This was "way back when", so it was dream world as a mytho-magical parallell place.
> > The dream magicians of the East Isles probably do have
> > an opinion about Kralorela and draconic stuff in
> > general. I guess it's on the line that the Kralorelans
> > do stuff with dreams, but that they aren't aware that
> > that's what they are doing. They are thus not quite in
> > control, playing with fire...
>
> I shall assay an opinion about the converse situation; or maybe just
> pontificate about mysticism in general, you can take this either way: I
> think the Kralori, and/or many 'conventional' mystics would associate
> dreaming with levels of consciousness, in the particular sense of levels
> of apparent reality one can 'wake up from'. They would point out the
> commonplace phenomenon of seeming consciousness/reality in sleep
> (dreams) as being an instance of, or a metaphor for, the ultimate
> unreality of the mundane world. While such experiences are not wholly
> unrelated to the 'real' world, they're just fragmentary, scrambled
> misperceptions of it -- in either case.
I agree that's the official mystic view. Dreams are rather far down the Consciousness scale.
> So back in the original example, I'd say that the Kralori probably
> don't regard Dream Dragons, or indeed the Emperor, as being 'dreams'
> in a strongly literalistic sense -- or at least, not in any more
> than is everything else. Perhaps less so, since a dream dragon, and
> certainly the emperor, is a higher/more fully realized level of
> (draconic) consciousness than Jobo Longs in the street.
Could dream dragons be seen as the result of interpreting dragonhod (a spiritual state) in material terms?
Powered by hypermail