Drowse-Wings

Overview

Drowse-Wings are the moths of the Dreaming Veil. They fly in its skies and around its dreamers, shedding a fine dust from their wings, and the dust does not stay behind when the dreamer wakes. A sleeper on the Material Plane may find it shimmering on the pillow, and carry the dream about all day.

Appearance

A Drowse-Wing is as wide as a palm, its wings broad and soft, with no colour of its own: its colours shift with the mood of whoever watches it, pale rose for one dreamer, deep indigo for another. Its body is furred and plump, its antennae feathered. It flies in slow, looping drifts like a falling leaf that has changed its mind. Its wings shed a dust so fine it hangs in the air as a glittering haze. Its sound is the melodic hum the plane makes of everything. Its scent is whatever the watcher last found comforting: bread, a mother's shawl, rain on a roof.

Habitat and Range

They fly in the dream skies above the Veil's floating islands and in the drifting places where sleepers from the Material Plane wander, and they gather thickest around a dreamer who dreams deeply.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Drowse-Wing seeks dreamers and circles them, settling on hair and shoulders and drinking, as far as anyone can tell, the dream itself. It leaves its dust where it settles. It is gentle and drowsy and is drawn more to pleasant dreams than frightening ones, which it flees, perhaps because the Nightmares hunt in them.

Abilities

Their dust carries something of a dream across the threshold of waking. A sleeper who wakes with it on them keeps the dream's mood for hours, a joy without cause, a grief, a longing for a place never seen, and sometimes a fragment of it: a tune, a face, a word. Very rarely, where many sleepers dream the same thing, the dust is said to help such a dream hold its shape long enough to become one of the Dream-Forms.

Life Cycle

They are said to hatch from forgotten dreams and to live as long as anyone remembers the dream they hatched from. No one has seen one die.

Uses and Dangers

Artists and dream-workers prize the dust and try to gather it, and some say it brings the visions the Phantasms give. Its danger is that it blurs the line the plane already blurs: a sleeper who wakes dusted night after night may begin to live in the dream's mood and lose the waking one.

Lore and Belief

On the Material Plane "dream-dust" on a pillow is a familiar sight to some and a tale to most. Some peoples brush it into a bowl and keep it as a blessing; others shake the bedding out of the window at dawn so the dream cannot follow them into the day. Much of what is called dream-dust is ordinary dust in the morning light (see Knowledge of the Cosmos).

Where It Appears

• Overview: Natives of the Planes