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Dream Entities
"Dream Entities"[7] are beings native to the Oneirosphere that are derived from their hosts' subconscious, acting much like an NPC or AI. Their natures tend to be dependent on their host's mental state, which often determines if they are hostile or friendly.
Unlike other beings in the Oneirosphere, most Dream Entities are not conscious or sapient. Due to their non-conscious nature, many Egregores have employed more passive Dream Entities for various purposes such as manual labour, navigating[8], etc.
Egregores
Egregores[9] are vast hive-mind entities that inhabit the Oneirosphere. Each of them is a separate connected 'collective unconscious' that is fuelled by the brainpower created by sleeping beings connected to the Collective. Any group of connected minds can theoretically be a Egregore, although most Oneiroi tend to be connected to globe-spanning collectives. While most Egregores are completely contained within the Oneirosphere and their Hosts, several have managed to directly interact with reality in some form.
While some Egregores act as one singular consciousness, most of them consist fully autonomous individuals that are simply connected to their Egregores. This varies between Egregores as each of them have their own psychology and degree of influence over their members.
Examples:
- In more individualistic Egregores such as Oneiroi-Noctua, the Egregores's unified consciousness acts separately from its constituents as the combined will of its members.
- In more cohesive Egregores such as the Eunoia Collective, each member is assimilated into a single consciousness. Such cases tend to be much more taxing on their host's mental state, and may even cause damage to the mental stability of people who simply contact them.
Egregores have been known to exist ever since the dawn of civilisation, with many Non-Corporeal Oneiroi claiming that they have existed since the ages before The Great Sleep[10]. Since then, Egregores have existed in everything, with members of countless influential organizations and governments having a connection to an Egregore whether they know it or not.
Despite all of this this, public knowledge of their existence has been relatively limited over the years due to the difficulty of detecting or remembering them, though despite this various organizations have managed to document their existence and activities.
Some Egregores can interact with 'corporeal reality' to a limited degree by contacting individuals through joined dreams or telepathic thoughts. A common occurrence connected to such events are Egregores influencing people to create objects in reality directly linked to them with the purpose of recruiting more 'members'. Such interactions are the most common way that the existence of Egregores has discovered and documented.
List of Known Egregores
Nightmare Hiveminds
Nightmare Hiveminds are temporary Egregore-like hive-mind entities that may form due to the trauma emitted from a corporeal disaster or another widespread traumatic event. These tend to cause vast amounts of destruction in any region they form in until they eventually fade away.
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