The Great Dreamer

Before the Dreamlands even existed, Hypnos was just an idea in his mother's head, a creature born of Nyx's vast, cold, unyielding mind. Nyx, the abstract embodiment of chaos and disorder whose very nature was to unravel the tightly woven fabric of reality had one goal: to destroy the Kabbalah, to tear down the Sephiroth and to annihilate the Editors' false belief in order and permanence. She saw in them a monstrous flaw, a misguided attempt to build something eternal from the impermanent, something that could not and should not be. It wasn't hatred or malice that drove her – no, Nyx was too calm, too clinical for that. Her motivation was cold philosophical truth: existence was fundamentally flawed and temporary and all attempts to preserve or perfect it were as futile as a dream.

In this grand design, Nyx had two children, born to be the harbingers of change. Thanatos, her son was death himself, an unyielding force whose purpose was to sever the ties of the narrative and bring the story's conclusion. Hypnos, her other child was different. While Thanatos focused on ending the story, Hypnos was designed to destroy the boundaries of consciousness itself, to unravel the world of dreams and make the distinction between dream and reality meaningless. Together they were meant to be the tools that would help Nyx wage war on the Kabbalah.

The plan was flawed. The Editors, the entities tasked with preserving the balance of creation, fought back with far more force and strategy than Nyx had counted on. They defended the Kabbalah with an iron will, their power crashing down in waves that shattered the dreamlike chaos Nyx had unleashed. As her children fought alongside her, their powers growing, the war raged with an intensity that threatened to consume the very fabric of existence. But in the end, despite their best effort, the rebellion was crushed due to the editors had used fragments from Nevermoon's essence. Nyx calculated and found herself locked away by the Editors, her rebellion failing and her plans to destroy the Kabbalah foiled. But in defeat, Nyx's children remained. Thanatos bound to his nature retreated to the Low Limbo (Da'ath). On the other hand, Hynos, the god born to shape the minds of dreamers, looked for something else. In the aftermath of the chaos, the broken remnants of the world lay before him and Hypnos wandered into them, guided only by his need.

It was then that he found the Dreamlands.

Vast and unstructured, the Dreamlands were a world apart from any other. Where the dreamers who lived there bent and turned the rules of physics and reality, it was a location of inexhaustible fluidity. There were no solid dividing lines here between the realm of sleep and the waking world. Hypnos knew right away the possibilities of the Dreamlands as a location where his power could blossom unimpeded, free of the limiting bonds of the Sephiroth.

Originally Hypnos was new to this territory. It was difficult to manage the Dreamlands; they were erratic, free, and always changing. Though he grasped the concept of dreaming, the Dreamlands were a whole dimension, living and breathing, where dreams bore change to reality and reality itself was an ever-shifting plot rather than just a passive mirror of the subconscious. An outsider here, Hypnos was strong but his first efforts at changing the realm were erratic and short, like pieces of a dream that vanish with the morning light.

But Hypnos was not readily dissuaded. Born of Nyx's will, a creature of great change, he had already tasted defeat once. He now set out to claim the Dreamlands. He started with the patterns and rhythms of the world—how the Dreamfolk, the entities created from the dreams of people, molded their surroundings. He discovered that the Dreamlands were free from the same laws as the waking world, and it is in this freedom that Hypnos started to refine his abilities.

Varied and vivid, the Dreamfolk were each manifestations of humans' dreams. Their subconscious minds shaped their worlds, which were landscapes born from wishes, fears, aspirations, and unanswered emotional sentences. Hypnos discovered how to incorporate his presence into these dreams, not as a threat but rather as a force of delicate influence. He might alter their fantasies, control the environment, even direct the dreamers themselves to fresh insights. Still, compared to the possibilities ahead of him, these were only small triumphs.

