Dream-Sickness

Overview

Dream-Sickness is what a sleeper carries back from the Dreaming Veil when sleep goes wrong. Households meet it in four forms: the sleeper who will not wake; the one whose nightmares leave bruises; the one who wakes and cannot believe the world is real; and the one who sleeps all night and rises exhausted. Most bad dreams are nothing; dream-sickness is the few that are something.

Cause

The sleeping mind can pass into the Dreaming Veil through any bed. There a dreamer may grow too comfortable to come back; may meet a Nightmare whose wounds follow it into the body; may stay long enough to blur dream and waking; or may be fed on by the plane's parasites, which drain vitality. Its dark zones are worse. The Nightmare Nexus, which wakes after mass fear, can trap a sleeper or leave the mind permanently prone to nightmare and madness, and the Lucid Wastes can shut a sleeper in a coma. Overuse of Dream Magic brings the same harms on its workers as sleep corruption and blurred perception (see Costs and Side Effects).

Who It Strikes

Anyone who dreams. The grieving, the frightened, and the unhappy go deepest and want least to return; children with recurring nightmares are hunted most. Survivors of a sack or a plague year are the Nexus's usual prey. Dream-workers take it as a cost of their art. The Wrought, whose rest is pattern-settling rather than ordinary sleep, are seldom met with it.

Signs and Course

The unwaking sleeper breathes slowly, eyes moving under the lids, and cannot be roused by noise, cold water, or pain. Some wake after days, grieving for a place they cannot describe; others lie on, thinning.

The haunted sleeper wakes screaming, sometimes with bruises, scratches, or a burn where the dream struck. The nights worsen until the sleeper fears to sleep at all.

The blurred wake and doubt. They touch walls, ask whether they are dreaming, forget which memories happened, and may wander. Most come back to themselves within weeks.

The drained sleep long and wake grey and weak, as from a fever, and weaken further each night until whatever fed on them is driven off.

Contagion

It does not pass from body to body. A great shared terror can draw many sleepers of one town into the Nexus on the same nights, and that looks like contagion.

Treatment and Its Limits

An unwaking sleeper must be kept alive: turned, kept warm, and given broth and water by the spoonful. Families talk to the sleeper and put a known object in the hand. A dream-worker may go in after them with Dreamwalk, dangerous without a prior link, or eat a child's repeating nightmare with Dream Eater, at the risk of taking its fear into themselves. The drained need food, rest, and sometimes vitality given by a healer through Vital Magic, which the healer pays for. The blurred need routine and company more than anything. Nothing reliable undoes the lasting harm of the Nexus; a sleeper who faces the fear there and wins is said to be free of that fear thereafter.

Mortality

Most dream-sickness is survived. The unwaking sleeper dies of hunger and thirst if not fed, and many die even when fed. A Nightmare can kill in the dream, and the body dies with it. The haunted and the blurred seldom die of it, but some keep lifelong nightmares, a dread of sleep, or a lasting sense of unreality.

Lore and Belief

On Caeldon bad dreams are blamed on bad food, a full stomach, a curse, or the dead, and most are right to be. Charms hang over cradles, and many households turn a sleeper's shoes towards the door so the dreamer can find the way home. An unwaking sleeper is often said to be visiting the dead, and some families will not wake one for fear of calling them back too soon.

A tale is told of the dream-guide who sat three nights by a cursed prince and went into his dream with a knife, and the prince who woke with blood on the pillow that was not his.

In the Medieval Era

Dream-sickness is everywhere and rarely named. Households nurse the sleeper, midwives and folk healers ease the drained with tonics, and the people of a village call the dream-guide if there is one. Dream-workers of the schools treat it for pay in towns, and see it among their own apprentices. After a massacre whole districts sleep badly for a season.

Where It Appears

• The Dreaming Veil (the Sleep, the Nightmare, the Blur, the Parasite)
• The Nightmare Nexus (the Corruption, those lost to the Nexus)
• The Lucid Wastes (the Wake-Up)
• Costs and Side Effects (Dream: sleep corruption)
• Nightmares