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Meromo

2025-06-23T23:17:39Z

Poswob Rare: /* The Crystals enter the coalition */

In 3348, the nation of [[Meromo]] was born. It was a nation founded by '''Mammans''' (originally from [[Kava]] and [[FILTER]]) who had settled in an area they at first called '''Putu Lake'''. The governing party called itself the '''Plumes'''.

==Language==
:''See edit history for Sapeepa-specific details.''
Because the founders of Meromo were exiles from [[Kava]], they had the same language as Kava. In their civilization, every nation was considered to have its own language, even if it may be nearly identical to some other closely related language. Thus people began to speak of "the Meromo language", not merely the Meromo dialect of the Kavan language.

Kava's linguistic histoiry was cpmplex. They spoke either a [[Paleo-Pabappa]] language, a [[FILTER]] language, or both.

Since Kâlika is not Dreamland, it is possible that there were no significant populations of Dreamlandic speakers in Meromo.

There was also an alliance between "Teupí" and "Cila" against [[Tarwas]] in the mid-3300s. (See Book_H.doc .) Dreamland did not exist yet, so the Teupí referred to here is entirely of Kava stock. Tarwas wins and enslaves the Teupi, but it is not clear whether they conquered their enemies or merely drove off the invasions.

''THis also proves that Kâlika is '''NOT''' Dreamland.''
==Early history==
In 2371, the [[Gold_Empire#Western_Pabaps|Lazy Palms]] tribe, a subgroup of the [[Paba]]p people, declared war on Nama and invaded the aboriginal homeland of Kava. They promised no end to their war until they had secured an independent homeland. Their home nation, Paba, denounced the Lazy Palms' new war but, because of their pacifist tradition, they also refused to help Nama fight off the invaders.

The Lazy Palms' native name was ''Pūgaya''. They dressed in white and were the only example of Lenians ever referring to themselves as "white people". Earlier, they had been nudists, but as they pushed northwards into mountainous territory, they realized they needed to wear clothes to protect themselves from the elements.

However, the Palms also saw themselves as one with nature, and allowed wolves to live within their settlements, and refused to burn tracts of forest that housed other dangerous animals. The wolves never attacked them, but many Palms were eaten by wildcats.

===Early contacts with outside peoples===
The Palms declared loyalty to a distant Lenian tribe called '''Čappini'''. Then, the dark-skinned '''Nik''' tribe, based in southwestern Paba, signed an alliance with the Palms. Soon, a troop of 250 [[Crystals]] moved to Kava and set up a pig farm that occupied half of Kava's coastland. The Palms had promised their settlers that they would allow no foreign peoples to occupy their land, but their military was too weak to expel the Crystals, and so they were forced to sign a treaty with the Crystals declaring that the Palms and Crystals were allies.

Lastly, the [[FILTER|Oysters]] (FILTER) signed a pact with Kava, hoping that Kava would allow the Oysters to move in and use Kava as a pathway to a further invasion of [[Nama]]. The Oyster language soon became the dominant language of Kava.

Nama was not officially pacifist, but that was only because its imperial government was so liberal that it allowed its subject nations to go their own way on nearly every issue, and Nama rarely fought wars because there were few wars that all of its subject nations, or even a majority of them, could all find common interest in. Moreover, Nama had a very small coastline for such a large empire, and this seacoast happened to be cut off from the rest of Nama by the world's tallest mountain range. Thus, although Nama's south coast was strongly defended navally, any invading army who managed to slip past that barrier would face almost no resistance from Nama's land army unless they wished to push beyond even the mountains into the rolling plains to the north.

The Palm invaders had an advantage because they were ancestrally Pabaps, and most trading ships visiting Nama at this time were Pabap ships. Thus, the Palm army actually originated as naval pirates who took Pabap trading shapes and then headed for Nama claiming to be the traders they had killed. Even though they knew that Paba would be horrified when the news broke, and would likely be punished severely by Nama, the Palm pirates had sworn off all allegiance to Paba, and indeed, all allegiance to anyone but each other.

They pushed their way through the Naman navy entirely unopposed, and immediately began a land invasion of Kava. Unlike many Naman nations, Kava had only one major race of people, which meant that there were no internal divisions to exploit in order to weaken them. But the Palms nonetheless easily conquered the entire nation of Kava with just the small army they had brought over on board their fake trading ships. Although the Palms found the native Kavan women attractive, they were forbidden to marry them, and so at first the population of Kava grew slowly. (They did not generally kill aboriginals, seeing them as even weaker than the Pabaps back home and therefore not a serious threat.) Kava was very poor, since they had brought none of the wealth of Paba with them. They were nudists even during winter except for a few who had settled in the small area of Kava that was mountainous, and even these people only wore skirts and crop-tops, often taken from native women.

Nama was so weak by this time that they never even mounted a counterattack on Kava; they only offered to resettle the Repilian aboriginals in poorer areas of upland Nama. Kava was not surprised; Nama had also done nothing when the [[FILTER]] army carved out an even larger Naman state, Nèye, in 2246. Nor did Nama punish Paba, as Paba had quickly denounced the war and promised that Kava would never become an ally of Paba even if they repented and became pacifists in the future.

Although Kava and FILTER shared the same handicap of having secure borders on land but no navy, both were primarily interested in settling the interior of the continent, even if it meant eventually losing their coastline in a war similar to the "war" they had fought against the defenseless Repilian aboriginals to get in. <ref>Might actually have been Sukuna, not Repilians. If it was Repi;lians, this would be a rare exception to the rule that Repilian tribes do not have any south coastal settlements in this area.</ref>

===Early Crystal Empire (Nèye)===
THe [[Crystals]] had originated from the slave plantations of [[Star Empire|Lobexon]]. Technically, they had arisen before Lobexon was enslaved, but even most Crystals did not realize this, as they did not form a strong identity until the oppression began. They were a political party with their own religion, and for most of their history had been a tiny repressed minority in every nation they lived in. Nevertheless, they had spread out quickly and were present in a lot of nations even as early as 2175. They realized that they had enough people to form a safe, solid nation if they could only call in all of the Crystals living dispersed throughout the tropics, including the slaves, to come together as one.

Their early attempts at this were not fruitful, however. The naive Crystals living on Sulasali Island moved as one to [[Paba]] in order to take advantage of Paba's very generous welfare benefits. They had heard that Paba's government paid ethnic minorities a welfare stipend that was greater than what the Pabap lower class made in a full time job. Although even the Crystals realized that they would not simply be given money simply by beaching on the shores, they figured that Paba was a place where they would be welcome and knew that they could get at least some money from the government because they couldn't speak Pabappa and thus couldn't work in most jobs.

However, they quickly exhausted the patience of even the notoriously tolerant Pabaps. Crystals refused to send their children to school, and most refused to learn Pabappa, which meant that they were unemployable and their quickly growing population drew a quickly growing share of Paba's welfare benefits. Moreover, Crystals used their free time to harass Pabaps in city streets, and those few who did speak Pabappa still did not have jobs but instead went around trying to convert Pabaps to the Crystal religion.

To solve the problem, Paba made thbe Crystal religion illegal and cut off their welfare benefits. Paba was unwilling to use force against the Crystals, both because they honestly believed in pacifism and because the Crystals had used their free time gained by not working to build themselves dangerous weapons. In fact, the Crystals had privately made an agreement to settle only in Pabap cities in which the Crystal minority was armed well enough to kill the entire population of that city. They drew murals on stone walls in the cities depicting helpless Pabaps being boiled and eaten alive by Crystal armies, saying that each mural would be the site of an actual massacre in the near future in the Pabaps did not give them a nation of their own inside Pabap territory. But now Paba had defeated them, since the Crystals realized that they could only survive by hunting animals in the wilderness, but they had settled in areas where this was difficult. Some Crystals walked all the way to northern Paba, figuring life would be better among the poorer and weaker Pabaps of the mountains, but most decided to leave Paba for [[Subumpam]].

Subumpam turned out to be even more exploitable than Paba. Although Subumpam was not a pacifist empire, its people were poorly armed and its army was smaller than would be expected for an empire its size. This is because it was overseen by Nama and Nama didnt want a rebellion. Subumpam did not even have a navy; its coastline was patrolled jointly by Nama and Paba. Nevertheless, the Crystals were soon captured into slavery in Subumpam, with the exception of those who were [[FILTER]] members. FILTER had earlier agreed to merge with the Crystals inside Subumpam only, while maintaining separate identities in other nations. Thus only about half of the Crystals were enslaved. The FILTER Crystals had escaped because they were visually indistinguishable from the mainline Subumpamese and mostly spoke Subumpamese. Although the FILTER Crystals did not attempt to rescue the enslaved Crystals, they did communicate with the Crystal establishment in Nama that they knew what had happened and predicted that Subumpam's slave camps were mild enough that few, if any, Crystals would die. Then FILTER declared war on Nama.

FILTER marched on foot all the way across Subumpam and then conquered the Naman nation of '''Nèye'''. They killed every man, raped every woman, and enslaved every child they found. THis was a far more brutal war than any that had occurred in recent history, and it was one of the fastest victories ever achieved. Nama had no reaction to the war other than to close down FILTER's representation in Nama's government. FILTER retained total control of Nèye for itself but invited Crystals from all around the world to live in Nèye, thus providing the Crystals their first true nation in which they were welcome. However, FILTER had reasserted itself as an independent organization now, saying that although they were allies of the Crystals they had not themselves become Crystals. The merging of the two parties while inside Subumpam was a deliberate attempt to make the most of a very desperate situation as they were both very violent but very small, and did not want to waste each other away to nothing when they had a golden opportunity to make a new nation in front of them. Notably, however, most FILTER members at least inside Nèye had retained elements of the Crystal religion and incorporated them into a new branch of their own religion, Sisnasi. The Crystals moving into Nèye accepted this, as they had decided that they would no longer fight any religious wars except against atheists.

===Growth===
Nama saw Kava and Nèye as being like two sharp teeth biting into the soft, defenseless flesh of the Naman heartland. The southern extent of Nama's territory resembled two human legs spread out, and in this analogy, Kava and Nèye had both taken big bites out of her left thigh. From here they both wanted to grow northward, and Nama hoped that as the two armies won battle after battle they would turn on each other and burn themselves out before they got too high up in the body. Previously, the spread-legs analogy had been the subject only of indecent jokes, but now the Kavan and Nèyean military commanders took it to heart and began drawing up maps of their proposed colonization routes with each nation in the Naman empire given the name of the corresponding female body part. The anology hinting at cannibalism and rape generally did not bother the mostly female military leaders of Nèye, as they had proven very recently that they had no problem with real rape, even mass rape, so long as it was their own men doing it and their enemies' women receiving it. Moreover the sight of the many male Kavan military commanders wearing white miniskirts and white crop tops while drawing invasion plans for the world's largest empire meant FILTER women were too busy suppressing laughter to be offended by anything they said. They accepted the name "Teeth" for their armies and declared themselves '''The Tooth Alliance''' shortly after 2371. In this alliance, Kava promised FILTER could have open access to Kava's territory and FILTER promised they would use it to help the male population of Kava develop a better sense of fashion.

As above, Nama was not a pacifist empire, but it was extremely poorly defended, particularly in the north, where the various nations of Repilian aboriginals had been left to self-government for thousands of years. Many Repilian tribes really were pacifists, and were totally unprepared for the arrival of well-armed invaders from the south. At first, Nama's land army was totally impotent and could at best only chase the invaders northwards as they went, even though these invasions took years to move just a few miles north. The invasions were slow because both Tooth armies saw that their enemies were essentially defenseless, and could be coerced into building forts and weapons for the invaders instead of simply being slaughtered on sight. The Naman search teams were slow because Nama's infrsastructure was so poorly developed in the north that the only way Nama learned an attack had taken place was when a trade supply route suddenly failed. Nama was afraid to send its best soldiers against the Teeth, knowing that the Tooth soldiers were armed to the teeth and would win, man for man, even over Nama's best. Moreover, both Tooth armies had whole families of civilians just behind the front lines, as again, they figured their enemies were so pathetic that they couldnt even conceive of a sneak attack behind enemy lines. FILTER additionally tended to have both male and female soldiers in its army, with women generally in control at the highest levels of command.

Soon, Nama did develop a northern front, and stationed a large land army there, but this meant that their military power in the south had decreased even further. The soldiers in the northern army knew that they were never going to be let home, because both Kava and FILTER favored very slow warfare in which whole families would move in and take over the territory one village at a time.<ref>FILTER had reverted to using its political name rahter than the name of its primary nation, as Nèye was largely Crystals now.</ref> FILTER was particularly good at this, and they managed to do it while still maintaining a very high birthrate, which meant their population was growing very quickly. Kava's growth was slower, but still substantial.

Nama's land army was now spread across 2661 miles of territory, from Nama's west coast to its east coast. (Note that these "coasts" were both entirely icebound, and thus could not host a navy. This is why Nama speaks of itself as having only a small amount of coastline, in its extreme south.) The number of soldiers stationed on each mile of the front was so small that even Nama realized their attempt to stop the invasion would likely be useless, as either of the Tooth armies could simply burst through the paper-thin Naman army and find that the Repilians living to the north of the border were even weaker than those in the south because they had been told they were being protected.

The two original nations of the Tooth Alliance, [[Kava]] and [[FILTER|Nèye]], had been very small. Kava was smaller and was slightly west of Nèye, but soon the two nations came to share a border and Kava actually became slightly larger. However, due to their alliance with the [[Crystals]], FILTER also began to sprout up nations to the west of Kava. Thus there were no longer only two Teeth in the Tooth alliance.

===The Crystals enter the coalition===
The Teeth realized a potential future problem with the entry of the Crystals into the alliance. Previously, FILTER and Kava had agreed to grow quickly but separately, forming no mixed nations and respecting new borders drawn up by one Tooth (or Jaw) when the other Tooth got to a new settlement first. But the Crystals were so different from both groups racially, religiously, and culturally that all three Teeth worried that the differences between Kava and FILTER would blur and fade away, or that FILTER, seeing itself as naturally belonging to the Crystals, would unite with the Crystals and suffocate Kava between them as they focused on reuniting with each other rather than attacking Nama. They signed a new treaty that further strengthened the prohibitions on competition between the Teeth, saying that even friendly competition between the Teeth was forbidden; they could only attack Nama, they could not even peacefully attempt to force a newly conquered settlement to join a different conqueror, and they could not build mixed settlements. To prevent Kava being smothered by the FILTER/Crystal coalition, they drew up a map of Nama with proposed borders for all three Teeth. They figured that Nama was so pathetically weak now that there was no chance of Nama mounting a defense strong enough to make a difference in their plans, and that they could confidently draw up borders in 2400 AD for a nation that wouldn't exist until 3400 AD, simply because they knew Nama would never be able to keep them out.

