Dreamlands

"The **Dreamlands** is a fictional location in the Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft. It is also the setting for a number of pastiches written by other authors. The Dreamlands is a vast, alternate dimension that can be entered through dreams, similar to astral projection. Experienced dreamers are among the most powerful inhabitants of the Dreamlands and may become its permanent residents after their physical deaths."

Source: http://www.yog-sothoth.com/wiki/index.php/Dreamlands

### AN UNFAMILIAR FAMILIAR WORLD

To reach the Dreamlands, a sleeper must find an unusual stairway in a conventional dream and walk down the **Seventy Steps of Light Slumber** to face the judgment of powerful gatekeepers named **Nasht** and **Kaman-Tha**. If judged worthy (i.e., able to survive the dangers of the Dreamlands), the dreamer is allowed to descend the **Seven Hundred Steps of Deeper Slumber** and emerges in the **Enchanted Wood**.
 When a person enters the Dreamlands in this way, he leaves his physical body safely in the waking world. Should he be killed during his travels, his corporeal body will only suffer a shock. Sometimes, however, this can be fatal; "dream death" of this kind makes return to the Dreamlands impossible. Waking up causes a person's "dream self" to disappear, and the individual may have difficulty recalling anything learned or experienced during his time asleep (similar to conventional dreaming).

The Dreamlands can be entered in other ways, including physically. This usually requires passing through very dangerous areas of both the waking world and the Dreamlands. Consequently, "real" death becomes a risk. However, the visitor does receive the prolonged lifespan of a native of the Dreamlands, and the traveller's time there is no longer limited to the duration of a night's sleep on earth.

Though the term "Dreamlands" typically refers to the dimension
accessible by human dreamers, other inhabited planets apparently have
their own dreamlands. Reaching these other realms from the terrestrial
Dreamlands is possible, but difficult.

Time flows at a different rate in the Dreamlands; each hour on earth represents a week or more there. Consequently, a traveller can spend months in the Dreamlands during a single night's sleep on earth. Fortunately for dreamers, inhabitants of the Dreamlands are either long-lived or immortal, provided they avoid injury or disease.

Despite its accelerated time, the Dreamlands rarely experiences change. Its geography, politics, and population remain fairly static. The history of the Dreamlands is a series of vignettes, each a cycle that plays out continuously within its own Age - unless a Dreamer or god exerts outside influence. At which point "history" alters, with consequences that can flow forward and backward in the timestream of the Dreamlands, ultimately affecting the dreams of all the Dreamers of Earth's Dreamlands. Space in the Dreamlands is just as conservative as Time, with the geography unchanging and even the buildings remaining the same in their familiar forms. Dreamers, however, can exert great change over the topography, such as by creating entire cities with accompanying populations.

The Dreamlands has its own pantheon known as the **Great Ones**,
 but they resemble powerful immortals rather than true gods because
ordinary humans can wound, deceive, and seduce them. Their dominion is protected, however, from mortal challengers by the dread Other Gods and their messenger Nyarlathotep (who treats the Other Gods and the Great Ones alike with evident contempt). Anubis also protects the gods, for reasons of his own.

Otherwise, the rest of the deities who figure prominently in Lovecraft's other writings (such as the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods), have little interest in or influence over the Dreamlands unless stirred up by Nyarlathotep for reasons of his own.

### MAP OF THE MIND

The Dreamlands is divided into four continental regions, each named for its cardinal direction.

* **The West** is the most well-known region of the Dreamlands and is probably the most peopled as well. It is where dreamers emerge from the Steps of Deeper Slumber. The port of **Dylath-Leen**, the largest city of the Dreamlands, lies on its coast. The town of **Ulthar**, where no man may kill a cat, is also located here. Other important cities are **Hlanith** (a coastal jungle city) and **Ilarnek** (a desert trade capital). The land of **Mnar** and the ruins of **Sarnath** are found at the southern border. The Enchanted Wood of the Zoogs is also found here. It joins the South.

* **The South** is the southern coastal region of the continent shared by the West along with the islands of the **Southern Sea**, including the isle of **Oriab**, the largest. The South's land-locked regions and its coastal areas are known as the **Fantastic Realms**, because they contain nightmarish and sometimes incomprehensible zones. All known and mapped settings for tabletop and computer roleplaying games have lands equating to those maps fitting impossibly within the Fantastic Realms, each occupying its own hyperspace pocket dimension of the outer Dreamlands and taking its sustenance and population from the surrounding Dreamlands energy. Otherwise, the islands of the Southern Sea are fairly normal.

* **The East** is a continent that is largely uninhabited, except for **Ooth-Nargai**. The city of **Celephaïs** is the capital of Ooth-Nargai and was created from whole cloth by its monarch **King Kuranes**, the greatest of all recorded dreamers. Beyond Ooth-Nargai are **The Forbidden Lands**, dangerous realms into which travel is interdicted.

* **The North** is a cold, mountainous continent notorious for its **Plateau of Leng**, a violent region shared by man-eating spiders and satyr-like beings known as the "Men of Leng". The North also has a number of friendlier places, such as the city of **Inquanok**, famous for its onyx quarries. The deepest reaches of the North are said to hold **Unknown Kadath**, the home of the Great Ones.

In addition to these regions, the **Dreamlands** has a few other locales that defy conventional description.

* **The Underworld** is a subterranean region that runs beneath the whole of the Dreamlands. Its principle inhabitants are **ghouls**, who can physically enter the waking world through crypts. The Underworld is also home to the **Gugs**, monstrous giants banished from the surface for untold blasphemies. The Underworld's deepest realm is the **Vale of Pnath**, a dangerous lightless chasm inhabited by enormous unseen beasts called **bholes**. Bholes are likely the ancestors of the **dholes** of **Yaddith**.

* **The Moon** has a parallel in the **Dreamlands** and is inhabited by the dreaded **moon-beasts**, amorphous frog-like creatures allied with Nyarlathotep. Interestingly, it is possible for a ship to sail off the edge of the Dreamlands and travel through space to the moon.
* **The Pillars of the West** are two mountain-sized basalt cylinders. One one side is the settled East. On the other side a gigantic sense-defying waterfall that empties perpetually into a bottomless pit. In its endless mist and clouds there floats a sky city, known as the Land of Hope.

### OTHER DREAMLANDS

Any inhabited planet in the "physical universe" has its equivalent **Dreamlands**, inhabited either by its native Dreamers and what they have created or by colonists who have travelled the vast distances between planetary **Dreamlands** to establish a colony on another world's dream continents. Just as the Earth's Moon exists within the **Dreamlands** of Earth so too do all other significant satellites and orbiting features of other worlds.

Also, the Dreamlands of an inhabited planet first form when life itself first appears on that world. For example in the case of Earth, it was the Elder Things race that "established" the vast bulk of the details of the primordial Earthly Dreamlands, long before any human or humanoid life existed or had even been dreamed of.

### TIME AND SPACE

Dreamlands have both physical geography and the passage of time. The geography becomes more stable as more Dreamers acknowledge and "believe in" a particular area. Shared dreaming creates a more or less consistent world in such areas. In other areas of the **Dreamlands**, where most geography is the creation of a single powerful Dreamer, topography may be subject to swift alteration or not be stable and consistent at all.

Time passes far slower in the **Dreamlands** than Earth. A single night's dreaming for a human is many months within the **Dreamlands** and can even encompass a lifetime on rare occasions.

There are also consistent "Ages" that exist, separate from each other by defining events. These Ages and events play out again and again, like levels of a computer game or chapters in a visual novel. They evolve with the attitudes of Dreamers but their essential nature never alters.