Sleepers in the Beast World sew a quilt of dreams. Jackals use it to blanket their sleeping deity, keeping them calm and comfortable. One square is a serene picture of a faraway beach and another is a child’s fear of darkness, explored in the safe confines of her sleeping mind. Whatever their subject, this world is imagined into existence every minute of every day. So it has been since the beginning of the world.
In a more literal sense, the Dreaming is a physical world created by sleeping creatures in the Beast World. Their dreams are projected by old magic into a collective of thought. These scattered scenes are connected by doorways and liminal spaces at their edges. Every dream is as unique as the person contributing it and they rarely have much cohesion. One dream’s kitchen doorway leads straight into a child’s memory of a trip to the dentist, and outside the window is a blurred memory of a mother’s voice, muffled by the womb. Some dreams are barely physical places at all, no more than a half-formed image with a voice calling out in the darkness.
The Dreaming is different every time one visits, but dreams with common elements and moods are clustered together. These shared thoughts, such as dreams about family or love or money, link spaces in the Dreaming and create a topography in this otherwise formless mass of thought-space. There’s an obtuse logic to these links that a traveler can learn to avoid dangerous dreams.
The Seelie Court towers in the background of dreams, present in every one a willful creature has. This ancient city is surrounded by walls of ivy, and a glorious spire rises from its center. The Seelie sleep within the walls, resting in the place created by the inhabitants of their former home. The purpose of the Dreaming is to contain the Seelie Court; it’s a resting place for the gods of an old, solved world.
Every Beast World dream features the Seelie Court. It might sit in the distance outside the window of a childhood home or it might be the only defined object in an abstract swirl of emotional color. Beasts are so used to its presence that they rarely remember it was there after waking. To a lifelong Beast World denizen, it’s a fact of life as obvious as the blue sky.
The Seelie Court is an afterthought to most, but it’s an important place in jackal culture. The city is closed to outsiders, but clerics and warlocks of the jackals’ dreaming deities walk the streets in their lucid sleep. It is a place of congregation and meditation, where jackals can sit in the gardens of the benevolent sleeper, comforted by their gods’ presence.
The Seelie dreams of the physical space within the walls of their Court. It’s often a reflection of the wild place from before the creation of the Beast World.
Daisy Walkers use magic to enter lucid sleep and travel through the Dreaming. They’re named for the rare, eight-petaled chamomile daisy used to cast the necessary spell. Some use the Dreaming as a nexus for travel; a daisy walker can return next to a dreamer in the waking world. Shrewd spies can glean secrets from unsuspecting dreamers, interrogating their resting minds as characters in the scene around them. Physics is flexible so long as a traveler can convince the dreamer that what’s happening is plausible. However, while their logic is inconsistent, if a dreamer becomes too confused or suspicious, they snap awake and force the visitor out.
Unless they obscure themselves, a dreamer knows when a daisy walker is present. Shared lucid dreams are a popular pastime of friends who can cast the spell and eight-petaled daisies are a romantic gift shared by lovers. More powerful magic allows a daisy walker to slip into dreams unnoticed, and the most potent forms of daisy walking allow for travel between dreams and back to the Beast World as a form of teleportation.
A daisy walker’s actions in the Dreaming are visible to the dreamer, and the dreamer’s meandering thoughts transform the world around them. A lucid dreamer with ill intent can warp reality to hamper a daisy walker or even cause them harm. In this way, a sleeping child in a stubborn mood is a dangerous and vengeful god. Other than wandering into a sadist’s sleeping psyche, no daisy walker should forget the risk of finding oneself in someone else’s nightmare, running with heavy feet from an invincible murderer.
