| On the eve of day 117, night falls on the town like a funeral shroud. As everyone settles down to sleep, or at least to wait out the gloom, there's the feeling, clear and enveloping, of being deep underwater, and of the eyes of something impossibly large settling on you an instant before consciousness fades away. At that moment, it's as if you've broken through the other side of the ocean. You feel light, unconnected. You drift. Asleep, and yet not, you can wander, with consciousness rippling like pondskin against your feet. Characters will be able to travel into the dreams of others who are asleep, in worlds created by their unconsciousness and by the tangling webs of the town's influence. No dream is entirely happy: some may start out that way, but there is always an element of the surreal, the sickening, the wrong in them. Those who are the owners of the dream being crawled into are not aware of their dreaming state, acting out whatever bizarre circumstances are involved with the usual level of unawareness granted in dreams. Those who climb into the heads of others, however, are lucid. They can interact with the dream. As a result, they can change it--and, perhaps, cause unsettling effects for those whose dreams they altered. Changes in mental states caused by those walking through dreams tend to linger even as they feel incorrect. Even if someone does their best to make you happy, when waking up it feels as if something uncomfortable and foreign is inhabiting your skin and changing your actions. It's easy to feel as if someone is reading your mind, controlling it--and if you were to speak to those who stepped into your dreams in the waking world and changed them, something about them would feel dangerous. Memories become fluid, as if being overwritten: it becomes more and more difficult to piece together details of the past as others leave footprints on the folds of your mind. In the worst cases, reality itself begins to feel like a dream, and those afflicted travel like sleepwalkers. An example of this could involve interrupting a sad dream and cheering up the dreamer: in a mild case, the character will feel uncomfortably happy. In a severe case, their negative feelings may be entirely overwritten by this incorrect, inescapable feeling to the point that they can no longer even comprehend the sadness and upset of others. Of course, you're free to get creative with this! There's a lot of room for manipulating things the way you'd like here. This will continue for the duration of the event. A log for this event has been put up here! There will be a different log for NPC interactions; remember, sign ups for that close on 11:59PM EST on May 16. |
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