====First mixed nations====
FILTER and Kava, however, found that they could not keep themselves apart. Their nations mostly directly bordered each other; that is, there was no "deep Kava" nation surrounded only by other Kavan nations; they all bordered either FILTER or a weak Naman nation they saw as soon to fall. Despite forbidding intermarriage, intermarriage became quite frequent among the lower classes of both nations. They responded to this by saying that it was culture, not race, that separated FILTER from Kava, and that any mixed families would simply need to adopt the nationality of the empire they were living in. However, FILTER nonetheless decided to classify Kavans as a distinct and inferior minority in their nation, while Kava welcomed such mixed families and treated them as equals. This had the effect of keeping FILTER essentially pure while making Kava a more mixed society. Previously, Kava had been essentially 100% Lazy Palms, which was a tribe of Pabaps, but now they became more diverse. However, the FILTER people were not greatly different from the Kavans except t hat they tended to be significantly taller. This was essentially a reflection of their own mixed [[Subumpam]]ese and [[Repilian]] ancestry; both of these tribes were fairly tall, but not so tall as to make intermarriage with Kavans a [[taboo]].

Thus, although they retained separate identities officially, the further north that Kava and FILTER grew, the more they blended together, and it soon seemed like there might soon be only two Teeth in the alliance after all. Meanwhile, since Kava was the central nation in the alliance, it also bordered the Crystal territories, though this border was much smaller than its border with FILTER. This is because whereas FILTER and Kava had both entered Nama through the "thigh" and pushed their way inwards, Crystal armies had come in from the extreme west, in the "finger" territories of Nama's outstretched right hand, and rushed through her right arm. There was little contact between the Crystals and the other two groups at first other than diplomacy; the Crystals killed Repilians in the west, and the FILTER/Kava armies killed Repilians in the east.

===The War of the Perfect Societies===
By 3115, as Kava and FILTER massacred more Repilians every day, an assortment of Repilian tribes responded by creating '''The Perfect Society'''. In the Perfect Society, nobody would be allowed to own weapons, except for a few people who needed them to hunt and fish. They considered FILTER and Kava to be as one with each other, and discouragedf their people from moving in, but stated because they were pacifists they wouldn't fight back if some tried to move in as long as they were unarmed. In 3125, The Perfect Society declared its independence (Kava and FILTER had claimed this land already, but not settled it), and defined their borders. The borders of the Perfect Society included the entire icecapped area of Nama, plus most of the territory behind Nama's army's front line. All in all, they claimed about 1/3 of the unglaciated part of Nama as their own.

Also in 3125, the Kavan settlers living in northern Nama created a new nation they called '''The Perfect Society'''. In The Perfect Society, all Repilians would be slaves for Kavans and would be forced to breed with the Kavan masters. The Repilian religions would be illegal and anyone caught practicing them would be placed in a special class of slaves that were specifically allowed to be tortured and abused. In 3125, The Perfect Society declared its independence and defined their borders. Nama accepted the new nation but renamed it to '''Nipanu-Malamuppa''' to prevent confusion.

Nama's government admitted that its north was hopelessly a lost cause. Kava and FILTER had destroyed much of the Mirror Project, and occupied areas of Nama that had not seen a war for more than a thousand years. Nama had always thought that its south coast was its weak spot, because it was cut off by tall mountains, but they now decided their only hope in surviving lay in moving their army to that very south coast in an attempt to starve out the home nations of Kava and Nèye.

Even though they knew that there were by now far more Kavans living in Nama than in Kava, Kava's original homeland on the south coast was still its only sea access. But Nama was frustrated by the inability of its constituent nations to even agree that Kava was evil. In 3137, yet another major war erupted in Nama, but it was between the two nations both calling themselves The Perfect Society. The long, spread-out army that Nama had held in place for centuries to keep the invaders out was thus repurposed to help fight the Perfect Society War on the side of the Repilians. Nipanu-Malamuppa won the war, and in 3138 declared that the "Era of Happiness" (''Yeisu Kasu'') had begun. They had defeated their rival nation, their own rebellious slaves, and Nama's land army in a single year. Most of the deaths in the war, even on Nipanu-Malamuppa's side, were Repilians.

The treaty ending the War of the Perfect Societies assigned to Kava all of the territory that had been claimed part of the Repilian victims' Peace Bubble nation. Thus Kava now had the entire icecap to itself, although they promised to respect preexisting FILTER settlements there, and they also had almost all of the territory that had previously been northern Nama. Because of the agreements the three Teeth had signed with each other more than 700 years ago, this war was considered no different than any of the other battles that had previously been fought, meaning that all of the territory won in the war was assigned to Kava and not the other Teeth, and that this voided even the Teeth's own preexisting plans drawn up 700 years earlier in which the tundra would be divided amongst the three armies. Nevertheless, the Crystals were focusing mostly on building settlements in the west anyway, and did not complain, whereas FILTER had grown so close to Kava now that they realized they could send their people into the new territory as much as they wanted to and not feel unwelcome.

===Growth===
As Kava grew, its people formed new independent nations; one of these was '''Meromo''', founded near the northern limit of human habitability.

===Čappini===
A nation called '''Čappini''' (Kakpoko) existed in northern Nama. These people were Lenians who had both Dreamer and Meromo ancestry. Unusually, their Dreamer ancestry had come to them long before the Dreamers reached their area; it had actually happened more than 800 years earlier.

[[Tarwas]] sent its army into their territory in the 3300s, intending to establish a foothold in Lenian territory even though they had previously refused to expand anywhere beyond their borders. Tarwas won, and took over the government of Kakpoko. Soon they bred with the locals and the people of Kakpoko became racially distinct from the Lenians. Then, Kakpoko declared war on the Lenians, and invaded the area they called '''Teupi''', which was already at war with Tarwas. Kakpoko became a pocket of somewhat darker-toned people and tried to ally with Baeba,<ref>it might not be really Baeba because the Crystals arent here yet .... if so, need a new term for the pre-Crystal government of Baeba Swamp. (Possibly just Gold?)</ref> but Baeba refused to join any alliance that included Tarwas.

==Tribal wars in Repilia==
There were three tribal confederations in western Repilia: the [[Lenia]]ns, the [[Merar]], and the aboriginal [[Repilia]]ns. These were easily identified by their physical appearance.

====Lenians====
The [[Lenia]]ns were blonde and blue-eyed with very light skin, easily tanned by the sun and also prone to sunburn. Most Lenians lived in the western peninsular empire of [[Dreamland]], but large numbers of Lenians had also settled [[Paba]] and from there moved north into colder climates. The two groups of Lenians were not very closely related, but they shared a similar physical appearance, and as the Dreamers moved eastward, the Pabaps moved northward, and the two groups met up in northern Repilia. Thus, [[Lenia]] was born, and defined as all contiguous territories with Lenian or majority-Lenian populations. There were no attempts at a formal political state for all Lenians, however, because the area involved was vast and there were many cultural differences.

For the most part, Lenians in Repilia thought of themselves as Lenians first and foremost, but some Lenians in Repilia still believed in an east-west distinction between their own tribes, who had come from the south coast (mostly [[Paba]]) and moved northward and westward, and the Dreamers who had come from the tropics and moved northward and eastward. Paba was much colder than Dreamland despite being located at a similar latitude, so the Pabaps were more accustomed to cold weather than were the Dreamers. Lenians in Repilia believed that they had inherited cold-hardiness from their ancestors and that unlike the Dreamers, they could survive outdoors in cold weather and not succumb to frostbite or hypothermia.

====Merar====
The [[Merar]] were tall, dark-skinned people who had also settled Paba and moved northwards as the climate began to warm up. They had founded the nation of [[Tarwas]] in 2414, and also settled many areas of the outer tropics such as [[Amade]] and [[Atlam]]. Most of the Merari people in the tropics never left their nations, and no longer identified as Merar. The tribal identification was strongest in areas where they were surrounded by other tribes. Over the generations, the cold climate of Tarwas caused the Merar to evolve towards a lighter skin color, but they still stood out from the other tribes in the area.

====Aboriginals====
The [[Repilia]]ns were the aboriginals of the far north. The Lenians and Merar were both invading Repilia by their mere presence, but few Repilians expected they would ever get their territory back. The Repilians had dark hair and an intermediate skin color, but they had distinct facial features and did not closely resemble either of the two other tribal groups, nor did they resemble people of mixed Lenian-Merar descent such as the Čappini.

===Birch War===
In 3125, the '''Birch War''' started, as the Lenians claimed a plot of land in the far north and began exterminating Repilians. This was a slow-moving background conflict, as both the Lenians and the Repilians here were nomads who moved from place to place rather than building compact cities. The aboriginals did not launch a counterattack until 3137, and by this time they had lost many strongholds and could only attack from vulnerable outposts.

The Birch nation soon expanded backwards as well, and came to border on the circular lake later called Putu. This was in '''Lăro'''. Female immigrants from [[Paba]] (Aboa) came to settle here, and the nation's growth outpaced its rivals. However, Paba's government restricted the number of women allowed to leave because they did not want their own population growth to slow down.

The Birches also took in immigrants from Repilia, because even though they were at war with Repilia, they were trying to skim off potential defectors in order to weaken Repilia while strengthening their own empire. As immigration from Repilia increased, immigration from Aboa slowed down, as the people of Aboa began focusing on other areas.

Towards the late 3100s, the Birches abandoned their Lenian ancestry entirely and began to identify as aboriginals. Even though their ancestors had acquired their land by slaughtering aboriginals, there were enough aboriginal immigrants in the Birch nation by this time that they considered the debt to have been paid. The Repilian confederation signed a treaty opening its remaining territory to the Birches, but warning them that they would be required to live under Repilian law, and that Repilia would refuse to protect the Birches in a wider war. The Birches realized this meant that they could gain protection by ceding their land back to Repilia, and although they did not give up all of their land, the areas where most people lived were indeed ceded back to Repilia, making Repilia once again the largest landholder in the far north. The new "Repilians" were racially mixed because of the many blonde Birch people who now lived there, but they had all fully come to identify as Repilians.

====Birch language====
The Birch people spoke [[Yeisu Kasu]], but may have switched to speaking a neo-Repilian language (see [[Macro-Pabap languages]]).

===Squirrel War===
In 3302, the Lenian tribes in [[Kava]] declared war on Repilia, including the descendants of the Birch tribes who had come to live there. However, Repilia launched no counterattack, as they were too disorganized. In 3315, the [[Merar]] tribes also declared war on Repilia, and joined the Lenian invasion. The Lenians knew that the Merar had been hostile to them in the past, and expected that they would be hostile again if they were to meet up with the Lenians inside Repilia. Thus, a three-sided war had begun, with the Lenians, the Merar, and the Repilians all against each other, though for the meantime the Repilians were too weak to even fight back.

The Merar soon defeated the Repilians, but they stopped their invasion at the borders they had defined in a previous treaty with the Lenians, and promised that they would not intrude into Lenian-held areas of Repilia. Thus, many Repilians fled into Lenian-held territory even as the Lenians were massacring the Repilians already there.

====Counterattack====
In 3332, the Repilians finally began to attack the Lenians who had invaded them.<ref>It is only this phase that was originally called the Squirrel War.</ref> This thirty-year delay helped them prepare, and when they finally attacked, their army quickly encircled the Lenians and forced them to surrender. However, the land they had trapped the Lenians in had been part of Repilia before the war, and thus they were only regaining their own territory, and were unable to invade Kava.

Even as they were losing their war in Repilia, the Lenians attempted to build colonies in northern [[Tarwas]].<ref>This is a timeline problem as they are invading the same territory that earlier was invaded by the Soap Bubble Societies (SBS).</ref> They never formally declared war against the Merar tribal confederation that ruled Tarwas, but simply sent their people to live there.

==Hedgehog War==
Within months of their defeat in Repilia, the Lenians declared war on both [[Dreamland]] and the dark-skinned aboriginals of [[Baeba Swamp]]. The Lenians had signed a pact with their ally, the [[Crystals]], promising to help the Crystals invade and crush Baeba, even though they knew that the Crystals would make Baeba the center of their empire and give nothing back to the Lenians. The Crystals wanted the Lenian troops to invade from the north and distract the Baeban army so that the Crystals could have an easier time moving in from the south. The Lenians were economically dependent on the Crystals and realized that, because they had just lost a war against the tiny Repilian tribal coalition, the Crystals would soon realize that the Lenians had become dependent on the Crystals for military protection as well. Nonetheless, the embarrassing loss in Repilia allowed the Lenian commanders to claim that their army was extremely weak, so they sent a small force.

====Invasion plan for Baeba====
The Lenian soldiers were poorly prepared for war. In the rough terrain, their men had great difficulty just moving around with their armor on. They were forced to contemplate dropping their armor and invading Baeba unprotected, even knowing that they would suffer grossly disproportionate casualties. But with their armor, their progress was so slow that they worried the Crystals could arrive before the Lenians had even reached the crests of the mountains, allowing Baeba's army to sweep around and encircle the Lenians whether they came wearing similar armor or not. Baeba's wildlife was diverse, and the Baebans were skilled in animal training, so the Lenians (and the Crystals) knew that Baeban soldiers might not need heavy armor in a battle.

====Invasion plan for Dreamland====
The invasion of Baeba left no troops free for the Lenians to use in also invading [[Dreamland]]. Many Lenians did not even wish to involve Dreamland in the war, as they saw the Dreamers as fellow Lenian tribesmen, but Dreamland had signed a treaty with Baeba's aboriginals by this point, meaning an attack against one would be an attack against the other. Some Lenians therefore wanted to break their pact with the Crystals and join Dreamland so they pull themselves out of the war altogether, but they knew that by so doing, they would be easy targets for the Crystals and would almost certainly not be helped by the Baeban aboriginals or by the Dreamers.
===Lenian troops arrive===
These dark-skinned people were distinct from the Merar and did not consider themselves mutual allies. But the aboriginals were much stronger than the Lenians, and outnumbered the Lenians by about 5 to 1. Thus the '''Hedgehog War''' (''Laus Hasŋa Yas'') began.

The Lenians had only launched this war because they knew that another army, the [[Crystals]], was approaching Baeba from the south, and that Baeba would not be able to use their full force against the Lenians if they were also fighting the Crystals.

