Silver’s Unique Magic (pt1)

Silver says that he doesn’t fully understand how his own unique magic works (or even how dreams work), and there seem to be several rules.

We see Silver use his unique magic for the first time in Book 7 when he rescues the prefect and Grim from the darkness of a dream after Malleus has put the island to sleep.

They temporarily appear in a pink-cloud location that Silver calls a “dreamway” and says that, if they become separated there, he is not sure if he would be able to ever find them again.

He explains that he is able to cross between different people’s dreams, but it is not the same as entering someone’s mind, and it doesn’t allow him to choose whose dream he goes into. He is more likely to go into the dream of a person he has a strong tie with.

(He comments on having met Mickey once upon a dream despite how he can normally only enter the drams of people he has some sort of association with, and how it is “doubly curious” that Mickey remembers their past encounter.)

Silver is able to identify the owner of a dream by a special, bird-shaped light that will accompany them, that it seems the others can see as well.

Silver describes dreams as “mental scenery” and “Like a world of imagination made from memories and wishes,” and as one never knows what someone is going to get from a dream beforehand he doubts he would find things related to test questions (for example) if he were to enter a teacher’s dream.

It seems that the “mental scenery” of dreams are not limitless, with Silver explaining that they are unstable mental worlds constructed by the dreamer, and, “When you go off too far from the dreamer, you tend to hit either dead ends or places covered in darkness.” (This will be relevant later 👀)

But it seems that Lilia’s dream was more expansive than Silver had anticipated: when Sebek insists on staying behind with Baul in Lilia’s dream Silver says that he has no idea what will happen if Sebek gets any farther away from Lilia, but there do not seem to be any negative consequences to Sebek staying behind–maybe Lilia being so magically adept means his mental scenery is more expansive than what Silver is used to?