“What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”

Nightmares and Dreamscapes (Stephen King)

Dream is a manifestation of Jo's subconscious. The centre as we know it is Spindle, where Muses live. The wider geography of Dream is accessed through Hub, where doors lead to various Vignettes along the Dream Connectome.

The non-linear route that connects all the stories Jo has known throughout their life. It spreads out like a series of connections from the Hub in Spindle as its centre. Stories which Jo thinks a lot about and are at the forefront of their mind will be positioned closer to the centre, their doors within Hub becoming easier to access, closer to Hub's entrance, and the Vignette Dreamscape is large with details rendered in high definition. As one travels further out through the Connectome, Vignettes of less well-known or forgotten stories will be barren with less detail and structure to their backgrounds, and most of it may seem like an uninhabited jungle, dungeon or desert depending on the story the Vignette represents. These Vignettes likely cannot be accessed through a door in Hub and can only be found by travelling through a Transition within a Vignette.

Beyond even these less well-remembered dreams lies the wilder dreamscape of Far Dream. Here, the thoughts, memories and plots that Vignettes are made from erode like sediment; reshaped and compacted by great psychotectonic forces into a more natural-seeming landscape. Some parts of Far Dream take the form of austere mesas and scrublands, or forbidding forests, or bitterly cold tundra - but in each case, they get more mountainous the further out you get. Here and there, amidst the wilderness, large chunks of forgotten Vignette are found relatively intact - grains of sand around which narrative pearls solidify and accrete.

Far Dream is, by all accounts, a spectacularly dangerous place. Wild and otherworldly Impressions pad, flap and squirm in valleys that have never seen the warm light of Spindle, while impressions and Muses desperate not to Fade lurk in old, shattered Vignettes, hungering for Juice and relevancy once again. The frontier outpost of Between-Wake-And-Sleep has recently been established, and offers ready access to Jo's memories of surreal fiction and literary postmodernism - though few who head out there have returned.

Nonetheless, Far Dream also represents a fantastic source of riches for prospectors, explorers, and narrative scientists. NFWS use their advanced sensory equipment to home in on rich seams of Tropes, and Union expeditionary parties strike out to hew them from the earth, colonising new and lesser-known Vignettes. The Tropes they mine are often decidedly odd - whacky, surreal devices that owe as much to dream logic as Jo's regular reading material - but they are often valuable and serve as useful sources of Juice to keep Spindle going.