Phantasms

The Phantasms are the things that strong feeling makes in the Dreaming Veil: manifestations of emotion or archetype that are not sentient but act on instinct. The fear-born Nightmares are Phantasms, and so are the Muse-Spirits that grant visions, and the Echoes, fragments of old dreams that lingered too long and became half aware.

At a Glance

Kind	Plane native
Habitat	The shifting dreamscapes of the realm of imagination and dream
Range	The Dreaming Veil
Danger	Dangerous: some of them hunt

Appearance

They take the shapes of what made them, which is to say the shapes of feelings: a Nightmare is shaped like a fear, a Muse-Spirit like a longing. What they share is that each is too much itself, a single feeling drawn without shading.

Habitat and Range

They arise wherever feeling runs strongest in the Dreaming Veil, around dreamers and in the dreamscapes many dreamers share.

Behaviour and Temperament

They act on instinct, without thought or choice: a Phantasm of fear hunts, one of longing beckons. Their instinct is the feeling that made them.

Uses and Dangers

Some of them give, as the Muse-Spirits do; some take, as the Nightmares do. Travellers learn to tell them apart quickly.

Lore and Belief

Dream-readers on Caeldon sort the figures of dreams into kinds and read them as omens, and some of those kinds may come from travellers' tales of the Phantasms. Whether every dream-figure is a Phantasm, or only the strongest, is argued.