Deeper in the Dreamlands, Hypnos found the actual range of his abilities. He recognized that he could form whole worlds, produce great landscapes of nightmares and dreams, and not just control particular ones. At his command, mountains of fear and seas of hope emerged. He mastered the art of spinning complicated narratives, creating tales that transcended space and time, stories that came alive inside the Dreamlands.

Hypnos, though, carried beyond simple control. He started to grasp the core of dreams, their relationship to the waking world, and how he could mold them in ways that would transcend the constraints of both domains. He started inventing whole worlds—spaces of terrible darkness and incredible beauty, where every dream was a tale and every story was a cosmos apart. Throughout the Dreamlands, his control spread and he gradually became the ruler, the great dream designer.

For Hypnos' strength, the real test came when an old entity from outside the Dreamlands wanted to possess the world. Learning of the Dreamlands, this ancient god long forgotten by time wanted to twist it to its will. This deity arose from the blackness of ignored memories and unspoken nightmares instead of from dreams as the Dreamfolk did. It was a being of terrific willpower, able to mold the dreamscape to fit its wants.

The god possessed terrible power. It started to twist the exact character of the Dreamlands, filling the territory with dark and twisted nightmares that would destroy its very fabric. Lost in the ongoing void of fear and hopelessness that the god released upon them, the Dreamfolk started to vanish. Once a world of unlimited potential, dreams now hung on the edge of destruction.

Hypnos was not a mere observer. He ruled the Dreamlands and it was his kingdom to guard. He encountered the old deity at the heart of the Dreamlands, where the dividing line between the dreamscape and the waking life was at its most flimsy. The fight that followed was not one of sheer power but rather one of wills. The ancient god tried to impose its conception of the Dreamlands, filling it with horrors and hopelessness, whereas Hypnos, with his dream mastery, wanted to turn these nightmares into visions of beauty and hope.

Hypnos power resided in his capacity to change the Dreamlands itself. Instantly altering the terrain, he bent the very fabric of the realm to his will, generating huge fields of light and dense woods of calm. He left the gods' dreams trapped inside their creation by turning them into brief visions. Despite its great strength, the god was not prepared for the sheer energy of Hypnos' imagination. Hypnos' will started to overwhelm the god as the struggle went on, and in a final, definitive act he dissolved the god into a dreaming, endless energy, ending with him absorbing it.

The success confirmed Hypnos' dominance of the Dreamlands. Once Nyx's rebellion ceased to be his child, he had become the absolute monarch of the land of dreams. Still, Hypnos was always on guard, knowing his power was not boundless even in his victory. The Dreamlands were enormous, and there always were fresh dreams to create, fresh terrors to face, and fresh obstacles to conquer.

As the story went on, Hypnos kept working in the Dreamlands, trying new things and any random ideas that would pop out of his imagination, driving dreams through the dreaming and shaping the nightmares, and guiding the minds of those who dreamed as well. He got better at getting into people's heads while they slept, getting into their dreams and sort of steering their thoughts. He even made whole groups of Dreamfolk, all coming from the dreams of us humans, and each one had our hopes, worries, and wishes somehow. With him in charge, the Dreamlands took off. It became this place where anything could happen in a dream, and even the worst nightmares could be made a little better.

But Hypnos knew his journey was far from over and he still had a long path to walk, not to mention he still didn't fully feel redeemed for having joined his mother during the Great Eclipse. Despite the inner thoughts, he felt like he was just starting to figure things out. The Dreamlands were huge, and he wanted to keep shaping them. He wanted to make new worlds and deal with whatever came his way. His story wasn't about winning or being the best, but about always getting better—just a long, ongoing thing of learning how dreams work.

So, Hypnos stayed in charge of the Dreamlands, but he wasn't like a mean boss. He was more like someone who makes things, who puts dreams together, and who makes anything seem doable. The Dreamlands were like his blank page, and every time he came up with something, he made new places, new stories, and new things to do. He was always going to be in charge, and in the Dreamlands, you could do about anything you wanted.