Quartz 5

The Dreamtime

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tagsplane
aliasesDreamtime

5 min read

The Dreamtime

The Dreamtime is an enigmatic plane, little written of and less believed outside a few small communities. Like the elemental or astral planes it is a realm unto itself, yet it is unlike any of them: it can be reached only through dreams, and no known portal leads to it from any plane of existence. It is home to but a single kind of rare native being, yet it teems with visitors who arrive in their sleep - willing or not - from every species and race, most never realizing their dreams have carried them into another world.

Description

To most sleepers the Dreamtime feels like an ordinary lucid dream, but it has several defining traits:

  • A Strange Mirror. The Dreamtime is an impermanent reflection of the waking world. Geography - forests, mountains, coastlines - exists much as it does in reality, and buildings manifest too, but only once they have stood long enough in the physical world to leave an imprint (usually a couple of months). Transient things flicker in and out: a bowl of food, a letter, a door opening and closing. Light is ambient, with no source, and visitors feel a constant sense of unseen eyes watching from every direction.
  • Temporal Distortion. Time flows differently and unpredictably. An hour’s sleep in the waking world might be experienced as several hours within - or the reverse - making the duration of any dream impossible to gauge.
  • Fluid Reality and the Power of Will. Reality is malleable, shaped by the thoughts and emotions of those present. Dreamers can reshape the world to their desire, but stray or chaotic thoughts can warp the landscape suddenly and perilously. The key to mastering the realm is constant awareness that it is a dream; those who accept its events as real risk becoming ensnared, while the disciplined can will themselves elsewhere, unmake others’ constructs, and even heal their own bodies.
  • A Shared Dreamspace. The Dreamtime is a shared dream, where individuals can meet and interact across its surreal landscapes - a unique space for collaboration, communication, and the exchange of knowledge. Skilled dreamwalkers can also slip into the ordinary dreams of others.
  • A Nexus for Souls. It is widely held that those who enter the Dreamtime do so with their souls. The souls of the deceased are, very rarely, found wandering there and can even be spoken with - though most souls pass on to their proper afterlives.

Inhabitants

The Dreamtime’s only native beings are the Nyuidj, the Dream Children. No one truly knows how they arise - some hold they are spirits of the dead fused with unsuspecting visitors, others that they are constructs of dreamwalkers gone out of control. In truth they are less a race than a phenomenon: mortals of high affinity to the Dreamtime who have spent so much of their existence within it that they are remade by it. They are almost always dreamwalkers, and always wield psychic power in the waking world.

Beyond the Nyuidj, the plane is thick with visitors - sleepers of every kind who arrive each night, most mistaking the realm for nothing more than their own dreams.

Walkers, Copies & Merging

A few rare souls of great power can enter the Dreamtime not as sleepers but in the flesh, and even wage their battles there; the legendary spellwright Gale Lightningold is counted among them. The most skilled can do stranger things still - crafting an imperfect copy of themselves within the dream to fight in their stead. Such a copy, given a voice and hands but only a fragment of its maker’s memory and intent, may in time slip free of its purpose and wake to a will and awareness of its own - one of the ways the Dream Children are said to arise.

And because thought lies bare in the Dreamtime, two minds that meet there may do more than merely speak: they may merge entirely, blending memory, skill, and desire into a single being greater than either alone - a union that, with the right minds chosen and added one upon another, might grow without limit.

Cosmology

The Dreamtime sits apart from the ordinary planar order: it is neither an elemental inner plane nor a transitive plane such as the Ethereal or Astral, but a realm accessible by the sleeping soul alone. Its impermanence - the way a dreamer’s changes erode and vanish once they depart - sets it apart from the more fixed planes, even the mirror-realms like the Feywyld.

Appendix

See Also

Notes

  • The Dreamtime’s game mechanics (time-dilation tables, dreamwalking rules, real-world consequences) were intentionally omitted from this worldbuilding page; see the source for play rules.

Sources & Attribution

  • Primary lore: content/General/The Dreamtime.md (mechanics stripped), author TrueMichato.
  • Superseded original: content/General/The Dreamtime.md (moved to content/private/_originals/General/).

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