slatestarscratchpad:

Here’s a fantasy setting I’d vaguely like to do something with.

There are two worlds, Wake and Dream. Wake is our own world. Dream is another world people go to when they sleep. It’s similar enough to our world - maybe it has the same land masses, maybe not. The laws of physics and economics and so on are definitely similar. It’s not some kind of constantly shifting mist-realm where you create things by believing in them, or anything like that. You’ve got all the same social and economic pressures and so on.

People pop into existence in Dream by their mother’s side the first time they go to sleep as an infant. After that they can travel through Dream the same way they would travel through Wake. Every time they appear in Dream, they’re in the same place they were when they left Dream the night before. This means that even if there are corresponding locations in Dream and Wake (eg the landmasses are the same), you might be in different places in each world. If you die in Wake, you disappear from Dream forever. If you die in Dream, you have deep dreamless sleeps for the rest of your life in Wake.

Nobody in Wake remembers the existence of Dream. They just wake up each morning with a collection of jumbled images they forget after a few minutes. But everyone in Dream has full memories of their waking life. Each night they appear in Dream and suddenly remember “Oh, right, instead of just having one life I actually have two, only one of which I can remember during the daytime”.

There’s no reason people’s dream lives have to be like their waking lives - but plausibly they would be. If you went to medical school in Wake, you might as well be a doctor in Dream too. This suggests that Dream doesn’t have much of an education system, since it’s more efficient to be educated in Wake and get education that persists through both lives.

But by the same token, Dream is more technologically advanced than Wake; Dream Einstein remembers all the discoveries he made during waking life and can spread them to Dream, but he also has decades worth of nights to think up more discoveries that never make it to the waking world. There should be on average about twice as many books/songs/poems by each of your favorite authors/musicians/poets in Dream, since Dreamers remember all the waking ones but can create more of their own.

Even if Dream has different land masses, there’s no reason to think the countries would be the same. As a reductio ad absurdum, if the countries were the same up until some dramatic battle, the Dream armies would know what tactics the Wake armies used in that battle the day before and would change their plans based on that knowledge. That means the battles can have different outcomes and the political histories can diverge. But they shouldn’t diverge too much. Dreamers still have their memories of being American or Russian or whatever, and they might feel patriotism toward their waking nations and try to expand them into the dreamworld, or subvert nations too far away from their ideals. Even if the Soviets win the Cold War in Dream, a lifetime of absorbing modern ideas about capitalism is going to make it hard for the Dreamers to really go all out with the communism thing. Or maybe if the propaganda is good enough they’ll just feel sorry for their poor deluded waking selves, who will never realize the glory of socialism. It could go either way.

Although the same people might tend to succeed in Dream and Wake just based on natural talent, it would be hard to directly transfer success from one to the other. A man who strikes oil in Dream would have no way of sending any of his money or status to the waking world; a man who strikes oil in Wake might become a bit famous in Dream and find a way to capitalize on that, but would have no other advantages.

Can anyone think of any more interesting or unexpected dynamics that might come up in a world like this?