The Crystals were another dark-skinned tribe who had originated in the equatorial regions of [[Amade]] and Lobexon. Their party was nearly 2000 years old, and they had spent all of this time slowly growing northward. The Crystals had signed a tripartite alliance with [[Kava]] and [[FILTER]], and the Lenians in this area considered themselves to be part of Kava. Thus, the Lenians expected that the Crystals would help them in their war against Baeba.

The Lenian army made no significant progress, however, and Baeba's northern border held firm even as they were being eaten up from the south. Both sides suffered a high body count, and both suffered disastrous defeats: early on, Lenians massacred a troop of Baebans who had been poorly equipped, and later on, the Baeban army returned the favor in the district of '''Ado''' by slaughtering a troop of unprepared Lenians.

====Lenians' opinions split====
This new war split the Lenian tribal confederation along east-west lines. The western empire, [[Dreamland]], had always allied with Baeba Swamp's tribal government and worked out any conflicts through diplomacy. They thus supported the aboriginals and opposed the invading [[Crystals]]. But the Lenians living east of Baeba were bound by an ancient treaty with the Crystals and thus could not defend the aboriginals. Indeed, they had actually declared war on the aboriginals after losing two other wars in Repilia.

The Baeban aboriginals had traditionally interacted mostly with the Lenians in the Dreamer state of '''Sessia''', whose pacifist government, led by a party calling itself '''Foam''' (''Nenana''; also known as PDP), had kept it out of wars for more than a thousand years. They were tied up in an attempt to stop a war in the distant empire of '''Aboa''' (also known as Greater Paba),<ref>This is the original name of Creamland/Memnumu.</ref> but the new conflict in Baeba drew their attention away from Aboa.

When Baeba's diplomats approached Sessia's Foam party to ask for intervention, most Sessians agreed to side with Baeba, but they remained committed to pacifism, and their only participation in the war was to allow Baeba's aboriginal population to move to Sessia as refugees. Some Sessian tribes defected and joined the war on the side of the Crystals. There were no Sessians fighting in the war on the side of the aboriginals, however, because Sessia considered this just as treasonous as fighting for the opposite side, and therefore any people wishing to fight in the war on any side were ruled out of Sessia.

==Foundation of Meromo==
In 3348, the Repilian aboriginals had regained most of their lost territory and pushed the Lenians into unfavorable areas. Here, the Lenians founded the nation of '''Meromo'''. Their governing political party was the '''Plumes'''. Meromo's founding tribe was called '''Mamma''', but they soon dropped the name in favor of identifying as a political party. Meromo's language was a dialect of [[Lenian_languages#Oyster|Oyster]].

Meromo signed a treaty with an older Lenian nation named '''Kàlika''' and created the binational empire of '''Teupí'''. In the mid-3300s, the Lenians of '''Teupí''' declared war on the Merar and invaded Tarwas. At first they won, but Tarwas pushed them back out and then conquered not only Teupí but a third Lenian nation called '''Čappini''' (Kakpoko).

Cappini submitted quickly and therefore the Merar maintained control there even when the war turned back in favor of Teupí. However, Cappini cut ties with Merar and declared itself a fully independent tribe. They signed a treaty with the aboriginals of [[Baeba Swamp]] but did not pursue unification.

Soon, the Merar regained the upper hand yet again, and enslaved all of the Lenians who had reached Tarwas. They announced a new alliance called the '''Dark Woods''' open to all of the tribes except the Lenians, and hoped to unite all of the tribes with dark skin or dark hair — that is, the Baebans and Repilians — on their side. But Baeba's aboriginals refused to unite with Tarwas, and the Repilians also refused because they still claimed that Tarwas had been stolen from them. Ironically the only people who joined the Merari's expanded confederation were the exiles from the Birch society who were mostly of Lenian ancestry. They ceded their land to Tarwas because they considered the Repilians (and the mainline Birch people) to be a greater threat.

===Crystals conquer Baeba===
The [[Crystals]] conquered Baeba and abolished Baeba's slavery-based economy. They declared Baeba to be the capital of their already large '''Crystal Empire''' and banished all non-Crystals from the government. Much of the population had been enslaved, and as the Crystals freed them, they became Crystals themselves. But the slaveowners and many of the other free people were hostile to the Crystals, and those who had not already fled into Dreamland before the invasion quickly did so as the Crystals took over their property and blockaded neighborhoods that sheltered resistance.

====Three-party government in Sessia====
Soon, the dark-skinned aboriginals who had moved to Sessia were so numerous that they began to overrule the pacifist PDP party in many political resolutions. They formed the ''' Hook''' party (GLK), declared a permanent war against the Crystals, and turned Sessia into a military outpost for any tribes who were hostile to the Crystals. Thus, refugees from the tropical empire of [[Kxesh]] began moving to Sessia as well.

The pacifists were terrified when they realized that the Baeban refugees were turning Sessia into a military stronghold and that Sessian pacifists might soon die in large numbers in a war that would gain them nothing. Some PDP members made plans to surrender Sessia to the Hook army and move westward into deeper areas of Dreamland, but most did not want to abandon their relatively prosperous homeland.

The remaining pacifists tried to convince the Hooks to drop their plans for war and admit that living at peace in Sessia was better than fighting to live in Baeba. But the Hooks refused to consider Sessia their home, and only increased their desire to retake Baeba. However, the immigrants moving into Sessia from [[Kxesh]] had never lived in Baeba, and they sided with the pacifists on resolutions relating to the war in Baeba. Their party was called the '''Sheath''' because they descended from a party called the Swords but had put aside both their desire and their ability to fight a war. (The name "Shield" was already in use.) The newly arriving Sheaths voted to stop the preparation for war, and formed an anti-war coalition with the Foam party.

Despite the Sheath's opposition to the war, the Hooks continued to bring boats to Kxesh to deliver Kxeshian immigrants into Sessia, and as more pacifist immigrants arrived, support for the planned war against Baeba declined rapidly. Since the Hooks seemed unmoved by this, both PDP and the Sheaths came to believe that the Hooks were planning to overthrow Sessia's democracy, and start a war in which pacifists would be forced onto the front lines while the Hooks hid out in secure forts.

===Baywatch settlement===
In 3373, Dreamland's dominant '''Baywatch''' party fortified the border state of '''Popa''', located immediately north of Baeba, and signed a treaty with the Hooks which granted them and Baeba's aboriginals the right to settle in Popa so long as they helped the Baywatchers overthrow the Crystals in Baeba. The Baywatchers wanted to conquer Baeba themselves and make it the capital of all of Dreamland. They promised to abolish tribalism and win their war by uniting an army drawn from all the tribes of the world against the Crystals and anyone who chose to side with them. The Baywatchers promised that racism would be impossible in Popa because all of the tribes would live in harmony and blend together as they married each other and had large families.

However, the Baywatchers quickly changed their minds when they realized that many Crystals were claiming to be Hooks and thus moving to Popa as well, and that the Baywatchers could not tell the difference between the two dark-skinned groups because they did not understand either of their languages. They thus enacted a racially restrictive immigration law and told the aboriginals that they would have to move to Sessia instead of Popa.

When the other Dreamer states learned of the war, they all aligned with the Baywatchers, and although they did not prohibit immigration, they preferred to let the Hooks stay in Sessia and overrule the Sessians because they knew that Sessia was the only area of Dreamland that had not committed itself to the war.

====Military stalemate====
It soon became clear that Dreamland would not be able to push the Crystals out of Baeba. The [[ppot#Baywatch|Baywatch]] party refused to surrender, however, as they believed the Crystals were intent on reaching Dreamland's north coast, which was entirely held by the Baywatch party. Dreamland's opposition party, the [[ppot#MWZ|Wild]] party, was strongest in the extreme west, far from Baeba, and had no interest in helping the aboriginals retake Baeba. In return, the Baywatchers warned that if the Crystals tried to conquer western Dreamland, the Baywatchers would build a wall and trap the Wild supporters on the western side to face the Crystals. But they knew that this was unlikely, because western Dreamland was difficult to reach from Baeba and would be of little value to the Crystals.

The Baywatchers maintained their strict rule against immigration of foreign tribes, so the Hooks and Sheaths were confined to PDP's territory, '''Sessia'''. The Baywatchers soon passed a law prohibiting even Lenian Sessians from moving to Baywatch territory, meaning that the Baywatchers had uncontested rule over their territory. (Lenians in Sessia spoke a different language, and could not easily learn Baywatch.) Thus Baywatch territory became a ''de facto'' one-party state. The Baywatchers promised they would lift the restrictions once their war against the Crystals was over, whether or not they won the war.

====Crystals push west====
As the Crystals tightened their grip on Baeba Swamp, they sent diplomats into Sessia to try to convince their people to join the Crystal Empire.

The Crystals told the Hooks that Crystal Baeba was the wealthiest city in the world and that merely by living near it they could share in its wealth, if only they signed an alliance with the Crystals. They said that Hooks could be allowed to move anywhere in the Crystal Empire so long as they declared themselves to be Crystals.

The Crystals told the Sheaths, who had recently arrived from [[Kxesh]], that Kxesh was a full ally of the Crystals and that the people living in Kxesh were much better off than they had been in the past. They promised that the Sheaths would be allowed to convert to the Crystal party and move anywhere in the Crystal Empire just as the ex-Hooks would, and that even if they preferred to retain their original identity they could still move to Baeba and share in the growing economy.

The Crystals told the pacifists in PDP that pacifism was a noble but unrealistic idea, and that if they remained in Sessia when the Crystals began their invasion, they would be the easiest targets and the most likely to die or be captured. But the Crystals promised that they, too, could convert to the Crystal party, or if they preferred, move to the arctic and live among their fellow Lenians in young, growing nations carved out from [[Repilia]].

====Sessian Civil War====
Thus the Crystals soon invaded Sessia, and found that indeed many of the locals had switched sides and agreed to fight for the Crystals. They pushed the pacifists, including the Sheaths, into the Baywatch state of '''Peri'''. Baywatch's army immediately counterattacked, and forced the pacifists onto the front lines of battle even though they knew that they would be very poor soldiers. The Crystals killed the pacifists, but some Baywatch soldiers worked their way into the battlefield just as the Crystals were celebrating their victory, and pushed them back to near the original Baywatch/Sessia border. Baywatch ceded all of Sessia to the Crystals, however, as they declared that a pacifistic ally was no ally at all, and some Baywatchers even sent diplomats to the Crystals hoping they could sign a pact that would give the Crystals control of all of the non-Baywatch areas of Dreamland. But the Baywatchers merely intended to distract the Crystals here, as they had no intention of honoring such a treaty.

The Crystals declared victory over the pacifists, and enrolled each of the Sessian states into the Crystal Empire. The surviving population was allowed to continue to identify with their original parties — the Foam (PDP), Sheaths, and even the Hooks all became legal parties within the Crystal Empire — but new laws were passed which ensured that the Crystals could always overrule these other parties on crucial issues.

Satisfied with their rapid conquest of Sessia, the Crystals signed a ceasefire with the Baywatchers even though they planned to revive the war and invade Baywatch in the distant future. Baywatch likewise had not given up on its plan to conquer Baeba, but they realized that surrendering the pacifists' territory would allow the Crystals to greatly strengthen their control over Baeba and that any future war in Baeba would be very difficult for the Baywatch army.

==Birth of Sapeepa==
Meromo was the parent empire of '''Sapeepa'''.<ref>Is Sapeepa the entire Thunder Empire, or just the state of Sàkwalo/Safiz?</ref>

The people who were in charge of Sapeepa and felt more love for their subjects than for the rulers of their parent nation, '''Meromo'''. The governors of Sapeepa raised their children as Sapeepans, not Meriras. Since Sapeepa was both distant and an economic liability to Meromo, Meromo treated them as an independent state without formally relinquishing their land claim.

Meromo's governing [[ppot#Plumes (PUM)|Plume]] party sent food and even laborers to Sapeepa because Sapeepa was so much poorer than the rest of Meromo. The Sapeepans disliked this, and tried to become economically self-sufficient in order to acquire a sense of pride while also helping Meromo. Yet, the Plume party also supported the killing of poor people, in order that they might not be able to suffer or cause other people to suffer. Thus their ideology caused problems for its supporters.

The Sapeepans developed a new, secret party based on "angry" egalitarianism, and stated that people who were unsuccessful were simply not trying hard enough. Thus their philosophy was often not much kinder to fellow Sapeepans than that of the Plumes. They gave speeches to their supporters saying "You have no rights." The Sapeepans forged close relations with the '''Kâlika''' people*NOT* Dreamers living in slightly better conditions to their west. They sometimes called their alliance '''Têupí''', and people moved in both directions.

Sapeepa grew slowly, and they could not conquer Baeba Swamp. Throughout the generations, Sapeepans often led invasions on weaker villages outside the Swamp, and stole food and other basic supplies which were scarce in their own territory. Their weapons were made of stone, and much weaker than the Baebans', but Baeba was not ready for a war, and treated the intruders as mere criminals. Sapeepa was also hostile to [[Repilia]], but Repilians avoided attacking Sapeepa in the vicinity of the Swamp because they believed the Sapeepans and others would cast magic spells that harmed only Repilians.

===Independence===
In 3431, Sapeepa revolted and became an independent nation. They said that they were going to reproduce faster than all other peoples and eventually take over the world. But many of their leaders were very perverse, and many of the people revolted and became savages disliked by all others on the planet except the [[Dreamland|Dreamers]], who had rejected racism and come to embrace every race except the dark-skinned ones as fully deserving of love.

====Demographics of Sapeepa====
The savages lived like animals, in almost total ferality. Children were ill-treated by their parents, and often not protected well enough to survive in the forest. Thus, even though the savages were reproducing very quickly, their kids kept dying. Warfare broke out among the many Sapeepans living in the forest, and they began to eliminate their weaker members through warfare.

===Foundation of Thunder philosophy===
Shortly after the breakup in 3431, another new political party, the [[Thunder Empire|Thunder]] party, began to take over Sapeepa. The Thunderers believed that the rights of the majority were the only rights that mattered at all - and there was no such thing as fairness, because everyone was ultimately part of the same universal being. Thus they were communitarians.

Thunder philosophy was very much the opposite of the Plume government that had preceded it, but the Thunder leaders had taken no steps to burn off the frustration they had accumulated while living under the Plume government, and they were as perverse as the people they replaced. (The Plume government was still in control of Meromo.) They believed that all crimes should be legal, so long as they benefit the perpetrator more than they benefit the victim.

