Dreamwalker

Few callings in Ancestral are as rare or dangerous as that of the Dream Walker. To common folk, sleep is merely rest, visions, or warnings from the Eternals. To a Dream Walker, it is a path whose countless branches must each be mastered. These exceptional mortals learn to enter the Dream Plane consciously, follow dream threads, locate sleeping minds, and pass into its regions where imagination possesses the weight of creation. During my travels beside King Iandor Greymon of Andor, I witnessed firsthand that sleep is not an escape from reality but one of its hidden doors. Our journeys through Astartian temples, Karmic Reflections, and the Dream and Nightmare realms later inspired two of my darker works on the subject, the Dreams & Nightmare Realms and Passing the Mantle.

Power Over the Dream

Dream Walkers share a reflection of the powers held by the Hypnagons, the native guardians who weave dream blocks and protect mortal mind threads. Through discipline, oneirology, and often a violent awakening within their own dreams, they learn to observe, alter, and project dreams, communicate with sleepers, guide companions into the Mantle, and defend souls from nightmare’s corruption. In the Dream Plane, where time may stretch into centuries or collapse into seconds, their will becomes both weapon and shield. A skilled Dream Walker can reshape weather, distance, memory, form, and even the purpose of a dream, while the greatest among them may create persistent dream realms or cross into places no ordinary sleeper could survive.

Their will becomes both weapon and shield.

The Peril of the Path

Yet the path is perilous. The Plane of Nightmares presses constantly against the Dream Plane, and the Erecthils, servants of distortion and terror, hunt Dream Walkers with particular hatred. Morgenydon, Lord of Nightmares, seeks to corrupt dream threads and turn the sanctuary of sleep into a battlefield of Entropy. If a Dream Walker loses control while guiding others, those companions may be dragged into nightmare regions, severed from their bodies, or consumed by horrors that do not obey mortal logic. For this reason, Dream Walkers are regarded with equal measures of reverence and suspicion. They are the true healers of wounded minds, spies beyond walls, guides through impossible realms, and among the few mortals capable of opposing a nightmare before it wakes in the real world.

I am writing these with deep sorrow and regret remembering our constant disputes with King Iandor. I thought my calling was to protect him. But now I understand. They live with the constant peril of getting lost in other people’s dread, therefore their lives are woven from sacrifice.

— Eolon of Oemon, forever a student of Harmony’s magnificent creations