The Dream Geographic Location in The Million Islands | World Anvil
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The Dream

The Dream is the realm of ideas, memories, and imagination. It is made up of the thoughts and emotions of all sentient beings, who collectively create and direct the Egregoric Force. Many different areas of the Dream exist, including regions of Memory and Story.

Some people have been granted the ability to walk in the Dream, leaving their sleeping bodies behind and journeying into the thoughts and dreams of the collective mind. The Dream can also sometimes be accessed via the Wild Places of the world, where the physical, spiritual, and dream realms are tangled together. In these places, it is possible to walk parts of the dream in your physical body, and even to carry objects out of legend and into the waking world. Among the Mu'o'a, it is said that a properly trained shaman known as a Fai Tala makes a practice of retrieving certain objects from the Dream.

Memory

Memories make up a large section of the Dream. Places lost to time still exist here, as do eidolons of the people who once lived. Visitors and soothsayers must be careful about trusting these memories too much, however - like all things in the Dreams, these memories are influenced the collective beliefs about them. As time passes, these echoes of the past are altered and distorted by the pressure of belief, and become more story than history.

Story

Another major section of the Dream are stories. All the characters and stories and figments of the imagination exist in the Dream, and can be located and visited by skilled dreamwalkers. These stories accumulate depth via the association of ideas by millions of minds; details that could not be known by the storyteller are filled in by the web of associated knowledge that holds the Dream together. Like everything in the Dream, stories can shift and alter over time, and locating the precise iteration of a story you wish to visit can be difficult. This is especially true when the dreamwalker is themselves the subject of legend - the landscape of the dream tends to warp around them, reshaping everything into a reflection of their own story.

One of the most common stories in the Dream are underworlds, or the lands of the dead. Many cultures tell tales of what happens after a person dies, and those stories each have their place within the Dream. The Eidolons of the dead are drawn to the afterlives they believed in as living beings, and persist there for as long as they are remembered.

Alien Dreams

All things that think to any degree participate in the Dream. This includes entities that can entertain concepts so alien that they cannot be comprehended by other minds. Even something as mundane as the slow dreams of trees can be difficult for many to grasp, and there are concepts adrift in the dream that are far stranger than anything a physical creature could conceive of. Contact with these alien ideas can be very dangerous to those who are incapable of understanding them. It can traumatize the psyche, leaving permanent scars upon the mind. More worrying, some of these dreams are infectious and take up residence in the minds they meet, and begin to rebuild the mind into a more hospitable environment for it. This can lead to some very strange and dangerous behaviour on the part of the afflicted.

Type
Dimensional plane

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