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Noddlings
Name: Noddlings
Type: Creature
Habitat: Inside sleep itself. Most often found in the dreams of those sleeping in or near the Drowsy Downs
Core Thread: Imagination, with a strong vein of Memory
Temperament: Gentle, drowsy, curious, and entirely harmless
Themes: Dreams, Record, Rest, Wonder, Care
"Shh. Don't wake up yet. I'm nearly finished with this bit."
-- A Noddling, in someone's dream
Noddlings are small, soft, sleepy creatures who live inside sleep itself. No one has ever seen a Noddling awake, and the Noddlings are not entirely sure there is such a thing. They drift from one sleeper's dream to the next the way a moth drifts between lanterns, arriving quietly, staying a while, and leaving before anyone thinks to wonder who they were.
A Noddling is round and downy, about the size of a folded pillowcase, with long, drooping ears that hang like the tassel of a nightcap, and eyes that are never more than half open. They greet one another, and the dreamers they visit, with a single slow nod, which is where their name comes from. They speak very rarely, and only in whispers.
Every Noddling carries a patch of cloth, a needle, and a tangle of coloured thread. In every dream they visit, they sit quietly in a corner and stitch a small record of what they find: a colour, a shape, a laugh, the way the light fell, a single bright moment. They never stitch the whole dream. Only the part they liked best.
When a Noddling's patch is full, it carries it out of sleep through the Waking Edge of the Drowsy Downs at dawn, and hands it to the Elder Reverie, Keeper of the Quiet Quilt. She sews each one into the Quilt, the vast patchwork of fields at the heart of the Downs. Over countless ages, the Noddlings' patches have become the land itself. The Drowsy Downs, they like to say, are made entirely of other people's dreams, and they should know, because they stitched them.
Noddlings are rarely in any danger, but they are sometimes caught out. When a sleeper wakes suddenly, the Noddling inside their dream tumbles straight out of it, and lands, blinking and bewildered, in the grass of the Downs, where it must wait until the next dusk to find its way back into sleep. Travellers in the Downs sometimes find one at dawn, dozing in a hedgerow with a half-finished patch, and it is considered very good luck to let it sleep undisturbed.
Where the Void touches the Downs, the Dreamfrost falls: a thin, silver frost under which dreams go still and pale. A Noddling caught inside a frosted dream finds nothing left to stitch, and the patches that come out of the Dreamfrost are blank. For a creature whose whole life is recording what others dream, there is no sadder thing than an empty patch, and the Noddlings have begun, very quietly, to leave the frosted places behind.
Noddlings are the gentle, whimsical heart of the Drowsy Downs. They suit a waking and dreaming mechanic: they appear only in the dream layer, and their patches can be found, followed, or recovered as a way of piecing a dream, or a region, back together.
For contributors, Noddlings are a charming, harmless presence for any dream-set quest or StoryQuest, and a natural way to show what the Dreamfrost takes. As with everything in the Downs, sleep must always mean rest and renewal, never death (see the note for contributors on The Drowsy Downs).
- The Drowsy Downs - their home, and the Quiet Quilt they stitch
- Reverie - Keeper of the Quiet Quilt, who sews their patches in
- If - patron of dreams and imagination
- Hushrooms - their watchful neighbours in the Downs
- The Void - and the Dreamfrost it brings