Cayce was upside down, and he couldn't much say that he cared for it...The sound of screaming metal that appeared to be filling the world was the sound of Patterson's beloved Jaguar rolling over and skidding and finally stopping. They had plowed into a mailbox.
"Stanzi. John. are you O.K.?
no answer.
" Hey! wake up, guys. the Men in Black will be here any second"
A low moaning marked Constanzi's position.still no answer from Patterson, not good.
"Stanzi...Stanzi wake up!"
"Urrrm, John you stupid Pentaho.Ow!"
"Stanzi!"
"Justin? madre de dios, Justin! John's hurt!"
An icy calm that Justin only felt in the thick of combat settled over him.
"Is he conscious?"
"No."
"Shit, he's the only one of us with life Magick...Is your laptop O.K? Is it running?"
"Yes."
"Find me a Hospital," A car door slammed, a pair of black wingtips approached, "and Hurry.."
* * *
The hallway floor was very cool and invitingly stable. Constanzi considered passing out on it. Her vision was a bit blurry and her head was clanging but even so, her adrenaline wrenched her into an upright position. Justin was already up and running.
" You! I've got a trauma case outside and I need a gurney and a crash cart Stat!"
" Are you a doctor?"
"Question me later rookie! this guy has multiple chest fractures. JUMP!"
Orderlies started moving in every direction. Stanzi was amazed. With a practiced and precise grace, they moved John into the E.R. and began ministering to him.
Justin was in the corner putting on a pair of rubber gloves.
"Are you nuts?" she whispered as she approached, "you don't know anything about medicine."
Justin looked up at her with a stranger's eyes. " You're right. Justin doesn't know anything about medicine....Now get out of my way and let me work."
There is little known and little used background in Mage, it's called Dream. Sure you've heard of it. Ever used it? O.K. maybe but have you really thought about it? Like all ill-defined things it is more than ripe for abuse, So...here, in a nutshell, is a nuts and bolts guide to a poorly understood game Mechanic.
The Collective Unconscious:
There are theories. Of course, as long as we have Hermetics, we are always going to have theories. Among Tradition Mages it tends to go like this:
"There is this deep place within the vast collective unconscious wherein all knowledge great and small resides...it finds its expression in the lives of spirits and mortals. Some call it the Maya, some call it the Dreamtime. Only those who can reach this place with their mind and touch it with their spirit may petition it for the knowledge it holds. Because it resides deep within all things it can and does act through many agents and in some cases will act in a completely unpredictable manner. But it will always nourish those who seek to know."
-a purposefully anonymous Dreamspeaker.
In some form or another, this is basically what most tradition Mages teach their pupils who possess this weird-even-for-a-mage ability. With some variations of course....Euthanatos, Verbena, Akashics, Dreamspeakers, Ecstatics, and most Hermetics subscribe to the above. Celestial chorus, Enochian Hermetics, Kabbalistic Hermetics, and Batini Mages tend to view the process as the will of the divine working through the individual. This, they say, is why you sometimes get weird results. There may be some truth to this theory as well.
Technomages, who as a rule do not consider the collective unconscious sentient and don't believe in God, seek to explain the phenomena itself. Virtuals, Etheric Mages and some Void engineers call this "Comparative processing". the basic reasoning is this; by comparing a situation or problem to every piece of data in my mind and looking for patterns and similarities, I can find solutions to situation and problems that I have no direct knowledge or experience of. (While this reasoning might seem specious, I can tell you from experience that it does in fact work in a limited way. I am an absolute machine at any form of standardized testing because of it. Although it is a stretch to say that because I can repair an outboard motor, so I ought to be able to perform thoracic surgery. Course...I'm not a Mage)
In some cases there Technomages fall back on the idea that all principles and axioms are the same and that gives them the paradigmatic nudge they need. Progenitors have even posited the theory that the proteins that make up our D.N.A. have an unknown capacity for information, that past life experiences are made up from bits and pieces of ancestor memory and that each human being potentially carries the sum of the knowledge of his family tree. This theory has yet to be tested. Of the conventions, Iteration X eschews all theorizing on the subject as the Computer seeks to become a Collective Conscious....Iterators with Dream as a background are very rare and are usually considered a wild element.
Nephandi Mages take a typically inverted view of the Collective unconscious. They say that the knowledge that they receive is from Oblivion which contains all the knowledge that has ever been lost. While some Euthanatos and some Dreamspeaker are fascinated by the idea they still subscribe to an active rather than a passive force in the cosmos.
Nobody really knows what the Marauders think about the subject but it is a known fact that Dream comes frighteningly easy to them and there are very few who do not have it.
The Real Story:
If you already have the Book of Worlds, then you already know a few things about the Maya and the astral realms. When a Mage accesses his Dream ability he is basically manipulating the underlying structure of the Maya as it relates to him. Naturally, he does both consciously and unconsciously...(it takes an effort of will to achieve but the Mage has no idea how he is doing it or why it chooses to manifest as it does.)
