Let me tell you something, buddy. We Visions are the original inhabitants of the Dreaming. The Fae and the Lost Souls have shown up in the last two hundred years. The Dead Gods sort of belong here, but it's not like they were made for this place as we were.

So I don’t know. Many of us aren’t too happy about these other races showing up. I mean, the Shaper is supposed to be a Vision. If the title is held by a Lost Soul or something, it just feels weird. I’m not so comfortable knowing that the Dreaming is getting crowded all of the sudden.

So anyway, since you’re new here, let me tell you a bit about the Visions. First off, we aren’t born of flesh and blood like the other races. We’re created by the will of the Dreaming. One day, a Vision will suddenly appear out of nowhere, a fully mature and functioning being, ready to serve the Shaper. Our life-spans can be anything, from an hour to a century, and some get older than that. When we finally stop manifesting, its because we have become one with the Dreaming again. There is no “death” for us, just a return to our roots.

If you cut us, do we not bleed? Sure. And when we’ve bled all the blood in our body, we’re practically zombies. We can’t run, we can’t speak loudly, we can’t use any skills we’ve learned… all we can do is make pleasant conversation and wait for our wounds to heal. If anyone tried to take anything from us at that point, we really wouldn’t have the energy to stop them.

But the beauty is that to “kill” us, you need a weapon that does spiritual damage. Blades of cold iron or silver won’t cut us as deeply as the other races because we can’t bleed to death. But a special weapon that does damage to our essence, that’s a horrible thing indeed. Every time we get hit with a weapon like that, it bleed a bit of our spirit back into the Dreaming. And once we’ve got no spirit left, we disappear, along with all the junk we’re carrying. That doesn’t mean that we’re dead, we’re still around, we just can’t phase back in, at least not right away.

If there’s one thing in on this plane we respect, it’s the Dreaming. And since the Dreaming supports the Shaper, we support the Shaper, especially if the Shaper is a Vision. Even if the Shaper is a complete bastard, we wouldn’t dare take offensive action against him (at least not directly), because if you fail, being exiled from your Dream Country of birth is the most humiliating thing that can happen to a Vision.

So predictably, when someone breaks the Law of the Dreaming, or goes against the word of the Shaper, we take it personally. It’s our responsibility to bring these guys in and give them the punishment they deserve.

Our ability to phase out is a nice one. I tell you, it’s saved my ass more than a few times. When we phase out, we go into the dreams of mortals. There, we are the storytellers and poets and artists that inspire, terrify, confuse, or arouse them. And maybe, one day, we’ll understand what makes them tick. If we never figure out mortals, the Dreaming is doomed.

Another common trait of the Visions is our Dreamstones. This is our soul in gemstone form. We must keep our Dreamstone on us at all times, because without it, we are nothing. If a Vision loses his Dreamstone, he will wander aimlessly, confused and motivation-less. It’s like taking away our goals. If our Dreamstone is destroyed, we will feel it deep within us. Luckily, we can channel our essence into creating a new one, but only if the previous one has been broken. Taking a Vision’s Dream Stone is one of the worst things you can do to us. The sad irony is that Dreamstones can be used to make spiritual weapons which can banish us from the Dreaming for a period of time.

Yeah, the Dreaming has been dying slowly for millennia. With the coming of the Dark Sides, it hasn’t been any easier. I personally think that the coming of the Fae is only moving us closer to the end… I know if the Fae had their way, they’d turn this place into their home-plane. They already lost one, why not move in here, right?

As you probably know, there are three breeds of Visions. There are the Weavers, the Nightmares, and the Succubi. For the most part, we get along and stick together.

The Weavers (that’s my kind) are really the most neutral of the Visions. They create and shape the Dreaming in hopes that one day we’ll figure out what it is that humans want. So we keep building the Dreaming up like we see the Waking World in their dreams, and one day we’ll figure out why they build it like that. The Weavers are fascinated by this stuff – architecture, art, music, poetry, the creative processes.

The Nightmares have a bad reputation, but they’re not evil. They’ve just learned how to feed themselves out of people’s pain, terror, and hatred. This doesn’t mean that they’re evil, it just means they have a predator’s mind. They will sometimes stand by the edge of a fight and just siphon the negative energy out of the combatants, using it to make themselves stronger. When they do this, you can see them throwing little bolts of dark energy at their targets, and then the energy zipping back like a firefly into the Nightmare.

The Succubi are seducers. They’re beautiful creatures, and they know it. For the most part, they’re female, but male Succubi have been known to exist (called an Incubus, not a Succubus). The Succubi revel in the flesh, and we don’t particularly mind. Some like frilly girly stuff, like satin and lace, but many like the more leather-gothic beauty they see in mortal’s desires.