The Dreamer

You are a channel, able to bridge the minds of multiple people in one dreaming state. From the prime dreamer's mind a memory is called forward, and within that memory do each of the joined dreamers find themselves, every one of them an actor on the stage of the original scene. They live the experience as it occured, and in this way forgotten memories can be recalled, because upon waking from the vision all the dreamers have perfect recollection of the event, as if it were theirs. Sadly for you, not only are you unable to be the prime dreamer and reap the benefits of your own power, but the world is increasingly fading to you. Nothing feels real anymore, if it ever has, and you cannot help shake the sense that this entire world is a false play, a dream itself.

Long Description: Wandering through the nunnery at night - or perhaps a hospital bay - you walk past the dust motes as they float down through a pale ray of moonlight; past the wooden foots of beds and the many rows of thin straw-stuffed mattress sacks upon which people are slumped, you imagine how easy it would be to join them in sleep. To slide between this place and the next, and move on to the place of dreams. You've never been able to sleep, not once, in your whole life.

People say that when you're suffering from sleep deprivation the world around you turns fuzzy and indistinct, that you hallucinate things that shouldn't be there. You have this, but none of the other ill effects people say you should get from not sleeping, notably dying. You feel like you're in a constant dream, though. You've been in one your whole life and can't wake up. You'd like to wake up, certainly, and feel awake for once. Salt air and gulls sailing out through a brilliant blue sky, beached sandstone cliffs, even the rough spray of the sea itself doesn't feel like it's real. Something's off. It's all maddeningly off.

Your limbs feel slow and sloppy, heavy like you're moving through molasses.

You got jealous of people who were good at just being in days and places, being present, their pupils made small by the sun's glorious intrusion as they laze about, their belly down on the grass on a hot summer day - or wide in arousal at night, their pupils blown huge as they stuff themselves behind alleys and into each other with hot, alcohol-damp breath - or pick up their first child or kiss the damp head of a sick elderly relative as they pass in the night. You feel so removed from it all, like it's not real.

People who can just be, you don't understand them. They go on, unfettered and unworried for what's really going on.

"I can't get to it," you snarl.

Get to what? There's nothing to get to. You're already in it.

"I don't know. To what's here."

What?

"To what's actually here. I don't know."

To what it means, you mean.

"Yes. Yes, that. To what's behind this."

You'd be plagued by grinning phantasms and disrupted attention. Often you would find yourself focussing on the middle distance and having to snap back to what people were saying. You hate it. You hate everyone walking around in the world as if they’re marionettes or imposters. You have to pretend you're a part of it and that it's real because if it is real and you're just imagining all this then you are mad. And that detonates a tiny tight, fidgety feeling just beneath your breastbone, really hot and sometimes it brings tears stinging to your eyes.

"This feels like an illusion. I just - can't -"

Help me.

Mechanics: Choose a "dreamer", it must be a willing participant. With them, you can enter their mind. You enter a mutual dreamstate with this person, or even a group whose blood has been shared with you (must be two ways to create the link, needs to be with each participant who want to enter the dream) and from there you can all access parts of the chosen dreamer's psyche ordinarily inaccessible to them, such as memories locked away. Everyone in the dream views the experience together, at the same time and can consciously remember everything upon waking. You need as many dreamers together as there were significant people in the memory to be viewed; the dreamers each find themselves taking on the role of one of the people in the memory, playing out the scene as it was experienced when first lived.

In the real world, most alarmingly, their bodies vanish. This is not a group Obfuscation; they are not in the world anymore, for as long as the dreamer is dreaming.

The dream is a snapshot seen (and experienced) in time by the dreamers who are connected through you. The dream must be a memory that the prime dreamer has themselves lived. It can be one they have forgotten or which a Dominate user has hidden, and in this way the dream will shatter the particular Dominate use of "Forgetful Mind" or other such methods that cause a victim to forget something. You can never be the prime dreamer. You simply take on a role of one of the people in the dream, and you have no control over who that will be - no dreamer does. ((Of course off-game you all have control over deciding who plays who.)) They simply "wake up" in the dream, and are compelled to act as the original memory played out. They cannot resist it, and once begun, they cannot escape until the emotional climax of the scene has been reached.

For off game purposes you would negotiate the actual scene and how it will play out. Usually this will mean the prime dreamer will tell you what memory you (and possibly other people) will experience, and they will give you a relatively short but detailed blow-by-blow of what will happen. You will all decide between yourselves which character will wake up to find themselves as which person in the memory, and the scene should ideally not be longer than five or ten minutes. You must decide before stepping back into roleplay what the cut-off point is for when the climax of the memory has been reached.