If you were sure your world doesn't care about science done outside of it I could grab things, but I am in fact very sciency in my day to day life.

I'm not sure about that at all. It could have been all the Valar, Fëanáro might die instantly if he sets foot - I think I still have their slow-aging thing that they gave me unless I'm just one of those people who keeps looking eighteen for the duration of their twenties - wouldn't risk it.

Yeah.

I got the slow aging, too, from Orome, but I'm pretty sure it didn't stick when I died and came back.

I - don't remember all the spells I invented in detail but I should be able to retrace my steps once I can - had some healing spells, wasn't prioritizing anti-aging but I can probably get somewhere on it before you die - my world doesn't have it but my world's fumbling around compared to experiment-aided development, it's amazing we have as much as we do -

Yeah, if you can't do science it's pretty impressive you've got the infrastructure you've implied.

We can do observational research. We can get value out of practice effects. Occasionally one of the unfairly powerful things is in a good mood.

Yeah, not miraculous or anything, just impressive.

I think it helps that there's lots of people, lots of kinds of people, lots of ways of thinking that get different results in aggregate without being too systematic to suit the world.

That does make sense.

It's not a bad standard of living in developed countries these days, if you're not too ambitious - or if your ambitions involve hitting things with swords, that also works for a lot of people - if I'd never fallen into Valinor I could have lived out my life there and it wouldn't have been great but it would have been okay.

But you did, and you--outgrew that.

Yep, and had to shove myself back into my box on no notice - they didn't even let me pack - I would've gone quietly if they'd just sent me to the Outer Lands -

Obviously when you die you can't take anything with you but at least I get dreamshaping replicas of my stuff since I mostly got my past life back in dreams and, like, science.

How does dreamshaping work?

In my original world when you have really intense dreams sometimes you get involuntary sympathetic reactions--like, if you're having a really intense nightmare that takes place in a swamp, your bed might start dripping swamp ooze--and with training you can learn to do something similar voluntarily. That's a massive oversimplification--she plays the memory of miscellaneous Feanorians interrogating her over her magic system.

Can you already lucid dream?

I wish.

Does it not interact right or do you just not know how?

I wasn't aware it was a thing you could learn, I thought it just--happened or didn't?

It's learnable, at least on my world, it's easier for subtle artists but other people can pick it up - Fëanáro wanted to learn but he doesn't sleep enough to practice -

I sleep plenty, it's important when your magic is dream-based. How do you do it?

You develop a really strong habit of checking things that dreams don't do reliably - like text, or checking clocks - to the point where you also check them when you're dreaming, and then if you notice a discrepancy asleep you can notice you can pivot into lucidity from there, although sometimes at first you just wake up instead.

I usually wake up when I notice I'm dreaming, she agrees. It's happened a few times.

Takes practice. If this seems like a really high-return possibility I can put people to sleep by subtle arts.

Being able to control my dreams would be pretty big, yeah. If I could have done that in Valinor we wouldn't have needed to steal the ships because I could have made them after looking hard enough. I mean, maintaining them the whole way across would have been tricky, but not impossible.