Glossary

### **Entities**

**Alternate selves**: When fantasias reflect aspects of their dreamer’s personal lives to shape themselves, this can include personas of the dreamers themselves, isolated facets of their identity or personality (including but not exclusive to alters and headmates), impressions of people they know, even themselves, or personifications of the roles other people have had in the dreamer’s life. Alternate selves that take directly after the dreamer are more directly a part of them, whereas their versions of other people they know are at best echoes of who they take after based on how they are remembered.

**Dark masses**: amorphous dark masses, some of which may be a degenerated silhouette and some of which may have been manifestations of significant emotional turmoil from the beginning. They prey on negativity through night terrors and paralysis, reputedly crossing over to haunt vulnerable sleepers.

**Imaginaries**: can refer to any permanent umbracosm resident, many of which would have less ability or tangibility in the corporeal plane as they are. They can range between fantastical lifeforms, spirits using inanimate objects as bodies or body parts, representations of objects or abstract concepts.

**Silhouettes**: shadowed astral bodies, some with simple white masks embodying however much they retained of their former identities, personalities and memories after losing anchorage to their corporeal lives. They may reform as they rebuild their senses of identity from scratch, if they do not deteriorate or find vessels to claim as their new bodies.

**???**: umbracosmic examples of abyssal gigantism, eldritch leviathans of the Void that devour collapsed limbos like whale falls. Since their conception/discovery in the late 1930s, they have had steadily more definition and influence in the umbracosm.

### **The immaterial plane**

**Blanching**: “Blanched” fantasias have predominantly white or black-and-white environments, and appear as if put through a high-contrast filter wherever color, even grey, does occur– hues are either heavily muted or brightly saturated, and shades of grey are often either very dark or very pale. This phenomenon is not yet fully understood, but there is an observable correlation between blanching and bleak outlooks.

**Canvas**: the vacant expanses of nothingness in the umbracosm beyond any limbo. How it behaves will vary, and while it is often breathable and walkable, these properties can disappear just by anticipating it, suggesting that it responds to cognition.

**Fantasias**: typically referred to in older media as *dreamlands,* they are limbos personally or communally imagined into creation by a specific wish that can be summarized by a simple word or phrase. They may remain in isolation like islands or annex each other like patchwork, but like any dream, they often portray assorted thoughts and memories of varying relevance or personal significance.

**Limbos**: tangible environments formed within the umbracosm.

**Liminalisms**: sites or instances of paranormal/liminal activity.

**Liminalities**: naturally-forming limbos found in proximity to planar crossings, taking shape as distorted echoes of the corporeal site they are parallel to. They may be considered underdeveloped, but whether a liminality will grow to become a coherent limbo may depend on the concentration and proximity of public cognition.

**Loredoms**: a type of quiltation manifested from mystical beliefs as they are wished upon through believers’ faith and offerings.

**Quiltations**: a collective fantasia conjoined by masses of belief or imagination, which often accumulate around common desires and fantasies but may represent multiple different wishes.

**the shallows**: zones in which the surface and umbracosm lie close enough to interact with each other to varying extents.

**the surface**: the corporeal/material plane.

**the umbracosm**: the imaginary/immaterial plane, also called the abyss, the astral/dream plane or the void.