As has been noted in other places sometimes a dreaming Mage will ask for one thing and get something else which may or may not help. Because of the fluid nature of the Maya, and because of the power of the Mages avatar, The Maya must respond but it may respond with whatever tools it has to hand. This usually depends on the specificity of the requested knowledge.
- A desperate Mage reaches out with his mind for enough brawl knowledge to keep from getting his fool ass killed. Nearly every person on earth has been in fight or two so the knowledge leaps into the mind of the Mage and he gets to walk out instead of being carried out.
- a Mage who cannot read Babylonian finds that he must decipher a clay tablet, he calls on the dream score and finds that a linguistic spirit arrives and gives him the knowledge he seeks.
- a Mage who seek knowledge about a particular vampire finds that he is channeling an 18th-century witch hunter. This kind of knowledge borrowing can get very nasty, very quick.
Mages and spirits and wraiths, Oh my!:
The Maya may work through these disparate beings because they each share one thing in common...they sleep and they dream... occasionally spirits and Wraiths must deal with a phenomenon called "Yanking" it has even been posited that Mages who go into Quiet are being "Yanked" themselves. As it happens, a Mage with a high dream score can sometimes make friends with the entities they are borrowing knowledge from or they can make bitter mortal enemies out of them. In almost all cases, many times when a spirit or wraith manifest they are completely unaware of the Mage and unless the Mage has spirit Magick and knows what to look for he will generally be unaware of what is going on too. Awareness of the spirit usually means that the Mage has at least spirit 1 and notices that his own aura has taken on few different colors. ( It should be noted that working spirit Magick on a spirit while you are using Dream to channel him is usually considered an attack, and will awaken the spirit in question who will usually be as mad as a wet chicken. Prime Magicks also have a small chance to awaken them but this is usually much gentler. Spirits like quintessence and awakening to the movement of quintessence can at times put them in a good mood.
Benefits of Dream:
1) An easy way to pick up common lore:
The example above is a good way to illustrate how useful Dream can be in an emergency. But, Dream has other, simpler uses...It is a good way for Mages to pick up languages, not just the languages of countries, but those of the Romani, the howling and barking of Garou language, the languages of computers, and in some cases languages even more esoteric. It's an excellent way for an Etheric Mage to pick up a scientific discipline that he is unfamiliar with for fast use or long research that verges into unfamiliar territory.
Another good way for this ability to be used is to do research. Here's an example;
A Virtual Adept wants to know about Vampires. He takes a few days of staying at home and using Dream to channel information about vampires, and then writing it all down on the old laptop. While the knowledge of Vampire lore fades every night, the data itself does not. As the character encounters more vampires his knowledge of them becomes more complete and fills in some blanks and inaccuracies.He has a ready made library of information that he can draw on and sooner or later that information starts to impress itself on the conscious mind as well. In this way, a player can either choose for the character to halve the cost of the talent, skill, or knowledge or he can choose to spend the full points on it, all at once, up to the limit of the dream score. (At the ST's discretion of course.)
While Dream is an excellent way to pick up pieces of knowledge, It is also good for picking up skills and abilities of a physical nature. This has unique advantages but also unique disadvantages. Channeling brawl is easy but channeling Ballet dancing is not. Channeling guitar is simplicity itself for someone who already plays another instrument and while the technical moves might still remain in the memory, the muscle memory does not. This is why, whenever channeling a strenuous physical activity a Mage must make a stamina roll against a difficulty of 8. Only one success is required. failure on this roll might mean a cramp or lingering stiffness perhaps even a sprain. A botch on this roll might result in torn ligaments or something broken. While it might seem risky to use this ability some Akashics and Euthanatos swear by this method. In their hands, an unfamiliar weapon or some found object becomes deadly.
2) Recovery of lost lore:
Among Mages, this is known as "Knowledge Dowsing". While this is an invaluable tool to some Mages it is not without its perils as I'll explain in a bit. At times this ability can be used to unearth lost languages, lost history, or even lost geography(!) There have been some cases of people channeling dead persons and writing symphonies while under the influence of "Automatic Writing" Most Mages write these episodes off as a Wraith ability called "Skinriding" but this is not always the case.
3) Past life contact:
There have been documented cases of Mages who have gone to channel an ability and found that they possessed it in a past life and then finding that they are beginning to remember things of that life while that knowledge is being channeled... As any Game master who reads this will realize, this is not always a good thing. While Euthanatos, Verbena, and Akashic Mages seem to have fewer problems in that respect even they are not immune and any Widderslainte who peers back into their other lives is in for a horrifying ride. Etheric Mages and Virtuals sometimes have to battle past lives to remain in the traditions. This is basically a door that the game master may choose to open at any time and in some ways, it can very good or bad for the character. At times solving old past life conflicts can help with the struggle for Arete or it can help psychological problems disappear but it can also be an invitation for the former life to Shanghai the present life. Be warned.
