are, for all intents and purposes, just another being living in their society with their family and their life experiences. The only difference is they sleep a death-like sleep that others who try to experience it find unnerving or relaxing.

The World of the Dream

In addition to dreams being a sort of half-death, people also belive that dreams are a gateway to an alternate dimension or plane of existence, or a glimpse into the suzal, or it’s just the mind cleaning itself and re-establishing connections, or it’s the soul relaxing and having fun, or some say it’s everything and/or more. Unfortunately, even with modern science and a better understanding of both sleep, the soul, and thought, there is no uniform consensus of what dreams are. For the purposes of explenation in the science of dreams, most refer to what happens during sleep as the world of the dream, though that may or may not be accurate.

While in the world of the dream, dreamers report hallucinations of things both witnessed in life and things made p. Most report skewed recollections of things they had perceived, even if on the fringes of their awareness, mashed together in absurd ways. Others report on things that they’d never witnessed before, a piece of clothing an artist uses as inspiration and brings into the world from imagination.

A unique feature of the world of the dream is how it defies both space and Time. Things can phase in and out of the dreams existance, impossible spaced traverse where entering the same door may lead to a completely seperate room that may suddenly be a desert of bricks. And, time may be lost as well, something that happens happens again or before something that already happened, cronology being more fluid than it should. The trouble with understanding dreams is that the loss of space and time is universal, even to those most time-sensitive and spacially grounded lose themselves.

Power

Dreams are not completely isolated to the individual and their sleep, they may interact with the outside world. Dreamers or those particularly attune with dreams, may affect themselves or the world outside either intentionally or unintentionally. They may alter their form, personality, knowledge, or natural abilities if a particularly potent dream is had. Dreams can also make it so what happened in them becomes reality, like instantiating or moving things or ideas.

I just woke up with it one day. That writing flame, it wasn’t there when I went to sleep, but I had a dream where I wrote a masterpiece with it. I’ve never been musically inclined, just sort of average before. Look for my next album, Songs of Paradise, it’ll be out in a season.

— A quote from an interview.

Unique

Individuals dream unique dreams, unable to be dreamt one-for-one by another or by themselves later. Reoccurring dreams bring back the same scenarios, but like life experience, there will be differences each dreaming; once a dream is had, it may never be had again. Not everyone remembers their dreams, so they are both unrecorded and many more unremembered, an occurance that may never have happened. Those who wish to remember can be more likely to by waking themselves up during their deepest parts of sleep, or to have a dream recorder, a Murn device, with them. Dream recorders aren’t as exact as memories, though they are far easier to use.

Premonitions

Some unique dreams may be understandings of a future. These may be actual visions of the future, an altering of reality to bring aobut the dreamed future, or a heightened perceptiveness and predictability to come to logical conclusions. It’s unkown which of these is true for an individual, as dreams are fickle and once had, they may not be revisited to understand what will happen. Dream oracles, those who routinely have premonitions, claim that they simply see the future, for altering reality may put them in a bad light and deep understanding may remove some of their credibility for accuracy.

Melding

Dreams may intentionally or not be shared with others. The most common forms of dream share are loose ones where the two individuals meet each other in their dreams, and that select section of the dream is remembered by each in the same way. Those who share the dream are typically linked in some way, emotionally being the most common. Lovers, close family members -like a harem of drake-, friends who share homes may all come to share dreams by accident. The longer and more attached people are, the more likely they will meld dreams and the longer it will occur. If one is a lucid dreamer, well, I’m sure one could imagine the types of things that could happen, subliminal messaging only the lightest of examples.

Some species are also more likely to meld dreams, in particular a court of fairies or familiars have highly melded dreams. This gives credence to the idea that it is the soul that creates the world of the dream, but it could be a correlation, since these creatures already have a sort of hive-mindedness.

Beyond the Body

Some are able to manipulate their dreams to extend their soul from their bodies in an easier and less controllable form of astral projection. These are lucid dreamers who control their dreams, thus all aspects of the world of the dream. Dreamers who move beyond their bodies may also visit other’s dreams. These beings are called dreamwalkers. Particular dreamers, who are down on their luck, may open their minds up for a public dream viewing. This is obviously highly unsafe as there are no safeguards up in their mind while dreaming, as they are somewhere else. Letting people in is not only dangerous and disturbing, but also has the individual loose a sense of self. The dream isn’t fully theirs if their’s other people in it. And, especially if they aren’t already influence by being connected to those people, they may become someone they would not want to be.

Breathless

I rummaged through the crashed ship. Under a heap of rubble laid the core. It may not be operable any longer, its energy remained broken. Still, I bring it back up to the disk in the partially-intact engine room. I try to have it spin, to have it provide the ship with energy once more. If I couldn’t get it to work repairing the rest of the ship, or building a new one, would be pointless.

A few of the dark tendrils that were meant to hold the core in place were missing. I hoped to all hope that the fragile disk would not chip, crack, or break. The room began to glow with the core whirring to life. To my dismay, the core was off-kilter and spun out of control, breaking further.

A fellow scientist and I exited the shelter out into the twilight of the alien landscape. We both wore full-body suits as the atmosphere was filled with deadly spores. So dense were the spores that the cavern choked in a perpetual amber haze. The fauna was thought to be hostile, though we could never travel far enough from our base to find out. And the gargantuan plants weren’t toxic, not the ones that we had brought back to the research station. The spores, solely, prevented habitation.

The scientist laid me down on a bed, having declared to me that the experiment should work. Before I could put two and two together, she removed my helmet, letting the spores race to fill my nostrils, throat, lungs. She told me to calm myself, that I should be capable of breathing. I flailed about wildly at the heavy air that made breathing strenuous. I thought death was coming for me.

Minutes pass after I should have suffocated; I became accustomed to the heaviness of breathing. And, the spores' growth in my lungs, that was no longer an issue for me. I could no longer return to the base for too long, my anatomy was permanently altered to only accept the spore-filled, oxygen-deprived air. I could last an hour or two within the old air of the base, but I would eventually suffocate. Only one of the scientists, the senior, had control of the viscous amber liquid that mutated me. Unbeknownst to me, she had been administering it for days. The one other scientist, likewise, was unaware of her machinations. The entire experiment was unsanctioned.

But what could we do? We had lost contact after the crash and no one has yet come to the station. Might have we been abandoned? No. We, the other scientist and I, later discovered that it was the head scientists that isolated us. It was she who orchestrated everything, to perform the experiment that no moral being would. She held us captive while my anatomy mutated further.

My fellow captives became enraged at the discovery. They exited through the pressurizing chamber and out into the atmosphere without a suit. He raced off. I forced the scientist to give me what she had of the liquid, the small vile that was all that remained. I chased my fellow up out of the cavern.

I heard them before seeing them, cackling mad. They had ascended a bare tree and swung from a branch. I know it’s the spores and lack of oxygen that has them losing their mind. I tried coaxing them down, to return to the ship and get treatment before it was too late. I convinced them to do so, and we started back for the ship. Halfway back, they collapsed. I was too late. In a panic, I had them drink the liquid. Though I loathed the thought of anyone being subject to my fate, I needed them to live.