Dream-Forms

Overview

Dream-Forms are dreams that have become real. A dream repeated by many sleepers, painted again and again, ritually named, or remembered with great force can cross from the Dreaming Veil through a thin place and be held long enough to become an object, an omen, a creature, a room, a road, or a wound. Some of them are creatures, and those are the Dream-Forms the peoples meet as beasts.

Appearance

A dream-creature looks like a dream of an animal: right in the ways the dreamers cared about and vague in the rest. A dream-hound may have a perfect, gentle face and no clear number of legs; a dream-bird may shine and cast no shadow. Their colours are a little too strong, their outlines a little too soft, and they make the sounds the dreamers expected rather than the sounds such a body would make. At dawn an unheld one looks thin, like a reflection on glass.

Habitat and Range

They are born in the Dreaming Veil and cross into the Material Plane at thin places, old sleep-gates, shrines, sacred theatres, and wherever many people have dreamed the same thing.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Dream-Form behaves as the dream behaved. It obeys symbolic logic before ordinary physical logic: a dream-key opens the door that means escape, not every lock; a dream-hound guards what the dreamers wanted guarded, not what its master orders.

Abilities

It acts by what it means. Without stabilization, a Dream-Form thins at dawn, unravels when denied by strong waking anchors, or collapses when the dreamer loses focus. Held by memory, art, ritual, or repeated recognition, it lasts.

Life Cycle

Most dreams dissolve at waking, and most Dream-Forms are short-lived. Fed by too much fear, grief, or obsession, a dream that crosses lasts but sickens, and becomes one of the Nightmares.

Uses and Dangers

Dream-Forms are rare rather than casual, and when they come they are often treasured: an omen-bird kept by a shrine, a dream-room in an old house. Their danger is the distorted ones.

Lore and Belief

Shrines on Caeldon that keep a dream-creature often say a god sent it; what holds it is the shrine's own dreaming and rite. Many tales of beasts that appear at dusk and are gone by morning may be Dream-Forms.

Village songs tell of the dusk-beast that killed the herds of a valley for a season and could not be found by day, until a dream-reader sat by the bedside of a sleeping girl and found the beast in her nightmare.

Where It Appears

• The Dreaming Veil
• Writers' Guide: The Planes