The new government was run entirely by Thunderers who had great and terrible plans for their new nation, which they immediately transformed into an army. They claimed that true Thunderers could never let a disease confine them to a life of suffering, and refused medical treatment for many common diseases.

The Thunderers excused sin after sin, saying the misdeeds of their people were not sins after all but expressions of the power and beauty of their God. They exonerated their entire population, essentially declaring all Sapeepans, even those who had not joined the Thunder party, innocent of all sins. With this mentality, Sapeepa became strongly united and ready to begin attacking outside nations. Even though its military was very weak, the Thunderers began preparations for war against Têupí almost immediately after they declared independence.

In 3434, the Thunderers entered the state of Lăro and attacked '''Punu Lake''', but they were driven back by the Têupíans. Early in 3435 they attacked again, and took over the Lake. Then they quickly began attacking more and more of the nations around them, winning most of their battles. Those battles that they lost were not terribly upsetting to the Thunderers, because their own nation was not hurt at all by the defeats.

The Thunderers stressed the great importance of maintaining a high birth rate in their society, and praised good mothers who raised large families for the nation. The Thunderers abolished marriage and replaced it with a system designed to maximize the amount of children each woman could bear, where each man who was allowed to would live with as many as ten women, and the rest of the men would be in the army, ready to fight (some women were in the army as well, but not many).

===Expansion===
Over the next sixty years, the birth rate increased, the death rate fell, and the material wealth of the population rose. However, the birthrate was still among the lowest in the world because Sapeepan children did not typically gather berries or other food items and thus each new child reduced a family's food supply. Neighboring nations began ruling out the Sapeepans, so they could not easily leave.

The Thunderers began to settle more and more lands around them, mostly mountainous areas to their west that lay between the Swamp and Punu Lake. They captured the highest peaks of the Black Mountains, a poor environment for humans but one that was very difficult to attack. Thus, they promised they would never be conquered even if they were to lose a major war.

By 3495, the Thunderers had founded two new nations: '''Lăro'''<ref>That is, they overthrew the preexisting government.</ref> and '''Yīspʷilinâ'''. These were located west of their original home nation of Sapeepa.

The Thunderers despised the [[Crystals]]. Crystals sent their people into Thunder territory, trying to make converts, but the Thunderers thought little of killing the Crystal immigrants.

==Southward war and early writeup information==
At one point, Sapeepa invaded all of the south, trying to conquer Aboan nations like [[Thaoa]]. They poisoned water and claimed that they would make the land unlivable. (This is why Lenians still lived in Subumpam in later ages despite losing the war against the Stars; they were not merely immigrants from Paba.)

They by this time had some slaves from Baeba. Baeba had invaded and conquered them, but when they revolted, many Baebans were trapped in their territory and became slaves.

:''NOTE on politics, See TRUE DATES.doc,<ref>remember this is separate from TRUE NAMES, but despite its name, does not always have the true dates, but only the time separation between them</ref> which shows this war as happening "around 2800 AD", on a time line in which 2871 is the year in which Sapeepa loses its war against two other powers (not the same as those here), and 2860 AD is the time in which the Crystal nations began to form and split apart into male, female, etc.

====More information====
In 2860, according to TRUE DATES, a major environmental disaster occurred. This was separate from the "doom" event of 2998-9, which also caused the Thunderers to develop a single standardized language. 2774 was the date of a civil war in Tarwas against the aboriginals. they had a language called Ghama. 2614 was the year in which Sapeepa attacked Punu Lake.

This could push the Sapeepan invasion of the south into the 3700's, beginning in 3680 but likely continuing for some time, overlapping their homeland's invasion by Taryte, even though this is not mentioned in the writeup. Note that there are two nations in this writeup that correspond to Sapeepa .... one called Pentileta and the other with a variable name; this is probably a reflection of politics rather than national borders.

Note that in 2371, Pentileta invaded Taryte.

The latest date in TRUE DATES is 2999, after which point the timeline truncates and reappears with the date 3564, which cannot be part of the same timeline since it would need to be pushed at least 820 years into the future .... to 4384 ... to belong. (This would imply 820 years of stability for the Lantern Empire.) To reconcile these two fragments, some events would need to be reordered, with the events listed as happening in the 3595-3700 period being interwoven with those listed as happening in the 2800-2999 era. This is not as awkward as it might seem, because the 3595-3700 group refers primarily to internal politics, whereas the other group refers primarily to wars and diplomatic relations.

This may mean there was a longstanding tribal divide even within Play territory in the 4100s, with the resistors (by then considering themselves aboriginals) having the shorter, darker body type, and the descendants of the invaders having blonde hair and being of moderate stature. It is not clear whether women would be taller than men in the 3800s in either group, but it became strongly characteristic of the Players. [[Thaoa]] also had their women taller than their men, due to a separate invasion from the Feminist Compact, but this had not happened in the 3800s either.

===GLobal war===
[[Dreamland]] (with Laba) & Sapeepa signed a pact and launched a war against Baeba and Nama simultaneously. They won, killing most of the people in the territories they conquered, but they did not actually occupy the other territories.

==Lantern Empire history==
Sapeepa conquered most of Meromo, but a few strongholds of the Plume party remained in outer areas. These areas did not join the [[Lantern Empire]], and therefore the Plume Empire continued to exist. Most Plumes aligned themselves with [[Dreamland]] as Dreamland was the only competent enemy of the Thunder party, but the Plumes knew they were of little value to Dreamland, and feared than in a war they would be left unprotected as the Dreamers focused on defending their own people. Therefore, they never signed a formal pact with Dreamland.

==War of 3564==
Nama surrendered in 3564 and focused on squishing weaker territories like [[Kava]] instead of trying to kill all of Sapeepa.

==Sapeepa-Taryte relations==
In 3696, [[Taryte]] invaded Sapeepa and conquered most of Sapeepa's territory in the lower latitudes. This war cost them the support of the Crystals, however, and therefore the war also became Taryte's war of independence from the Crystal Empire.

In 3958, Taryte and Sapeepa met up again, this time as allies against the even greater power of Adabawa. At this point, the Plume party rebuilt its army and joined the war on Adabawa's side. Adabawa won, but his rule was so weak that the conquered territories began to split up into many small armies. Soon, Sapeepa ceased to exist as a cohesive territory, and Taryte was split up by many immigrants who ruled tiny stretches of coast in the tropics, while the interior became poor once its contact with the coast was cut. The Plumes were simply one of many small empires now, and they again began to look towards Dreamland for a potential alliance. However, just as before, Dreamland was not interested.

==Notes==
<references />
[[Category:Teppala]]

Tarise

2025-06-23T14:49:57Z

Poswob Rare: /* Proto-Tarise (~1900) to Qaš (3700) */

:''For the Sak language, see ht tp://www. fra thwi ki .com/i ndex.php?title=Tarise&oldid=108980 here]. For the Tarise with Teeth, see [h tt p: //www.f rathw iki.com/i ndex.php?title =Tar ise& oldid= 115487 here].''

'''Tarise''' was a language spoken in [[Taryte]] between 1085 AD and 1900 AD, whereupon it began to divide into many dialects. Some dialects had begun splitting off even earlier than this, but were considered the same language until 1900 for political reasons. The rise of the [[Star Empire]] led to the recognition of the dialects as independent languages.

Proto-Tarise divided into five languages spoken along the tropical coast where the rainfall was greatest. Here, people lived closely packed together and had a tense relationship with the Empire of Amade??? to the west and a somewhat more peaceful relationship with [[AlphaLeap|Wax]] to the east.

Further inland, there were also five languages, but these had spread from just one of the coastal languages, and therefore they were much more similar to each other than were the five coastal languages.

In later times, Taryte invaded the [[Thunder Empire]] and began settling the cold plateau to their north. They defeated the Thunderers quickly, and spread their language to the two new provinces they built on the plateau. These were also derived from the same branch that had spawned the inland languages, but due to geographic separation, it soon went its own way and divided into two more languages, thus bringing the total number of languages spoken in Tarise to 12 by the time of the consolidation of the Empire of [[Halasala]].

==Trout (1085) to Proto-Tarise (1900)==

The consonant inventory was:

BASIC LABIALIZED
Bilabials: p b m f v mʷ w
Alveolars: t d n l tʷ dʷ nʷ
Postalveolars: č ǯ y
Velars: k ŋ h g ḳ ŋʷ hʷ gʷ

Unlike [[Fojy]], the tone of one syllable was not predictable from the syllable before it: two low tones could occur in a row, and there were more than two tones. Thus, in the sound change list below, descriptions like "after a high tone" are defined narrowly, rather than, for example, also applying before a low tone.

Note that the inherited fricatives /h hʷ/ are velars, as in Khulls, and 're spelled with x.

#The voiced fricatives ''g gʷ '' shifted to '''Ø w'''. However, the fricative allophones remained, and therefore came to also replace original Ø~ʕ. For example, syllable final -u merged with original gʷ, and obtained the velar frication as an allophone after a stressed vowel.
#The stops ''p t b d'' shifted to '''h s g z''' unconditionally, with palatalization and labialization both preserved. Preexisting ''č ǯ'' merged with the palatalized coronals. xʲ , hʲ, and sʲ were still distinct.
#All unstressed syllables became CV only, with no tones.
#The sequence ''ʷə'' shifted to '''ʷu'''.
#The vowels ''ə i'' shifted to '''i yi''' unconditionally.
#The long falling tone vowels ''ā ī ū'' became high tone '''à ì ù''' unconditionally. They did not acquire glottalization.

Note that labialization is preserved.
The consonant inventory at this time was:

Labials: m w
Alveolars: s z n l
Palatals: y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ (Ø)
Postvelars: h g

But consonantal allophony was very powerful, even alternating between stop and fricative realizations of /s z/.

:''SEE [[Tarise]] for remainder of sound changes.''

Thus there were only two proper stops in the language: /k ḳ/. The fricatives /s z/ preserved allophones [t d] when before [a] and not after a closed syllable, but there is still no [ti] or [tu] in any environment. Likewise, the velars /k ḳ x/ were allophonically uvular before [a], palatal before [i], and true velar before [u]. However, this uvular opposition was not significant because in most cases the contreasast wias wth kʷ not k.

The inherited /ki/ gap is filled by the shift of /kə/ > /ki/; primordial /ki/ by this time had shifted to /sʲi/.

There were three vowels: /a i u/, on two tones. A vowel could be followed by /i/ or /u/, even if another consonant was in the coda.

==Tropical Rim daughter languages I-III==
Syllabic consonants are preserved. In some daughters, disyllabic consonant sequences such as /-isi-/ contract into single syllabic consonants, while unstressed monosyllables like /si/ become simple, nonsyllabic consonants. The vowels also had widely spaced allophones, largely due to a contrast between /i/ and /yi/ and between /u/ and /wu/.

Some of these languages might actually have begun splitting apart prior to 1900 AD.

:'''THESE LANGUAGES ARE LISTED WEST TO EAST!!!!!!!!!!!!'''
===Proto-Tarise (1900) to Tropical Rim I===
This is the westernmost language, and has the warmest and wettest climate as well as the smallest habitat.

The consonant inventory at this time was:

Labials: m w
Alveolars: s z n l
Palatals: y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ (Ø)
Postvelars: h g

And the vowels were

Short vowels: a e i o u
Long vowels: aa ee ii oo uu
Falling diphthongs: ae ei ao ou
iu

''NOTE: There will probably need to be more vowel changes here.''

Tones were still preserved.

#The sequences ''se ze sa za so zo'' shifted to '''te re ta ra to ro''' when not after a closed syllable.
#The vowel sequences ''e ee ae ei'' shifted to '''ya yaa ai yai'''.
#The velars ''k ḳ'' shifted to '''q q̇''' before any /a o/.
#The falling diphthong ''iu'' shifted to '''ū'''.
#All ''g'' shifted to '''ʕ'''. Then ''ʕʷ'' (phonetically /ʕu/) shifted to '''w'''.
#The vowel sequences ''o oo ao ou'' shifted to '''u uu au uu'''. Note the asymmetry with the previous shift evolving /e/.
#The sequences ''ky ḳy'' shifted to '''ć''' unconditionally. Then ''ty ry'' became '''č ž'''.
#The sequences ''xy hy'' merged as '''ś''' unconditionally. Then ''sy zy'' became '''š ž'''.
#The voiced alveolar stop ''d'' shifted to '''r''' unconditionally.
#After any palatal or postalveolar consonant, the labial glide ''w'' disappeared to '''Ø'''.
#The vowel sequences ''ai au'' shifted to '''ē ō'''.
#The labialized nasals ''mʷ nʷ ŋʷ'' shifted to '''m̄ n̄ ŋ̄'''.
#The labial approximant ''w'' shifted to '''b'''.
#The voiced fricative ''z'' shifted to '''d'''. It may have become a dental by this time, as with n̄~ṇ.

Therefore the consonant inventory was

Labials: b m m̄
Alveolars: t s d n l r n̄
Postalveolars: č š ž
Palatals: ć ś y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ ŋ̄ kʷ ḳʷ xʷ
Uvulars: q q̇ h ʕ qʷ q̇ʷ hʷ

The vowel inventory was

Short vowels: a i u
Long vowels: ā ē ī ō ū

All diphthongs had been eliminated by previous shifts. The vowel system can be analyzed as just /a i u/ since the long vowels have only one tone. In this case, the five longs would be analyzed as /ā ai ī au ū/. This is similar to the situation in nearby [[Amade]].

This language is in the transitional zone between the "wet" languages of the equatorial zone and the "dry" languages of the deserts and savannas to the north. Both groups consider the dry languages to have a harsh sound, but the speakers of the dry languages point to [[khulls|Leaper]] which they say has an even more harsh sound because of its pharyngealized vowels and frequent use of ejective consonants. The ejectives of Tropical Rim I only appear where the parent language had also had an ejective, whereas in Leaper, new ejectives appeared from sequences of a high tone plus a voiced stop.

===Proto-Tarise to Tropical Rim II===
Probably spoken in the extreme southwest, but not influenced by [[Kxesh]].

