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The Dream Lands
The Dream Lands are a mutable plane formed from dreams, memory, imagination, and nightmare. Most dreaming creatures touch the fringes of this plane without realizing it, experiencing only fleeting and private dreams before waking. Those who travel deeper may enter a shared realm in which places, creatures, and events possess an existence independent of any single dreamer.
The Dream Lands have no fixed correspondence with the Material Plane, and entrances to the plane are fickle and unpredictable. A familiar house may open onto an expansive city, a road may cross a kingdom in an hour, and a traveler who turns back may find that the road behind has disappeared or now leads somewhere else. Nevertheless, portions of the plane can become remarkably stable. Places dreamed of repeatedly, held in many memories, or inhabited by native creatures may persist for centuries and can be revisited by travelers who know the way.
Travelers may enter the Dream Lands naturally through sleep, through particular spells or magical objects, or through rare places where the boundary between waking and dreaming thins. Ordinary dreams seldom carry a dreamer beyond the plane’s shallowest reaches, while deliberate exploration generally requires magic, special knowledge, or unusual circumstances.
The Dream Lands have the following traits.
- Subjective directional gravity. Gravity generally behaves as a traveler expects it to behave, though unusual regions may possess entirely different conditions.
- Highly morphic. The Dream Lands respond to thought, emotion, memory, and expectation. Minor details may change spontaneously, while powerful dreamers or native beings may reshape entire locations. Stable regions resist such alteration.
- Mildly neutral-aligned. The plane itself favors no alignment, though individual realms within it may strongly reflect the nature of the minds or beings that shaped them.
- Erratic time. Time does not pass consistently between the Dream Lands and other planes. A night of dreaming may encompass days or years of subjective experience, while a long journey through the Dream Lands may occupy only moments in the waking world. The DM determines the relationship or rolls on the Erratic Time table when it becomes important.
- Altered magic. Magic generally functions normally, but illusion, phantasm, sleep, and dream-related magic may be enhanced in regions strongly shaped by dreams. Magic that awakens a sleeping creature, protects the mind, or dispels illusions may likewise have unusual effects upon dream creatures and environments.
A creature entering the Dream Lands through ordinary sleep leaves its physical body behind. Its dream-form carries the creature’s normal abilities, equipment, and appearance unless the nature of the dream dictates otherwise. Objects acquired in the Dream Lands ordinarily vanish upon waking and cannot be carried physically into the Material Plane.
Damage suffered by a dream-form does not normally injure the sleeping body. A dreamer reduced to 0 hit points awakens immediately and may be unable to return to the Dream Lands until after another period of normal sleep. Particularly powerful creatures, magic, or regions of nightmare may cause injuries that persist after waking.
Creatures that enter the Dream Lands physically are subject to different dangers. Their bodies and possessions are actually present, damage is real, and death in the Dream Lands results in actual death. Such travelers may also carry objects into or out of the plane if they can find a means of physical passage.
Denizens
The Dream Lands contain both visitors and native inhabitants. Sleeping creatures from other planes may appear briefly without ever realizing that they have entered a shared realm, while experienced dreamers deliberately travel its roads and seek out its hidden places.
Native dream creatures arise from persistent dreams, fears, desires, stories, and memories. Some are fleeting beings that disappear when the circumstances that created them are forgotten; others possess independent existence and may survive long after their origins have vanished. Intelligent inhabitants establish kingdoms, cities, courts, and domains whose histories may extend far beyond the lives of the dreamers who first imagined them.
Nightmares also have inhabitants of their own. Some feed upon fear, pursue dreamers from one dream to another, or seek ways to follow their victims into the waking world.
Locations & Features
The Dream Lands contain everything that can be imagined, but repeated dreams and powerful influences cause certain types of places to appear with particular frequency. Geography is unreliable between such places, while established locations may remain surprisingly stable.
Typical features include:
- Dream Cities: Settlements shaped by generations of dreams. Their inhabitants, streets, and customs may persist even when no waking creature currently dreams of them.
- Dream Gates: Doors, stairways, paths, mirrors, and other thresholds connecting distant portions of the Dream Lands or, rarely, leading to another plane.
- Dreamscapes: Temporary regions shaped by the dreams of a particular sleeper. Such places may dissolve or transform when the dreamer awakens.
- Memory Realms: Places formed from powerful memories, sometimes reproducing locations that no longer exist on the Material Plane.
- Nightmare Realms: Regions shaped by fear, suffering, or hostile intelligences. Their environments frequently work against intruders and may be difficult to escape.
- Stable Roads: Unusually persistent routes connecting important locations. Knowing such a road is often more useful than possessing a conventional map.
- Waking Thresholds: Rare places where the Dream Lands touch the Material Plane closely enough for creatures, objects, or influences to cross between them.
Hazards
The Dream Lands are not inherently hostile, but their mutable nature makes assumptions about reality unreliable.
- Disorientation: Roads, landmarks, and distances may change without warning. Travelers who stray from established routes may become lost even in apparently familiar surroundings.
- Dream Incursion: Creatures or phenomena from the Dream Lands may sometimes follow travelers back into waking reality, particularly through unstable thresholds or powerful magic.
- Entrapment: Powerful inhabitants, magic, or certain regions may prevent a dreamer from waking normally. Escape may require defeating the source of the effect, finding a waking threshold, or receiving aid from outside the dream.
- False Awakening: A dreamer may believe that he has awakened while remaining within another layer of the Dream Lands. Only careful observation or magic may reveal the deception.
- Nightmares: Regions dominated by fear may produce monsters, hazards, or circumstances drawn from the fears of those entering them.
- Shifting Reality: Terrain, structures, and even ordinary physical laws may change in unstable regions. A doorway may cease to exist, gravity may change direction, or a harmless landscape may become dangerous without warning.
Encounters
In the Dream Lands, the boundaries between creatures, locations, and events are never truly clear. Likewise, there is no such thing as a "typical" encounter in the Dram Lands, though recurring themes and archetypes do appear—a familiar location transformed by the sort of logic that makes sense only in dream, an impossible road, a persistent dream shared by several sleepers, a dream gate, or a nightmare spreading into otherwise stable regions, a person remembered by a dreamer but long dead in the waking world.
Because the Dream Lands respond to thought and expectation, encounters may also draw upon the travelers themselves, turning their memories, desires, fears, and unfinished concerns into features of the adventure. Travelers might meet alternate versions of themselves, the land may become places they know both intimately and only in passing, the creatures around them may be personifications of their hopes and dreams and fears.
There is little that is impossible or unknown in the Dream Lands, but it will also never be truly known, and so much is forgotten as soon as it remembered. It is the waking world that forgets.
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