The Dreamlands
I’ve been letting this blog languish for what feel like months while I’ve been busy writing “Book of the Gods”. So I’ve decided to post some extracts from the current work in progress, a way to wet appetites and to get over my own procrastination.
I’ll probably try to do this once a week if I can. So the first extract I’m going to post is from the “Other Worlds” chapter and specifically the intro to the “Dreamlands”.
The great Dreamlands, home of the Gods, the fantastical and the afterlife exists beyond the thin layer of the Spirit World. You know when you’re in the Dreamlands because everything appears or feels more real. The truth of everything is vividly more apparent and this leads to a sense of “hyper-realism”; colours are more startling, feelings are more passionate, sounds more stunning and so on. To humans, things take on personality because there are more true; flowers are more alluring and delicate, storms more violent and malignant, architecture belies more of the personality of the creator or designs of its architect, the way clothes hang on someone tell more about them then the choice of clothes and so on. The hidden meaning of things is less hidden and more explicit and it leads to an over-saturation of senses and meaning to humans. When people return from the Dreamlands, their memories and experiences there don’t seem real within the pressure of the Veil in the Mundane World, they take on a dream-like quality and many people forget them, just like night-time dreams.
Time moves differently in the Dreamlands, though it always marches forward, it can move slowly or quickly. A few seconds in the Dreamlands, several lifetimes may have passed on Earth and vice-versa, decades may go by in the Dreamlands, but the travellers discover they have lost only moments when they return. No-one can predict or control this, but certainly some Islands have more stable ratios of Dreamland time to Mundane time. It can make trips to the Dreamlands a risky busy, because the travellers do not know when they will return. The Sea of Dreams connects the various Islands in the Dreamlands. Most visualise and experience the Sea of Dreams as a great wide open ocean. Beneath the waves the fleeting dreams of sleeping humans can be seen and it’s possible to dive beneath the waves and seek out these temporary treasure houses. Sandmen harvest these dreams for trade and sale. Sometimes the dreams rise up out of the waters like great ancient sea monsters or whales before mutating and dissolving back into the sea. But the Sea of Dreams can manifest in a variety of ways, it can appear as a great wide forest, with mysterious and secretive animals/dreams hiding between the trees or a universe of doors hanging in space, great dream-animals floating through them or even the great tree Yggdrasill. It depends on the culturally conditioning of the travellers, but can be the strongest willed of the group of travellers or the most common expectation. By default, it manifests as the great open sea. Dreamlings and other travellers build fantastical crafts to move across the Sea of Dreams, from sky boats to giant cows.