The consonant inventory at this time was:

Labials: m w
Alveolars: s z n l
Palatals: y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ (Ø)
Postvelars: h g

#The sequences ''se ze sa za so zo'' shifted to '''te re ta ra to ro''' when not after a closed syllable.
#The sequence ''iu'' shifted to '''ū'''. This did not include /ju/ inherited from earlier /igu/.
#The velars ''k ḳ'' shifted to '''q q̇''' before any /a o/.
#The sequences ''ae ao'' shifted to '''ai au'''.
#The vowel ''e'' in any context shifted to '''ya'''. The /y/ was not present if the preceding consonant was /w/ or a labialized consonant.
#The vowel ''o'' in any context shifted to a true schwa '''ə'''.
#The sequences ''mw nw ŋw'' shifted to '''m̄ n̄ ŋ̄'''.
#The sequences ''xy hy sy'' merged as '''š'''. Then ''ky ḳy ty'' merged as '''č'''.
#The sequences ''ry gy ŋy ly'' shifted to '''ž ž ň ł'''.
#The labial approximant ''w'' disappeared after consonants; intervocalically, it was shifted to '''g'''.
#:The disappearing /w/ may create more consonants than just /m̄ n̄ ŋ̄/, but note that none of the neighboring languages did this.

Thus the consonant inventory had become:

Labials: m m̄
Alveolars: t s z n l r n̄
Palatals: č š ž ň ł y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ ŋ̄
Postvelars: q q̇ h g

And the vowel inventory was /a i u ə/.

===Proto-Tarise to Tropical Rim III===
This language may have some Qaš-like characteristics.

==Proto-Tarise (~1900) to Qaš (3700)==
This language ends up with a phonology similar to [[Khulls|Leaper]] but very different phonotactics. Leapers consider it to sound harsh, and Qaš considers Leaper to sound harsh as well.

Cladistically, this is simply Tropical Rim IV. However, it is listed here separately because its sound change list is far longer than the others and because it spawned daughter languages of its own.

This language grows further east than Tropical Rim V, and may have invaded the territory of '''Wax'''. This would help explain why there is an unusually sharp division between Tarise and Wax.

It is possible that the Tarise speakers are absorbed by the [[AlphaLeap|Leapers]] early on, rather than only around 3700, which would mean that this language was only a substrate and that the ruling "Tarytean" party with no name was in fact the Leaper party.

The consonant inventory at this time was:

Labials: m w
Alveolars: s z n l
Palatals: y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ (Ø)
Postvelars: h g

Qaš has a very long list of sound changes, but most of them are conditional, and up to three conditions can be present. Even this list is far fromcomplete, as it currently (May 2020) only lists changes in the onset, not the coda, and ignores the vowels as well. The total rate of change is similar to or greater than that of Leaper.

''NOTE AS ABOVE THAT THIS IS INCOMPLETE''

#In unstressed syllables, the vowels ''i u'' merged to the schwa vowel '''ə''', which was spelled as /i/. Thus, the vocoids of unstressed syllables had a six-way contrast between /a ya wa ə yə wə/. However, this schwa vowel soon became silent ('''Ø''') in many positions. There were no unstressed long vowels.
#The labialized nasals ''mw nw ŋw'' all merged to '''m'''. The palatalized nasals ''mʲ nʲ ŋʲ'' shifted to '''ň'''.
#The sequences ''sy zy ky ḳy '' shifted to '''š ž č č '''.
#The sequences ''xy xw'' shifted to '''hy hw'''.
#Before the vowel [a], the velars ''k kw ḳ ḳw x'' became uvulars '''q qw q̇ q̇w ħ'''. In the same environment, ''s z'' (but not the labialized forms) shifted to '''t d'''. Thus, in stressed syllables, /t d/ and the uvulars occurred only before [a], while plain /s z/ and the velars occurred only before [i u].
#The unstressed schwa vowel disappeared when adjacent to a stressed syllable. The fricatives ''h g'' (but not /x/) disappeared when they came to occur after a stop or another fricative. Thus sequences like /ta ka/ were restored.
#The voiced fricative '' z'' shifted to ''' r''' before a vowel.
#The sequences ''sw zw '' lost their labialization and thus became '''s z'''.
#In word-initial position before a nasal, the consonants ''ŋ l s z g'' disappeared while the dorsal fricatives ''h x'' changed position. ''xl hl'' shifted to '''lx lh'''.
#In pretonic position before a stop, the fricatives ''x h'' made that stop voiceless and aspirated, and then disappeared.
#The clusters ''km ḳm qm q̇m'' became labialized to '''kʷm ḳʷm qʷm q̇ʷm'''.
#An ''h'' bordering any tautosyllabic stop or fricative in either direction made that other consonant voiceless, and then disappeared.
#In pretonic position, the nasal clusters ''mn mŋ nm nŋ ŋň'' shifted to '''n m m ń ń'''. Note the asymmetry of the last two clusters.
#In pretonic position before a nasal, the palataloids ''š ž y hy'' all merged as '''ň'''.
#Nasals occurring in pretonic position before any /ň/ disappeared.
#The consonant clusters ''rg rz rl rň'' shifted to '''z dz zl dň'''.
#In pretonic secondary position after a nasal or /l/, the voiceless sounds ''s q k x'' shifted to '''h'''. In the same environment, the consonants ''z ḳ q̇'' became silent.
#The voiced velar fricative ''g'' disappeared to '''Ø''' when occurring in a cluster of any kind. Labialized forms left their coarticulation and then disappeared.
#In pretonic position before any /t d s z/, The dorsals ''x k ḳ kʷ ḳʷ'' shifted to '''k'''; in the same position, the dorsals ''q q̇ qʷ q̇ʷ'' shifted to '''q'''.
#Any nonlabialized dorsal stop before /ň/ shifted to '''č'''.
#The cluster ''žz'' shifted to '''ž'''. Any other cluster of a palataloid fricative followed by a sibilant shifted to '''š'''.
#Palatalized stops followed by primordial sibilants shifted to '''kš'''.
#In pretonic secondary position after a dorsal stop, the coronals ''t d s z'' shifted to '''s'''. Thus the original sample of 36 different consonant clusters was reduced to a contrast between /ks/ and /qs/. (This does not interfere with the shift above that produced /kš/ because that sibilant was shifted out of the reach of this shift.)
#The nasals ''m n ň ŋ'' disappeared in word-initial position after an /ň/, /č/, or any dorsal stop.
#The nasals ''m n ŋ'' disappeared in word-initial position after the coronals /t d r/.
#In a syllable onset, the ejective stops ''ḳ q̇'' became aspirated to '''k q''' when following any /t d r s z h x k q hʷ kʷ qʷ/. They also became aspirated when preceding any /k q x/.
#In pretonic position, the clusters ''ld lt'' shifted to '''dl tl'''.
#In pretonic secondary position after any palatalized sound, the voiceless dorsals ''x k ḳ q q̇'' shifted to '''č''' and deleted the preceding consonant.
#Velars preceding uvulars became uvular. Uvulars preceding velar stops (but not fricatives) became velar.
#In pretonic secondary position after any /t d r s z/, the voiceless dorsals ''k ḳ x'' shifted to '''ć '''.
#All consonants disappeared before a pretonic /ć/. (There may have been clusters involving /č/ that did not delete.)
#The true palatals ''ć ń'' shifted to '''č ň''' before the front vowel /i/, and to '''k ŋ''' otherwise.
#The nasals ''m n ň ŋ'' became the voiced stops '''b d ǯ ġ''' in pretonic position before the coronals /t d l/.
#In pretonic secondary position, the voiced stop ''d'' was deleted to '''Ø''' when occurring after another voiced stop.
#A voiced stop or fricative bordering an /s/ in either direction became voiceless.
#All non-dorsals were delabialized. Thus the labialized coronals ''tʷ dʷ'' shifted to plain '''t d''' and labialization disappeared on all bilabials and palatals.
#The pretonic clusters ''tň dň ňt ňd'' shifted to '''č ǯ č ǯ'''. ''td dt'' shifted to '''t'''.
#The pretonic coronals ''d r'' shifted to '''t''' before any /s/. ''tz'' shifted to '''ts'''.
#The pretonic coronals ''d t r s z'' disappeared before any /d t q/. (But note that /sd/ and other mismatched pairs did not occur.)
#The lateral ''l'' disappeared after /ǯ/ or any labialized consonant.
#All tautosyllabic geminates were simplified to singletons.

===Final consonant inventory===
The consonant inventory at this time was:

Labials: p b m (Ø) w
Alveolars: t d s z n l r
Palataloids: č ǯ š ž ň λ y
Velars: k ḳ x g ŋ kʷ ḳʷ
Postvelars: q q̇ h qʷ q̇ʷ

This is very similar to '''Leaper'''. Tarise has a few consonants (/ň/ and most of the uvular series) that Leaper lacks, and Leaper has a few consonants (/ṗ ṭ/ and some labialized sounds) that Tarise lacks. In Taryte, each language borrowed heavily from the other and they thus had the same consonant inventory. But outside Taryte, Leaper retained its original inventory and loanwords with uvulars were adopted either with the aspirated uvulars /q qʷ/ or with the ejective postvelars /ḳ ḳʷ/ depending on various conditions.

Unlike the other Tarise languages, Qaš had many consonant clusters, and the unified Tarise syllabary was useless to write Qaš. Instead, they adopted an alphabetic script from the Gold people.

==Proto-Tarise (~1900) to Tropical Rim V ("River People")==

The consonant inventory at this time was:

Labials: m w
Alveolars: s z n l
Palatals: y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ (Ø)
Postvelars: h g

The possible codas were /n l x k ḳ/, and there were three rare syllabic nasals, /ṁ ṅ ŋ̇/.

#In bisyllabic roots, if the vowel in the second syllable was /i/, then ''u'' in the first syllable changed to ''' uj'''.
#The sequence ''ai'' shifted to '''ei'''.
#In closed syllables (including the high tone, which had developed final /ʔ/ by areal influence), the vowels ''o i u'' shifted to '''a e ə''' (IPA /æ ɪ ʊ/).
#Syllabic nasals between consonants all shifted to '''ə'''.
#All stressed vowels became high-tone; thus tones were eliminated. The tones left no effects on surrounding consonants, and the allophonic affricates that appeared for some fricatives did not survive.
#The clusters ''ks kt kl kx kh kg'' all merged as '''k'''.
#The sequences ''ḳya ḳye ḳyi ḳyo ḳyu ḳyə '' became '''ta če či to tu tə'''.
#Then, ''gy'' became '''y''' and ''hy xy'' merged as '''ś'''.
#All codas were deleted; note that a previous shift had made all vowels in closed syllables into /a e ə/.
#In unstressed syllables, the mid vowels ''e o'' shifted to '''i a'''. (The same as Pabappa's much later word-final shift.)
#:This may need to be modified, just like in Pabappa, so that they harmonize with the stressed vowel instead. The 2010 writeup for this language had assumed that closed syllables existed eve n in unstressed position, and harmonized them the other way.

Note that ''o'' is an IPA cardinal ['''ɑ''']. The only rounded vowel is /u/.

This language may be associated with the Crystals, but it is not their main language. More to the point, this is the language of the '''River People''' who rescued a troop of orphans in the year 4190 and then moved with them into a hillside campground in the tropical empire of [[Kxesh]]. Thus the language may survive inside Kxesh and sprout a second daughter language. However, the hillside settlement was very small and the orphans had little reason to spend time learning a new language when they were busy trying to gather food.

It is possible that tones could survive with a very low functional load simply because all of the languages surrounding TR-V in all directions preserved their tones. (The loss of tone was originally intended to happen while the language's vowel inventory increased, but I didn't understand sound changes very well at the time.)

====River People Syllabary====

The River People spelled their language with syllables that fit into a 12x12 grid, reminiscent of the much older 10x10 grid that had been used to spell Tapilula. There were many gaps in the River People grid, even though such syllables existed; the River People chose not to create glyphs for the less common syllables, instead using digraphs. For example, the uncommon sequence /sa/ was spelled as /sə/ + /a/; the schwa sound never occurred before another vowel.

yi i ye e ya a yo o yə ə yu u
li ḷi le ḷe la wa lo wo lə wə lu wu
mi ṃi me ṃe ma mo mə mu
si ṣi se ṣe ṣa ṣo sə ṣə su ṣu
ti te ta to tə tu
zi ẓi ze ẓe da ẓa do ẓo zə ẓə zu ẓu
ni ṇi ne ṇe na ṇa no ṇo nə ṇə nu ṇu
ki ḳi ke ḳe ka ḳa ko ḳo kə ḳə ku ḳu
xi x̣i xe x̣e xa x̣a xo x̣o xə x̣ə xu x̣u
ŋi ŋ̇i ŋe ŋ̇e ŋa ŋo ŋə ŋu
hi he ha ho hə hu
gi ge ga go gə gu

'''All consonants are palatalized''' before any /e i/ unless marked with a dot. The degree of palatalization is greater for /l s t z n x ŋ/ and less for /m k h g/. Before other vowels, the underdot marks labialization on all consonants except '''k''', where it marks glottalization and (perhaps) an articulation slightly further back.

All of the palatalized consonants are distinct from each other and from the reflexes of the earlier palatalization. Note that /hi/, /gi/, /ki/, etc are the reflexes of the *non*-palatalized forms of the earlier language, but came to be weakly palatalized because they were unpaired.

The syllables on the left-hand columns (the ones Romanized without dots) are more common than the right-hand ones; that is, /mʲi/ is more common than /mi/, and so on.

Vowel sequences other than the diphthongs were rare because of the earlier shifts of /jV wV/ to the syllables with coarticulated consonants.

;Spelling rules
The syllabary above does not list all of the possible syllables in the language. There are no separate symbols for combinations like /ńa/, etc. since these are much rarer than the ones with /e/ and /i/, and because a sequence of /ńe/~/ńi/ + /a/ (or any other vowel) would never occur.

Loanwords with a nonpalatalized consonant before a front vowel use the right-hand glyphs. There is no means of indicating tone or foreign consonants in loanwords; the closest native sound is used instead.

Stress is unmarked, but teachers sometimes use double vowels or a vowel followed by a schwa.

====Demographics====
This area may have traded hands between the Crystals, the Leapers, and the Stars several times. It was almost certainly Leaper territory after 2668, falling to the Crystals sometime in the next few centuries, and perhaps back and forth once or even many times before the Stars took over in the early 3700's. The Crystals then conquered both the Stars and the Leapers, pushing the Leapers hundreds of miles up the coast and eliminating Star-held territory entirely.

The Stars and probably the Leapers also had many Lenian slaves, and in fact these Lenians may have been the first settlers in the area (if this is Pēles), but each time the Crystals took over, these slaves would have joined the war on the Crystals' side and many would have themselves become Crystals. This is why the Crystals were a dark-skinned tribe in Baeba Swamp but became lighter-skinned towards the equator. This also means that any Lenian slaves in the area by 3700 would not have been direct descendants of the original Pelesians.

