Fenya's Dream - The World of a Dream

• Last edit: May 10, 2023

In the last post I wrote a bit about our foxy character, this time it will be about the world itself. What it is, how it functions and what you can expect to find in it.

Fenya’s world is kind of a blend of fantasy and science fiction. Probably an overused concept, but the thing I love is exploring ancient “super civilizations”, their ruins and relics. And you need a bit of magic to fill in the parts where technology gets too boring and too long to explain things.

Fenya’s World

Imagine living in a world where you can’t distinguish between dream and reality anymore. You enter a dream, you shape a world, but what did you exactly change? Was it only imagination or did technology allow you to affect reality as well? And most importantly, did you really fall asleep and dream and did you really wake up again?

All this technology does not exist anymore. The only memory of a once great civilization that might, or might not, have had that ability, is left in ruins and mega structures that were reclaimed by nature. Fenya encounters one such thing at the start of her adventure. You can imagine huge cities and structures, above and underground, that can only hint at what people were able to build.

Their decline? Unknown… for now. It’s something left for Fenya to figure out on her journey.

The Dream

One aspect of the dream is the ability to physically alter reality. For the dreamer themselves and any observer of the ongoing dream world. They can travel to different locations and they can change their perception of the world. All this works with gargantuan machines called Dream Sequencers. The amount of power they need to operate is beyond anything a successor civilization could build. The only way left to interface with those things is to bring back life to those ancient power generators. (And hope they won’t explode)

Very few individuals of their society were selected to operate them. It was a great honor and the ultimate service to their civilization to shape the dream. It took decades of training and only those with the purest heart would be allowed to become a dream forger. What happened to them while inside the machines, and once they left them again, is unknown. Undoubtedly they played a part in the downfall of their civilization and it’s up to Fenya to figure out this part of history.

While those machines had to be tuned exactly to the persons they were connected to, Fenya will have no choice but to enter them as well at one point. The world inside a dream is indistinguishable from reality. All physical rules apply, everything you know from your own world exists there as well and functions in the same way as an identical copy. Yet, you can alter anything with pure thoughts. How the dream forger used that power, was for them to decide.

Of course technology could fail and severing the connection with the dream, either from the power failing or deliberately shutting down the Dream Sequencer, would immediately kill the dreamer inside. Those things were operated by large crews that had to monitor everything and all time. It is unclear what happens to the dream if a connection was severed like this, but its state was most likely violently disturbed and left in chaos.

Those worlds will also have different physical representations, but that is for another chapter…