The dreamscape is the interior of the mind. Every living, animated thing has a dreamscape. Dreamscapes are split into five zones or "rings" of sanity/consciousness: sunlight, twilight, midnight, lower midnight, and hadal.[1] Clairvoyants can consciously access their own dreamscapes while amaurotics may catch glimpses when they sleep.
Description[]
Jaxon Hall describes the dreamscape to Paige Mahoney this way: "Everyone has a dreamscape, you see. An illusion of safety, a kind of locus amoenus. You understand. Voyants have colored dreamscapes. The rest have black-and-white ones. They see their dreamscapes when they dream. Amaurotics, consequently, dream in monochrome."[2]
Every dreamscape has a kind of invisible light, or an inner glow, imperceptible to amaurotic senses. Many of the human dreamscapes in Sheol I contain blood and pain. Fear thins the defenses of dreamscapes. When a dreamscape gives a harsh, tainted light it is a signal of distress. When Paige is accessing the æther, she can see dreamscapes around her. They appear as star-like orbs.
The locus amoenus is a peaceful and idyllic place, usually a garden, lawn, or woodland, where safety or comfort can be found. Dreamscapes can take virtually any form, from fields and lakes to rooms, libraries and alleys, but only clairvoyants have color in their dreamscapes.
Your spirit lives, ideally, in the very center of your dreamscape. Clairvoyants, including Rephaim, can consciously access their own dreamscapes when they want to feel safe, and see it as if it's a real place. Voyants can even live in there until they starve to death if they aren't careful. However, the vast majority of them cannot walk away from the central zone without causing massive damage to their sanity. Here's where Paige's gift comes in. Eliza asks Paige to draw her a picture of the dreamscape from a bird's eye view. She would have produced something like the diagram below. Humans build up layers of resistance around their dreamscapes over the years, like a kind of emotional armor.
A person only resembles themselves in their dreamscape if their mind perceives them that way. Usually, a person's outer rings of their dreamscape are full of mirages and hallucinations of that person's fears or regrets. There are no mirrors in a dreamscape.
Zone 1[]
The first ring of consciousness is the sunlit zone. In order to stay sane, most people need to keep their spirit fixed in this zone. The silver cord, the link between body and spirit which keeps a person anchored within their physical form, prevents them from moving away from this zone. It forms a kind of wall around that zone. The spirit staying the sunlight zone is equated with a healthy mind. If a spirit were to drift beyond this zone on a permanent basis, the individual would begin to lose their sanity. The sunlit zone is where beauty, safety, and warmth live.
Zone 2[]
The second ring of consciousness is the twilight zone. When someone is particularly stressed, the silver cord becomes more flexible, and the spirit is able to drift into the twilight zone. An amaurotic would associate this experience with having a nightmare.
Zone 3[]
The third ring of consciousness is the midnight zone.
Zone 4[]
The fourth ring of consciousness is the lower midnight zone.
Zone 5[]
The fifth and final ring of consciousness is the hadal zone. Once you reach the hadal zone, you're too far gone to function. This happens to the Underguard in Chapter 1 of The Bone Season. Paige somewhat accidentally uses her gift to shove his spirit into his hadal zone, effectively destroying his sanity. Specters dwell in this zone. A specter is a manifestation of a person's fears, anxieties, or memories. They appear as silent, spidery figures that crawl in the hadal zone. Most people have at least one. When something "plays on your mind" it is the specters at work. They are projections of one's regrets or anxieties. Their shape is loosely human and somewhere between solid and gas, with skin that seems to slip and slip around smoke. They can't hurt a dream-form, but they can attempt to block their path. A person generally knows which memory is correlated with which specter.
Dream-Form[]
Your projection of yourself in the dreamscape is known as a dream-form. It is the shape taken by a spirit when it's within the confines of a dreamscape. In the æther, a spirit has no form. It's simply a "faceless glimmer," as Paige calls it. You can't see your own dream-form, but you can imagine it looking a certain way if the situation calls for it.
Trivia[]
- Samantha Shannon first got the idea for dreamscapes when she was writing in her mid-teens. It was a type of stage on which recurring dreams played out. She developed it fully when she was studying medieval poetry at university and discovered the term locus amoenus, meaning "pleasant place" in Latin.[1]
- All the rings of consciousness are named after common terms for the light zones in the ocean. The hadal zone, for example, refers to the deepest levels of the ocean, where there is little marine diversity, extreme pressure, and total darkness.
- It is considered rude among clairvoyants to ask what someone's dreamscape looks like.