My Love, You Never Failed, Like any Blessing

DREAMS
#Dreams are a thing that humanity shares.  You can dream yourself in someone else's head, you can encounter other people in your own head.  You can switch identities.  Dreams are a patchwork composed of the psyches of the dreamers.

#Sleep to dream.  That's it.  Most people don't leave their own dreams very often, but it's a trick you can learn pretty easily and get reasonably good at with enough practice.

#People do it to do the things that they cannot do during the waking hours.  A lot of trysts happen in dreams, and a lot of violence.  Conspiracies can hatch here with better security than in the waking world, but not perfect security.  You can spy on people pretty well in dreams, too.

#One of the things that people can do to/with one another is terrible and intimate violence, and some folks can do things in dreams that have nothing to do with their capabilities in the waking world.  This sort of thing is very, very hard to prove or prosecute in the waking world as well.  And while you won't know a person killed through dreams, you will know someone who knows someone that they are certain was.

#Nightmares are usually personal things, but spirits can slip into the dreaming world, and if they are friendless and unpleasant enough to try, they can wreck some shit. 

#You may have never seen them, and no one you know may have ever seen them, but someone they know has seen something from the raggedy edges of the dreaming, that might be of humanity, but isn't human or from any human being.  They can be... very unpleasant to meet.

#Cats are good guides in the dreaming, and pretty good at keeping you on the right path, or helping you find your way home.


HELL

#Hell is a subterranean, mostly abandoned palace that runs under, for all we know, all the land and sea.  It's incredibly vast and mostly uninhabited.  It is full of nice furniture, it's warm (kind of hot and dry, actually), and there is always fresh, delicious food and rich things about. 

#Everything in hell has a feeling that humans cannot shake of being hellish.  Every door could have a demon behind it.  Every mouthful of food could turn into ash or wasps or poison at any moment.  Anything you take from hell is immediately identifiable to anyone who looks at it as hellish, and all things of hell give humans a terrible sense of anxiety and unease. 

#Trolls had something to do with the construction of hell, but that's about all we know about that.  Hell's purpose remains a mystery.

#Hell is home to demons and devils.  They are there, but you most likely have never seen either unless you are a very frequent harrower.  Demons are fairly unique, they might be spirits warped by hanging out in hell and they might be native.  It's hard to tell.  Spirits don't willingly go to hell.  Devils are living people who have gotten over the hellish anxiety and live down below.  Most of them are sufficiently evil to have earned the title, but a lot of them are very social and gregarious. 

If you know the right routes through hell, you can travel between points much, much faster than you can via any other method.  That said, transporting large groups through hell always seems to go really, really wrong. 


THE AFTERWORLD

#Ain't ever further than a heartbeat away, baby...  It's a land that is contiguous to the land of the living, and about half of the afterworld is overlaid on about a half of the living world, but the living and the dead find it very hard without special initiation and training to interact with one another.  Furthermore, there is about half of the afterworld not available to the living, unless they have even more specialized training and initiations, likewise half of the living world to the dead.

#Spirits retain some of their interests that they had in life and some of their personality, enough to recognize.  They do, however lose their hunger, sexual desire and fear in death, and so tend to be pretty alien to their living contemporaries.  Spirits value intellectual stimulation and friendship, and those things are what they most crave, as well, in some cases, the ability to continue the living agendas they kept past death. 

#The Afterworld looks a lot like the living world, but the living who can see into the dead precincts and the dead all agree that the afterworld is a lot more scenic and texturally interesting than the living world.  Spirits of the dead tend to resemble the people they were in life at their best, often seen in impressive coats and bearing masks.  Some dead, the really miserable people in life, tend to take on aspects of their worst natures and wear their terrifying masks extensively.  The friendless are malicious spirits who often enjoy tormenting the living.

#Only the 4 or 5 most recent generations of the dead are very active.  Once their lives are forgotten, they tend to get quieter and head for the dead-only hinterlands to hang out.  Eventually, they become the naked invisible, and from there, eventually resolve into the wind of the sky which, when it enters the lungs of a being without a spirit (i.e. anything just born) it collects and becomes a brand new spirit.