If this is Pēles, then yet another language was once spoken there: Bait.

Each of these groups had at least one language of their own; the River People language here may belong to any of the above groups except the Lenians. It is possible that this is the language of a people who saw many occupation armies sweep in and out and maintained their language even as they were forced to change their party identification. Because they lived at the mouth of Tarise's largest river (which is also much larger than any rivers in AlphaLeap's original territory), they may have had an uncommon ability to resist occupiers.

The Crystals' primary language was [[Khulls]],<ref>"The Crystals were ethnically Baeban, but they taught their children three different languages: Xap (from Baeba), Asup (from Qololof), and Moonshine." </ref> but this was not their ancestral language, and they had adopted it to enhance their transnational appeal. The Leapers also did this; the Stars, however, were primarly monolingual throughout their history, learning new languages only to engage in trade.

If the Crystals incorporated Taryte into the region they called [[Amade]], then it seems likely that the '''Firestone''' army also conquers what had been Taryte when they conquered Amade. The Firestones were more interested in tropical agriculture than in fishing, and may not have fully displaced the population of Taryte the way they did in Amade. However, as they came by sea, it is likely that they would have held full control of the seacoast even so.

===Tropical Rim V (3900) to Castle on a Cloud===
#After a vowel, ''sĭ tĭ kĭ ḳĭ'' changed to '''š č č č''' .
#Unaccented long vowels and diphthongs were reduced to the monophthongs '''o i u '''.
#All long vowels became short; however, diphthongs such as /ai/ remained.
#All final vowels in bisyllabic roots were deleted. If the vowel deleted was /ĭ/, the vowels in the first syllable changed from ''o a e ə̈'' to '''ei ei i ĭ'''.what is ĭ? ə̈?
#:NOTE ON POLITICS: This is about 4800 AD *if* the parent language was 3900 AD.
#In compound words and certain inflected forms, the second vowel in the word was deleted if the resulting consonant cluster was acceptable ("the Debra shift"). If the second vowel occurred between two labial consonants, the first labial consonant was deleted.
#:This shift, and everything below it, assumes the speakers had radically shifted northward into [[Poswa|Poswob]] territory. If not, the language must have gone extinct around 4800 AD.
#Before front vowels (including ʉ?), the velar stops ''k ġ'' were fronted to the postalveolar affricates '''č ǯ''', which were considered single phonemes rather than clusters.
#Voiced stops became prenasalized after a tense vowel; lax vowels before voiced stops became allophonically tense but did not gain prenasalization.
#Unstressed ''ʉ'' became a true schwa. The script was now written with the old /ʉ/ series as the inherent vowel (previously it was schwa).
#Sequences of /a/ + vowel came to be velarized; if the consonant was velar, it became labiovelar.

If the language is still around by this time, it must be between 6800 and 7950 AD, with the latter date being the original planned construction.

==Proto-Tarise (~1900) to Sub-Amade==
This is set up on the assumption that some of the "1085" colonists also settled in Amade. If so, they may have also settled in Lobexon, which currently has no assigned language other than the aboriginal Star languages.

==Notes==

Tarise

2025-06-23T14:45:01Z

Poswob Rare: /* Proto-Tarise (~1900) to Qaš (3700) */

:''For the Sak language, see ht tp://www. fra thwi ki .com/i ndex.php?title=Tarise&oldid=108980 here]. For the Tarise with Teeth, see [h tt p: //www.f rathw iki.com/i ndex.php?title =Tar ise& oldid= 115487 here].''

'''Tarise''' was a language spoken in [[Taryte]] between 1085 AD and 1900 AD, whereupon it began to divide into many dialects. Some dialects had begun splitting off even earlier than this, but were considered the same language until 1900 for political reasons. The rise of the [[Star Empire]] led to the recognition of the dialects as independent languages.

Proto-Tarise divided into five languages spoken along the tropical coast where the rainfall was greatest. Here, people lived closely packed together and had a tense relationship with the Empire of Amade??? to the west and a somewhat more peaceful relationship with [[AlphaLeap|Wax]] to the east.

Further inland, there were also five languages, but these had spread from just one of the coastal languages, and therefore they were much more similar to each other than were the five coastal languages.

In later times, Taryte invaded the [[Thunder Empire]] and began settling the cold plateau to their north. They defeated the Thunderers quickly, and spread their language to the two new provinces they built on the plateau. These were also derived from the same branch that had spawned the inland languages, but due to geographic separation, it soon went its own way and divided into two more languages, thus bringing the total number of languages spoken in Tarise to 12 by the time of the consolidation of the Empire of [[Halasala]].

==Trout (1085) to Proto-Tarise (1900)==

The consonant inventory was:

BASIC LABIALIZED
Bilabials: p b m f v mʷ w
Alveolars: t d n l tʷ dʷ nʷ
Postalveolars: č ǯ y
Velars: k ŋ h g ḳ ŋʷ hʷ gʷ

Unlike [[Fojy]], the tone of one syllable was not predictable from the syllable before it: two low tones could occur in a row, and there were more than two tones. Thus, in the sound change list below, descriptions like "after a high tone" are defined narrowly, rather than, for example, also applying before a low tone.

Note that the inherited fricatives /h hʷ/ are velars, as in Khulls, and 're spelled with x.

#The voiced fricatives ''g gʷ '' shifted to '''Ø w'''. However, the fricative allophones remained, and therefore came to also replace original Ø~ʕ. For example, syllable final -u merged with original gʷ, and obtained the velar frication as an allophone after a stressed vowel.
#The stops ''p t b d'' shifted to '''h s g z''' unconditionally, with palatalization and labialization both preserved. Preexisting ''č ǯ'' merged with the palatalized coronals. xʲ , hʲ, and sʲ were still distinct.
#All unstressed syllables became CV only, with no tones.
#The sequence ''ʷə'' shifted to '''ʷu'''.
#The vowels ''ə i'' shifted to '''i yi''' unconditionally.
#The long falling tone vowels ''ā ī ū'' became high tone '''à ì ù''' unconditionally. They did not acquire glottalization.

Note that labialization is preserved.
The consonant inventory at this time was:

Labials: m w
Alveolars: s z n l
Palatals: y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ (Ø)
Postvelars: h g

But consonantal allophony was very powerful, even alternating between stop and fricative realizations of /s z/.

:''SEE [[Tarise]] for remainder of sound changes.''

Thus there were only two proper stops in the language: /k ḳ/. The fricatives /s z/ preserved allophones [t d] when before [a] and not after a closed syllable, but there is still no [ti] or [tu] in any environment. Likewise, the velars /k ḳ x/ were allophonically uvular before [a], palatal before [i], and true velar before [u]. However, this uvular opposition was not significant because in most cases the contreasast wias wth kʷ not k.

The inherited /ki/ gap is filled by the shift of /kə/ > /ki/; primordial /ki/ by this time had shifted to /sʲi/.

There were three vowels: /a i u/, on two tones. A vowel could be followed by /i/ or /u/, even if another consonant was in the coda.

==Tropical Rim daughter languages I-III==
Syllabic consonants are preserved. In some daughters, disyllabic consonant sequences such as /-isi-/ contract into single syllabic consonants, while unstressed monosyllables like /si/ become simple, nonsyllabic consonants. The vowels also had widely spaced allophones, largely due to a contrast between /i/ and /yi/ and between /u/ and /wu/.

Some of these languages might actually have begun splitting apart prior to 1900 AD.

:'''THESE LANGUAGES ARE LISTED WEST TO EAST!!!!!!!!!!!!'''
===Proto-Tarise (1900) to Tropical Rim I===
This is the westernmost language, and has the warmest and wettest climate as well as the smallest habitat.

The consonant inventory at this time was:

Labials: m w
Alveolars: s z n l
Palatals: y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ (Ø)
Postvelars: h g

And the vowels were

Short vowels: a e i o u
Long vowels: aa ee ii oo uu
Falling diphthongs: ae ei ao ou
iu

''NOTE: There will probably need to be more vowel changes here.''

Tones were still preserved.

#The sequences ''se ze sa za so zo'' shifted to '''te re ta ra to ro''' when not after a closed syllable.
#The vowel sequences ''e ee ae ei'' shifted to '''ya yaa ai yai'''.
#The velars ''k ḳ'' shifted to '''q q̇''' before any /a o/.
#The falling diphthong ''iu'' shifted to '''ū'''.
#All ''g'' shifted to '''ʕ'''. Then ''ʕʷ'' (phonetically /ʕu/) shifted to '''w'''.
#The vowel sequences ''o oo ao ou'' shifted to '''u uu au uu'''. Note the asymmetry with the previous shift evolving /e/.
#The sequences ''ky ḳy'' shifted to '''ć''' unconditionally. Then ''ty ry'' became '''č ž'''.
#The sequences ''xy hy'' merged as '''ś''' unconditionally. Then ''sy zy'' became '''š ž'''.
#The voiced alveolar stop ''d'' shifted to '''r''' unconditionally.
#After any palatal or postalveolar consonant, the labial glide ''w'' disappeared to '''Ø'''.
#The vowel sequences ''ai au'' shifted to '''ē ō'''.
#The labialized nasals ''mʷ nʷ ŋʷ'' shifted to '''m̄ n̄ ŋ̄'''.
#The labial approximant ''w'' shifted to '''b'''.
#The voiced fricative ''z'' shifted to '''d'''. It may have become a dental by this time, as with n̄~ṇ.

Therefore the consonant inventory was

Labials: b m m̄
Alveolars: t s d n l r n̄
Postalveolars: č š ž
Palatals: ć ś y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ ŋ̄ kʷ ḳʷ xʷ
Uvulars: q q̇ h ʕ qʷ q̇ʷ hʷ

The vowel inventory was

Short vowels: a i u
Long vowels: ā ē ī ō ū

All diphthongs had been eliminated by previous shifts. The vowel system can be analyzed as just /a i u/ since the long vowels have only one tone. In this case, the five longs would be analyzed as /ā ai ī au ū/. This is similar to the situation in nearby [[Amade]].

This language is in the transitional zone between the "wet" languages of the equatorial zone and the "dry" languages of the deserts and savannas to the north. Both groups consider the dry languages to have a harsh sound, but the speakers of the dry languages point to [[khulls|Leaper]] which they say has an even more harsh sound because of its pharyngealized vowels and frequent use of ejective consonants. The ejectives of Tropical Rim I only appear where the parent language had also had an ejective, whereas in Leaper, new ejectives appeared from sequences of a high tone plus a voiced stop.

===Proto-Tarise to Tropical Rim II===
Probably spoken in the extreme southwest, but not influenced by [[Kxesh]].

The consonant inventory at this time was:

Labials: m w
Alveolars: s z n l
Palatals: y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ (Ø)
Postvelars: h g

#The sequences ''se ze sa za so zo'' shifted to '''te re ta ra to ro''' when not after a closed syllable.
#The sequence ''iu'' shifted to '''ū'''. This did not include /ju/ inherited from earlier /igu/.
#The velars ''k ḳ'' shifted to '''q q̇''' before any /a o/.
#The sequences ''ae ao'' shifted to '''ai au'''.
#The vowel ''e'' in any context shifted to '''ya'''. The /y/ was not present if the preceding consonant was /w/ or a labialized consonant.
#The vowel ''o'' in any context shifted to a true schwa '''ə'''.
#The sequences ''mw nw ŋw'' shifted to '''m̄ n̄ ŋ̄'''.
#The sequences ''xy hy sy'' merged as '''š'''. Then ''ky ḳy ty'' merged as '''č'''.
#The sequences ''ry gy ŋy ly'' shifted to '''ž ž ň ł'''.
#The labial approximant ''w'' disappeared after consonants; intervocalically, it was shifted to '''g'''.
#:The disappearing /w/ may create more consonants than just /m̄ n̄ ŋ̄/, but note that none of the neighboring languages did this.

Thus the consonant inventory had become:

Labials: m m̄
Alveolars: t s z n l r n̄
Palatals: č š ž ň ł y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ ŋ̄
Postvelars: q q̇ h g

And the vowel inventory was /a i u ə/.

===Proto-Tarise to Tropical Rim III===
This language may have some Qaš-like characteristics.

==Proto-Tarise (~1900) to Qaš (3700)==
This language ends up with a phonology similar to [[Khulls|Leaper]] but very different phonotactics. Leapers consider it to sound harsh, and Qaš considers Leaper to sound harsh as well.

Cladistically, this is simply Tropical Rim IV. However, it is listed here separately because its sound change list is far longer than the others and because it spawned daughter languages of its own.

This language grows further east than Tropical Rim V, and may have invaded the territory of '''Wax'''. This would help explain why there is an unusually sharp division between Tarise and Wax.

It is possible that the Tarise speakers are absorbed by the [[AlphaLeap|Leapers]] early on, rather than only around 3700, which would mean that this language was only a substrate and that the ruling "Tarytean" party with no name was in fact the Leaper party.

The consonant inventory at this time was:

Labials: m w
Alveolars: s z n l
Palatals: y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ (Ø)
Postvelars: h g

Qaš has a very long list of sound changes, but most of them are conditional, and up to three conditions can be present. Even this list is far fromcomplete, as it currently (May 2020) only lists changes in the onset, not the coda, and ignores the vowels as well. The total rate of change is similar to or greater than that of Leaper.

