Glossary

There are times when I use esoteric vocabulary in my blog posts, as I'm in the habit of inventing my own terms for concepts and images that appear in my dreams. This glossary details what I actually mean when I use such terms.

• Astral Plane (usually capitalized): A localized universe in the larger ethereal dreamspace. There are many and they are wildly diverse. Some Planes are relatively similar to our own physical universe in terms of physics and appearance. However, in others, the rules are different. For example, in one Plane there might be no universal force of gravity, though entities may be capable of altering their velocities at will, while in another everything comes in stark solid colors, while in yet another your head might be spontaneously transformed into another form for some reason. The exact number of Astral Planes is unknown.
• Demolition: The process by which a mind breaks up dream-entities and causes them to revert into their constituent ether.
• Dream Notes: Notes that I write shortly after waking from a dream to help me remember the dream. Sometimes these notes are relatively detailed and end up translated into a semi-fictionalized narrative based upon the dream. At other times, the notes are fairly vague and end up seeming like strange incoherent ramblings even to me.
  
• Dream-entity: Any object that exists within a dreamspace.
  
• Dreamspace: A particular space in which dreams exist, develop, and are experienced by consciousnesses, and which is populated by dream-entities.
  
• Ether: The base material out of which ethereal entities are formed, including all of the visual and material objects that exist within dreamspaces and hypothetical universes.
  
• Gaum: A particular species of monster that hails from an Astral Plane called Swale. They appear to be social creatures, but little is known about their society or even the extent to which they are, in fact, social. Physically, they are humanoid, roughly the size of humans, but menacingly slender with dry, light grey skin, pitch black eyes with no visible pupils or irises, and long claws on their hands. From all accounts, they seem to be the primary unit comprising the armies of some great evil commander, and they also seem to be completely loyal to that master's agenda. They have proven to be violent and merciless creatures and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.
• Skeleton: The structural foundation upon which a subconscious mind builds up more detailed dream-entities.
  
• Ubiquitous Tree: In Computer Science, there is a data structure called a tree, which effectively organizes data into a form that resembles a tree. It consists of nodes, each of which have a unique parent node and any number of child nodes. A tree also has a unique root node that has no parent node. Nodes that have no children are referred to as leaf nodes. See the figure below for an example.
  
  
  A Ubiquitous Tree (often abbreviated to U-Tree) is simply one such structure, except that no branch has a leaf node. This means that the branches extend infinitely in every direction, filling whatever universe the U-Tree happens to exist in, which tends to be an ethereal universe, such as a dreamspace or a hypothetical universe.
  
• Universe: An entire body of space and all entities that exist within. A Universe can be material, such as our own physical Universe, or ethereal, such as dreamspaces and hypothetical universes.