Perils of Dream:
1) Susceptibility to outside influences:
When a Mage opens himself to dreaming, he is essentially dropping most of his spiritual defenses to act as an antenna for whatever the Maya sends. Some entities know this or can sense this. For this reason and this reason only it is unwise to attempt to use dream near a Nihil or a severely Wyrm infested area. When a Mage uses Dream, his ability to fight off external possession is reduced by 2 for the purposes of resisting Puppetry, Domination, or Possession charms of spirits or other forms of coercion. The only exception to this is Mind Magick. The dream users spiritual defenses may be dropped but this does not mean that his mental shields are disabled at all. However this can be circumvented with spirit Magick and/or some spiritual help. Mages with a dream score of 4 or above find that their auric fields are particularly thin... as such, they often have a permanent -1 for resistance even when not using their dream score. When they use it, they are also subjected to the -2 penalty.
2) Specificity breeds problems:
One thing that most Mages who have studied this phenomena can readily attest is that the more specific the knowledge sought, the more problems can arise. Mages who suppose that Dream is an easy road to lost lore often end up in extended Quiets. Let me give you a couple of examples. Lets say that your Mage wants to channel Chinese, Since there are billions of people who speak Chinese, this language just drops into his mind and he can speak it like a native. Lets say that this same Mage need to decipher something written in ancient Mayan, since this knowledge is known by maybe a hundred living people, the Mage is most likely to be contacted by a deceased Mayan, or a linguistic epiphling, and the Mage might take on certain elements of that spirit personality for the duration...and sometimes beyond. Lets say that the Mage wants to decipher a strange stone tablet with old glyph marking that predate mankind. Since no human ever knew that language, the Maya channels something that did... the Mage then screams "Purple hairy SPIDERS!", drives his fingers into his eyes and then starts tearing Doissetep keep apart stone by stone....
You run into the same problems with knowledge as it becomes more personal. lets return to the example of the virtual adept who wants to know about vampires. If he just wants to know general vampire lore he's liable to get it free. If he wants to know about the vampires of a particular place or group he might end up channeling the City Father Totem of that city or he might " yank "some spirit that has links to the group, in the case of Giovanni or Samedi this will probably be a ghost, in the case of thaumaturgically adept vampires, some other type of spirit might be yielded. In some cases the knowledge might come from the sleeping mind of a ghoul close to the group or clan. This can be a disaster if the sleeping ghoul is from one of the Sabbat ghoul families as many of them are thoroughly bent if not outright insane. If the Virtual adept wants to know information about one particular vampire he definitely runs the risk of channeling someone slain by that vampires and maddened by years or decades of frustration. Worse, if the Vampire has Necromancy as a discipline, word may get back to him. The Mage might even be unwittingly influenced by the necromancer through the wraith.(hey, are you frightened yet?)
3) The Oneira:
Some of the dream lords have a vested interest in certain types of knowledge, while Channeling Mages do not have an effect on the Maya itself, some of the Oneira take a keen interest in the kinds of knowledge that goes out especially if it is part of their particular bailiwick. One Oneira was known to hunt a particular Mage for stealing lost stories from the Maya. The Oneira sometimes take a notice in the antics of particular Mages and ultimately it is an incredibly bad idea to annoy them as you gotta sleep sometime.
It is rumored, that the Oneira also protect some knowledge from being accessed. The Akashic Record possesses a legend about a contingent of their Mages that traveled into the Maya and consulted a Chinese Oneira about the best way to keep others from learning the roots of Do. The Oneira, was paid a tribute,(what this was is different in each version of the legend) and in return he has kept that knowledge safe. Apparently, this is an extremely rare procedure and there are only a bare half dozen things that are flatly not accessible by the use of Dream. Few even know what they are. Do is one. Knowledge of Iteration X's Computer Root commands is another. (no-one is sure exactly how they pulled this off.) The lost spirits of the Bunyip, Croatan and the past lives of Silent Striders also remain lost in the mists of the Maya. No one knows who guards them.
* * *
Justin was tired as he stripped off the gloves. Constanzi had gotten a Verbena friend to prepare a few things and as soon he was taken to his room they would minister to him and then get the hell out of there.
"Are you O.K?" She queried, " You went a little weird there for a minute."
" I got a surgeon who died a few years ago, he knew the hospital. He's still sort of in here."
Stanzi shivered. "Is that good or bad?"
"Well..." He grinned, " You see that cute nurse over there?"
"Yeah. So."
" Well, I plan to ask her out."
"Why."
" Cause I remember what she was like in bed. The Doc did a good deed for John, and now I'm going to do a good deed for him...and me."
"Pig."
" All part of the service." Justin Cayce said as he smiled and walked away.