#In unstressed syllables, the vowels ''i u'' merged to the schwa vowel '''ə''', which was spelled as /i/. Thus, the vocoids of unstressed syllables had a six-way contrast between /a ya wa ə yə wə/. However, this schwa vowel soon became silent ('''Ø''') in many positions. There were no unstressed long vowels.
#The labialized nasals ''mw nw ŋw'' all merged to '''m'''. The palatalized nasals ''mʲ nʲ ŋʲ'' shifted to '''ň'''.
#The sequences ''sy zy ky ḳy '' shifted to '''š ž č č '''.
#The sequences ''xy xw'' shifted to '''hy hw'''.
#Before the vowel [a], the velars ''k kw ḳ ḳw x'' became uvulars '''q qw q̇ q̇w ħ'''. In the same environment, ''s z'' (but not the labialized forms) shifted to '''t d'''. Thus, in stressed syllables, /t d/ and the uvulars occurred only before [a], while plain /s z/ and the velars occurred only before [i u].
#The unstressed schwa vowel disappeared when adjacent to a stressed syllable. The fricatives ''h g'' (but not /x/) disappeared when they came to occur after a stop or another fricative. Thus sequences like /ta ka/ were restored.
#The voiced fricative '' z'' shifted to ''' r''' before a vowel.
#The sequences ''sw zw '' lost their labialization and thus became '''s z'''.
#In word-initial position before a nasal, the consonants ''ŋ l s z g'' disappeared while the dorsal fricatives ''h x'' changed position. ''xl hl'' shifted to '''lx lh'''.
#In pretonic position before a stop, the fricatives ''x h'' made that stop voiceless and aspirated, and then disappeared.
#The clusters ''km ḳm qm q̇m'' became labialized to '''kʷm ḳʷm qʷm q̇ʷm'''.
#An ''h'' bordering any tautosyllabic stop or fricative in either direction made that other consonant voiceless, and then disappeared.
#In pretonic position, the nasal clusters ''mn mŋ nm nŋ ŋň'' shifted to '''n m m ń ń'''. Note the asymmetry of the last two clusters.
#In pretonic position before a nasal, the palataloids ''š ž y hy'' all merged as '''ň'''.
#Nasals occurring in pretonic position before any /ň/ disappeared.
#The consonant clusters ''rg rz rl rň'' shifted to '''z dz zl dň'''.
#In pretonic secondary position after a nasal or /l/, the voiceless sounds ''s q k x'' shifted to '''h'''. In the same environment, the consonants ''z ḳ q̇'' became silent.
#The voiced velar fricative ''g'' disappeared to '''Ø''' when occurring in a cluster of any kind. Labialized forms left their coarticulation and then disappeared.
#In pretonic position before any /t d s z/, The dorsals ''x k ḳ kʷ ḳʷ'' shifted to '''k'''; in the same position, the dorsals ''q q̇ qʷ q̇ʷ'' shifted to '''q'''.
#Any nonlabialized dorsal stop before /ň/ shifted to '''č'''.
#The cluster ''žz'' shifted to '''ž'''. Any other cluster of a palataloid fricative followed by a sibilant shifted to '''š'''.
#Palatalized stops followed by primordial sibilants shifted to '''kš'''.
#In pretonic secondary position after a dorsal stop, the coronals ''t d s z'' shifted to '''s'''. Thus the original sample of 36 different consonant clusters was reduced to a contrast between /ks/ and /qs/. (This does not interfere with the shift above that produced /kš/ because that sibilant was shifted out of the reach of this shift.)
#The nasals ''m n ň ŋ'' disappeared in word-initial position after an /ň/, /č/, or any dorsal stop.
#The nasals ''m n ŋ'' disappeared in word-initial position after the coronals /t d r/.
#In a syllable onset, the ejective stops ''ḳ q̇'' became aspirated to '''k q''' when following any /t d r s z h x k q hʷ kʷ qʷ/. They also became aspirated when preceding any /k q x/.
#In pretonic position, the clusters ''ld lt'' shifted to '''dl tl'''.
#In pretonic secondary position after any palatalized sound, the voiceless dorsals ''x k ḳ q q̇'' shifted to '''č''' and deleted the preceding consonant.
#Velars preceding uvulars became uvular. Uvulars preceding velar stops (but not fricatives) became velar.
#In pretonic secondary position after any /t d r s z/, the voiceless dorsals ''k ḳ x'' shifted to '''ć '''.
#All consonants disappeared before a pretonic /ć/. (There may have been clusters involving /č/ that did not delete.)
#The true palatals ''ć ń'' shifted to '''č ň''' before the front vowel /i/, and to '''k ŋ''' otherwise.
#The nasals ''m n ň ŋ'' became the voiced stops '''b d ǯ ġ''' in pretonic position before the coronals /t d l/.
#In pretonic secondary position, the voiced stop ''d'' was deleted to '''Ø''' when occurring after another voiced stop.
#A voiced stop or fricative bordering an /s/ in either direction became voiceless.
#All non-dorsals were delabialized. Thus the labialized coronals ''tʷ dʷ'' shifted to plain '''t d''' and labialization disappeared on all bilabials and palatals.
#The pretonic clusters ''tň dň ňt ňd'' shifted to '''č ǯ č ǯ'''. ''td dt'' shifted to '''t'''.
#The pretonic coronals ''d r'' shifted to '''t''' before any /s/. ''tz'' shifted to '''ts'''.
#The pretonic coronals ''d t r s z'' disappeared before any /d t q/. (But note that /sd/ and other mismatched pairs did not occur.)
#The lateral ''l'' disappeared after /ǯ/ or any labialized consonant.
#All tautosyllabic geminates were simplified to singletons.

The consonant inventory at this time was:

Labials: p b m (Ø) w
Alveolars: t d s z n l r
Palataloids: č ǯ š ž ň ł y
Velars: k ḳ x g ŋ kʷ ḳʷ
Postvelars: q q̇ h qʷ q̇ʷ

Unlike the other Tarise languages, Qaš had many consonant clusters, and the unified Tarise syllabary was useless to write Qaš. Instead, they adopted an alphabetic script from the Gold people.

==Proto-Tarise (~1900) to Tropical Rim V ("River People")==

The consonant inventory at this time was:

Labials: m w
Alveolars: s z n l
Palatals: y
Velars: k ḳ x ŋ (Ø)
Postvelars: h g

The possible codas were /n l x k ḳ/, and there were three rare syllabic nasals, /ṁ ṅ ŋ̇/.

#In bisyllabic roots, if the vowel in the second syllable was /i/, then ''u'' in the first syllable changed to ''' uj'''.
#The sequence ''ai'' shifted to '''ei'''.
#In closed syllables (including the high tone, which had developed final /ʔ/ by areal influence), the vowels ''o i u'' shifted to '''a e ə''' (IPA /æ ɪ ʊ/).
#Syllabic nasals between consonants all shifted to '''ə'''.
#All stressed vowels became high-tone; thus tones were eliminated. The tones left no effects on surrounding consonants, and the allophonic affricates that appeared for some fricatives did not survive.
#The clusters ''ks kt kl kx kh kg'' all merged as '''k'''.
#The sequences ''ḳya ḳye ḳyi ḳyo ḳyu ḳyə '' became '''ta če či to tu tə'''.
#Then, ''gy'' became '''y''' and ''hy xy'' merged as '''ś'''.
#All codas were deleted; note that a previous shift had made all vowels in closed syllables into /a e ə/.
#In unstressed syllables, the mid vowels ''e o'' shifted to '''i a'''. (The same as Pabappa's much later word-final shift.)
#:This may need to be modified, just like in Pabappa, so that they harmonize with the stressed vowel instead. The 2010 writeup for this language had assumed that closed syllables existed eve n in unstressed position, and harmonized them the other way.

Note that ''o'' is an IPA cardinal ['''ɑ''']. The only rounded vowel is /u/.

This language may be associated with the Crystals, but it is not their main language. More to the point, this is the language of the '''River People''' who rescued a troop of orphans in the year 4190 and then moved with them into a hillside campground in the tropical empire of [[Kxesh]]. Thus the language may survive inside Kxesh and sprout a second daughter language. However, the hillside settlement was very small and the orphans had little reason to spend time learning a new language when they were busy trying to gather food.

It is possible that tones could survive with a very low functional load simply because all of the languages surrounding TR-V in all directions preserved their tones. (The loss of tone was originally intended to happen while the language's vowel inventory increased, but I didn't understand sound changes very well at the time.)

====River People Syllabary====

The River People spelled their language with syllables that fit into a 12x12 grid, reminiscent of the much older 10x10 grid that had been used to spell Tapilula. There were many gaps in the River People grid, even though such syllables existed; the River People chose not to create glyphs for the less common syllables, instead using digraphs. For example, the uncommon sequence /sa/ was spelled as /sə/ + /a/; the schwa sound never occurred before another vowel.

yi i ye e ya a yo o yə ə yu u
li ḷi le ḷe la wa lo wo lə wə lu wu
mi ṃi me ṃe ma mo mə mu
si ṣi se ṣe ṣa ṣo sə ṣə su ṣu
ti te ta to tə tu
zi ẓi ze ẓe da ẓa do ẓo zə ẓə zu ẓu
ni ṇi ne ṇe na ṇa no ṇo nə ṇə nu ṇu
ki ḳi ke ḳe ka ḳa ko ḳo kə ḳə ku ḳu
xi x̣i xe x̣e xa x̣a xo x̣o xə x̣ə xu x̣u
ŋi ŋ̇i ŋe ŋ̇e ŋa ŋo ŋə ŋu
hi he ha ho hə hu
gi ge ga go gə gu

'''All consonants are palatalized''' before any /e i/ unless marked with a dot. The degree of palatalization is greater for /l s t z n x ŋ/ and less for /m k h g/. Before other vowels, the underdot marks labialization on all consonants except '''k''', where it marks glottalization and (perhaps) an articulation slightly further back.

All of the palatalized consonants are distinct from each other and from the reflexes of the earlier palatalization. Note that /hi/, /gi/, /ki/, etc are the reflexes of the *non*-palatalized forms of the earlier language, but came to be weakly palatalized because they were unpaired.

The syllables on the left-hand columns (the ones Romanized without dots) are more common than the right-hand ones; that is, /mʲi/ is more common than /mi/, and so on.

Vowel sequences other than the diphthongs were rare because of the earlier shifts of /jV wV/ to the syllables with coarticulated consonants.

;Spelling rules
The syllabary above does not list all of the possible syllables in the language. There are no separate symbols for combinations like /ńa/, etc. since these are much rarer than the ones with /e/ and /i/, and because a sequence of /ńe/~/ńi/ + /a/ (or any other vowel) would never occur.

Loanwords with a nonpalatalized consonant before a front vowel use the right-hand glyphs. There is no means of indicating tone or foreign consonants in loanwords; the closest native sound is used instead.

Stress is unmarked, but teachers sometimes use double vowels or a vowel followed by a schwa.

====Demographics====
This area may have traded hands between the Crystals, the Leapers, and the Stars several times. It was almost certainly Leaper territory after 2668, falling to the Crystals sometime in the next few centuries, and perhaps back and forth once or even many times before the Stars took over in the early 3700's. The Crystals then conquered both the Stars and the Leapers, pushing the Leapers hundreds of miles up the coast and eliminating Star-held territory entirely.

The Stars and probably the Leapers also had many Lenian slaves, and in fact these Lenians may have been the first settlers in the area (if this is Pēles), but each time the Crystals took over, these slaves would have joined the war on the Crystals' side and many would have themselves become Crystals. This is why the Crystals were a dark-skinned tribe in Baeba Swamp but became lighter-skinned towards the equator. This also means that any Lenian slaves in the area by 3700 would not have been direct descendants of the original Pelesians.

If this is Pēles, then yet another language was once spoken there: Bait.

Each of these groups had at least one language of their own; the River People language here may belong to any of the above groups except the Lenians. It is possible that this is the language of a people who saw many occupation armies sweep in and out and maintained their language even as they were forced to change their party identification. Because they lived at the mouth of Tarise's largest river (which is also much larger than any rivers in AlphaLeap's original territory), they may have had an uncommon ability to resist occupiers.

The Crystals' primary language was [[Khulls]],<ref>"The Crystals were ethnically Baeban, but they taught their children three different languages: Xap (from Baeba), Asup (from Qololof), and Moonshine." </ref> but this was not their ancestral language, and they had adopted it to enhance their transnational appeal. The Leapers also did this; the Stars, however, were primarly monolingual throughout their history, learning new languages only to engage in trade.

If the Crystals incorporated Taryte into the region they called [[Amade]], then it seems likely that the '''Firestone''' army also conquers what had been Taryte when they conquered Amade. The Firestones were more interested in tropical agriculture than in fishing, and may not have fully displaced the population of Taryte the way they did in Amade. However, as they came by sea, it is likely that they would have held full control of the seacoast even so.

===Tropical Rim V (3900) to Castle on a Cloud===
#After a vowel, ''sĭ tĭ kĭ ḳĭ'' changed to '''š č č č''' .
#Unaccented long vowels and diphthongs were reduced to the monophthongs '''o i u '''.
#All long vowels became short; however, diphthongs such as /ai/ remained.
#All final vowels in bisyllabic roots were deleted. If the vowel deleted was /ĭ/, the vowels in the first syllable changed from ''o a e ə̈'' to '''ei ei i ĭ'''.what is ĭ? ə̈?
#:NOTE ON POLITICS: This is about 4800 AD *if* the parent language was 3900 AD.
#In compound words and certain inflected forms, the second vowel in the word was deleted if the resulting consonant cluster was acceptable ("the Debra shift"). If the second vowel occurred between two labial consonants, the first labial consonant was deleted.
#:This shift, and everything below it, assumes the speakers had radically shifted northward into [[Poswa|Poswob]] territory. If not, the language must have gone extinct around 4800 AD.
#Before front vowels (including ʉ?), the velar stops ''k ġ'' were fronted to the postalveolar affricates '''č ǯ''', which were considered single phonemes rather than clusters.
#Voiced stops became prenasalized after a tense vowel; lax vowels before voiced stops became allophonically tense but did not gain prenasalization.
#Unstressed ''ʉ'' became a true schwa. The script was now written with the old /ʉ/ series as the inherent vowel (previously it was schwa).
#Sequences of /a/ + vowel came to be velarized; if the consonant was velar, it became labiovelar.

If the language is still around by this time, it must be between 6800 and 7950 AD, with the latter date being the original planned construction.

==Proto-Tarise (~1900) to Sub-Amade==
This is set up on the assumption that some of the "1085" colonists also settled in Amade. If so, they may have also settled in Lobexon, which currently has no assigned language other than the aboriginal Star languages.

==Notes==

Mevumep

2025-06-23T13:47:18Z

Poswob Rare: /* Languages */

==Languages==
:''See [[User:Soap/PC]].''

The writeup at [[Macro-Pabap_languages#Yeisu_Kasu_%283100%29_to_Mevumep_%284100%29|here]] suggests that Mevumep may have also spoken a para-Play language, but there is as of yet no room for immigration of these people into Mevumep, so if this exists it must have been a merchant's language confined to a small area; even so, this small area could have been so disproportionately wealthy that it was mandatory to learn that language for residents of the region.

==Census of 4198==

'''NOTE''': All names in this section are given either as exonyms, trade names, or ciphers; none is from an original language of Mevumep.

====Key to placenames====
The Slopes ciphered the Andanese root ''yuku'' "city" through a different cipher for each territory, which meant that their Play names of each city was different. Likewise ''puni'' in cipher was their word for districts. These were not standalone Andanese words, but the tradition was to take the head of the corresponding word, which was most often a (C)V(C)V disyllabic sequence.

The base cipher for the entire Union was Stargazer's modified cipher, since the Slopes felt it was the most culturebound of all ciphers, and that culture was Stargazer's own, so it was equally foreign to all 40 districts in the Union.

The four zones had their own ciphers, and each of the forty districts had their own ciphers, for a total of 45 ciphers.

===Fox Island===
'''Fox Island''' was home to 367,000 PBC's spread across nine districts, with about 40,000 aboriginals in the southern tail region and 16,500 inland; these were not counted as part of the PBC population. In the west of the island there were an additional 94,000 people where tribal affiliation was not recognized; indeed this entire area was just one district as well, as it had its own system.

====Southern peninsula====
The Southern peninsula had for 3,500 years run on a system whereby a landholding family would host hundreds of people on their land, who were meant to forage in the wilderness for food and mostly take care of themselves; the landlords were responsible for protecting them from invasion, wild animals, and to some extent caring for their children. This last bit was important as the landholders learned early on that they needed a large child population to keep their landholdings from withering away.

These people were '''Wand''' (men taller than women), and among the tallest and strongest people overall. The slaves were a mixture of these same people and the aboriginals who were also Wand.

The Southern landholders worked their slaves very hard, and punished slow workers by exile. These people could also leave of their own will (and thus the landholders sometimes said their practice was not slavery), but had to leave the property immediately and could not legally remain in the wilderness.

Over the centuries, the landholders in the tropical forests of the southern peninsula sent more and more slow workers, rebels, and other unwanted peoples north into the rest of the island. They did not want a war, so they tried to keep good relations with the northern part of the island. The northern societies were much poorer, and had a much higher birth rate but also a high infant mortality rate.

The border between north and south shifted many times over the 3,500 years, with the south ending up with more land than just the peninsula, but they did not spread over the mountains because the climate here was cooler. Thus the plantation economies remained a minority. Some landholders spoke about migrating to the mainland, but the mainland societies were mostly not interested.

====Northern mountains====
These people were '''Womb''' (women taller than men) and much shorter and more delicate overall than the Southerners. They had been there for about ten thousand years before the Southern landholders, and thus were aboriginals (but they were not the only group of aboriginals). Most were not interested in moving to the South, and they knew that the hard labor of the South would not treat them well anyhow. They were thus much poorer than the people to their south, but their land was mostly free of Southern intrusion and relations overall were good.

===Hăla===
Only about 87,500 people lived in all of Hăla's 9 recognized districts, about 10,000 in each one. This number had been higher before the [[Players]] conquered all of the coastal territory. The Players had chosen to accept these people into their coalition rather than driving them into the highlands. Thus, the only Hăla that had remained was the highlands, and these districts were not connected to each other.

===Northwest===
About 83,400 people lived here, in nine districts, again with about ten thousand people per district.

===Northeast===
With 118,000 people, this area had the lowest population density, but with 12 districts, also held about 10,000 people per district.

==Older edits==
:''This pertained to a much smaller area than what I am now referring to as Mevumep. I may need a new name for one or both of them.''
Northeast corner of continental area... dolphin shaped country. No aboriginals at all ... all 4 tribes are macro-Pabap people.<ref>lenians?</ref> Glacial, rocky landscape... no agriculture possible. The language may be [[Paleo-Pabappa|Birch]], even though the Birch society arose as a blend of aboriginals and Lenians.

==Notes==

==See also==
*[[Macro-Pabap languages]]
*[[Paleo-Pabappa]]

==Notes==

Taryte

2025-06-23T13:16:58Z

Poswob Rare: map

Taryte is a tropical/temperate empire, split by a mountain range whose inhabitants live like the inhabitants of the temperate zone.
==Language==
''See [[Tarise]].''

==Geography and climate==
Southern areas have 3 seasons: cool, hot, wet. Temps in July are about equal to temps in January but it is much rainier.[[file:Taryte.png|thumb|right|247px|Taryte (yellow).]]

==Culture==
The ancestors of the Tarise people were dark-skinned aboriginals who had lived in the tropics for tens of thousands of years. As the climate slowly warmed, their civilization advanced, and they eventually pushed north into the temperate zone to create '''Upper Taryte'''. Despite the similarity of their names, they were never in contact with the Tarwastas, a tribe of dark-skinned people who had pushed through from the tropics to the temperate zone to found the empire of [[Tarwas]] further east.

==Desert War==
===Background===
An ancient treaty, signed in 2371, had divided the world between the three powers of [[Kava]], [[FILTER]], and the [[Crystals]]. The authors of the treaty had promised that, even though conquest of many areas of the map would be possible only far in the future, the powers who signed the treaty would obey its borders and never so much as quarrel with another signatory. Thus, the treaty united the three conquering powers on the same side, and their only enemies were the various aboriginals whose lands were set to be conquered.

Within a few centuries, the FILTER empire collapsed and its territory was mostly incorporated into Kava. For legal reasons, FILTER needed to remain a separate entity, but the territories nominally administered by FILTER were in fact part of Kava and looked to Kava's capital city<ref>apparently not [[Blop]]</ref> for advice. In 3138, Kava created a new state, [[Repilia]], on conquered aboriginal land that had long ago been assigned to FILTER, and for the first time, omitted the legally required step of formally consigning the government of the land to FILTER. Nevertheless, many of the people in Xema considered themselves to belong to FILTER and not Kava.

In 3565, FILTER was formally abolished as a governing entity, and though it remained a political party, its opinions were decided by the leaders of Kava. The non-FILTER Kavans came to call themselves '''Thunderers''' and stated that the Thunderers were also a political party. The alliance of FILTER and the Thunderers was nevertheless generally referred to as the [[Thunder Empire]], not as Kava, as both parties realized that FILTER had been reliant on Kava for nearly a thousand years and that there was no chance of a reawakening now that even the political opinions of FILTER had been merged with those of the Thunderers.

====Relations in the tropics====
By 3626, the Lenians in southern Taryte had mostly become slaves, and their relative share of the population was growing. As their population grew, Taryte's rulers began to fear that they would soon be thrown out of power in their own homeland. A rebel movement formed in Taryte, but its leaders remained obedient to the laws of Taryte's ruling '''Leaper''' party and did not attempt violence.
:''NOTE, it is possible that Amade, Taryte, and AlphaLeap are all merged into one entity now since all were at least pretending to be subjects of the Crystal Empire.''

Many small colonies of escaped Lenian slaves had formed in Taryte; most were in the foothills of the mountains, where the climate was wetter and survival was easier, but other Lenians moved to the coast where they lived openly, generally working for traders who had more to gain from hiding a slave than from hiring a legal Tarise laborer for the same job.

Many Tarise leaders began to call for the genocide of all Lenians, saying that the world would be much better off without them. They claimed that these people were hypersexual, stupid, and violent, and were responsible for many of the empire's problems. But Taryte's government was interested in the present, not the future, and therefore they took no action against the Thunderers and their allies. But gradually, the Taryteans began to draw in Pejos from outside Taryte who wanted to destroy the Lenian races. They preached reliance on technology, saying that people had to abandon slavery and build machines. They demonized reliance on the powers of the human body; they felt that the people most fit to govern a nation were those with physical disabilities or other impediments that would force them to rely on the power of machines. Thus, they agreed with their enemies the Thunderers, who also preached technology but had so far relied on [[AlphaLeap]] for almost all of their science.

They exploited the natural aridity that entirely dominated much of Taryte to force citizens to endure constant intense thirst; this also was intended to shape the Taryteans into living the Tarise mindset, as they were constantly reminded of the absence of water and animal life in the ideal world.

In their history, it had been common for the abolition of slavery to be enforced by killing all of the slaves, and the Lenian slaves living in Taryte thus preferred to remain slaves. The rebellious Taryteans vowed to destroy their capital and its government.

In 3696, after exactly seventy years in hiding, the Tarytean rebels set up their new government in the barren desert province of '''Nippon'''. They were leaving their old homeland in the tropics because they felt it was ruled by an evil government that they needed to destroy. They saw no possible way for them to morally justify living in the tropics. Though Nippon was within Taryte's borders, its population was small and largely nomadic, and would have nothing to gain from opposing the invasion.

The Taryteans disapproved of their people's bad morals; they theorized that that within a few decades Taryteans would have so much mechanical power that physical strength and even intelligence would be largely irrelevant, whereas an ethical mind would be very important for the future of their nation. (The development of non-military technology was surprisingly slow despite the tremendous amount of effort put into it by the government simply because it had to be invented "from scratch", as no other nation had such technology).

The new Tarytean leaders declared that they had liberated themselves of the problems caused by their reliance on the immoral race-based slavery of the tropics, and announced the beginning of a new era in which only people of their ''own'' race would be enslaved.

Men were given manual labor jobs, whereas women were put into a sexual slavery similar to the prostitution that had taken place in the tropics, though without the use of money. Children under the age of five were forced to attend preparation, a sort of nursery school where they were watched closely and forced to undergo various tests while working their hardest to please the adults (the work they were given was much lighter than that given to adults, but they faced a very steep learning curve. If they could not keep up with the learning curve, they were deemed useless and killed.)

The Taryteans wanted their people to look, think, and act alike. Their clothes were symbols of their status, with the most powerful people wearing light blue clothes, and the most corrupt wearing a dusty pink. Red was a sign of evil to the Taryteans, and blue was a sign of good. In fact, they thought blue eyes were blasphemous, and would not allow any children with blue eyes to survive.

====Declaration of war====
The '''Leaper''' government in charge of Taryte declared war on the rebels when they learned what was happening, but were unable to act because the rebels had moved to a barren plateau where the land itself was their shelter and therefore their settlements were invisible. However, some of the rebels defected back to the government and helped Taryte track down the settlements in the desert. Thus the '''Tarise Civil War''' began.

They criminalized obesity and told people that to be tall and thin was to be morally superior to all others. The Taryteans believed that Sapêpans were evil and were attempting to return their country to a pre-Meri state, believing that it would be more peaceful. It was not just Sapepa they wanted to eliminate, however.

Tarytean citizens were encouraged, and sometimes forced, to dress appropriately at all times. Fancy clothes were banned, as the government wanted to save money on producing clothes by making them as cheap as possible. Degrees of formality were established, with the highest-level government officials receiving the best clothes (this was meant to encourage lesser citizens to strive for success in the government). Most girls were required to wear their hair plain and long under normal circumstances,[3] and exceptions were made only for upper-level Taryteans to show their status.

The rebel leaders did their best to produce a stable government that they hoped would last hundreds of years. The barren land around them made defection back to the government difficult, as would-be defectors had to fight both the rebels and the cruel natural environment. The rebel leaders realized that they would likely be eventually deposed, however, and sped up their violent reforms in the event they would be soon forced to stop by either the government or their own people.

====Contact with Lenians====
Within a year after the founding of the rebel settlements, a group of rebels invaded the Thunder state of '''Sapeepa''' and began kidnapping Lenians to use as slaves.

The kidnapped slaves began to criticize the Taryteans, claiming Taryteans were unnaturally obsessed with the ideal of purity; that is, after the early Taryteans had managed to survive many years of unjust aggression by their rulers in the tropics, they refused to discard their old mentality and applied it even when there was no danger from within their society, and thus the Taryteans unwittingly had embarked on a quest to purify their society by attacking various groups in the population that were unlucky enough to be singled out as undesirable. When the rebel leaders learned that some of their people were using kidnapped Lenians as prostitutes and slaves, they ejected those people from their colony and threatened to kill the Lenians.

The rebels were strict especially in their racial policies, refusing to let anyone who appeared to them to have even a trace of non-Tarytean ancestry survive. Since Taryte was ethnically diverse due to slavery and trade, the rebels ruled out an alliance with many other Taryteans, even those who opposed the government for other reasons. However, they did not plan to conquer Taryte; they wanted to set up a coalition government with Taryte's orthodox government and the rebels sharing power equally.

With slavery firmly in place, the Taryteans were pleased at the remarkable improvement in their society, though in fact this change had come about not so much because of the absence of undesirables from their society as the great overwhelming fear of elimination that all residents suddenly were forced to live with. Their religion taught that to be killed by the government ensured reincarnation as a slave, to be served immediately.

====The Thunderstorm Treaty====
Around 3700, Taryte and Sapeepa signed the '''Thunderstorm Treaty''', which stated that their common philosophy of utilitarian reliance on technology overruled their massive philosophical differences.

But in 3704, the '''Kyry''' army, an alliance of soldiers within the rebels, rejected the treaty and declared war on all Lenians and all Taryteans who protected them. The Taryteans had given up much of their military power to Kyry, and now they feared that the Kyry generals would make decisions that even the other rebels felt unwise.

But when the Tarytean soldiers entered the Thunder province of '''Sapeepa''', the Sapeepan soldiers immediately attacked. Even though the Lenians were the victims of this invasion, their resistance was illegal, since Taryte, the Tarytean rebels, and the Kyry army within the Tarytean rebels were all legally still part of the Crystal Empire, and the Lenians were required by law to rely on the government for defense. Therefore the government of the Empire did not help the Lenians resist the attack.

Nevertheless, the Lenians won this battle, and the Kyry generals admitted that they had underestimated the military prowess of the Lenians. They immediately halted the entire war, using the authority earlier granted to them by the rebel leaders. But the rebel leaders refused to accept defeat; instead they fired the generals and organized a new army that promised an even greater attack on the Lenians as revenge for their initial defeat.

In 3707, Taryte invaded the Lenians again, and this time they won, and held full control of Sapeepa for three years without a counterattack.

The rebels declared their main settlement to be the new capital of Taryte, and declared war on the Tarytean government. They invaded the tropics and began to enslave all other Taryteans, even those who had been their allies just fifteen years earlier. They promised to kill all Lenians, including slaves, both within their borders and without.

====Thunder reaction====
When the Lenian Thunder leaders heard that their people were being murdered by the Tarytean rebels, they signed a pact with the Tarytean rebels to speed up the killing of the Lenians. This was because the rebels had promised to make an exception to their plan of total genocide for those who betrayed the Lenians, and use the defectors as workers in Taryte for as long as they were useful. This brought the remaining Lenians into the war on the side of the Tarytean government, even though the Tarytean government kept most of them as slaves.

The Tarytean rebels dammed and diverted the rivers that flowed from the highlands, and promised to kill Taryteans in the tropics largely through starvation rather than combat. The Tarytean government responded with a conventional attack, and had secured the alliance of all of the people of Taryte, even the slaves.

===Thunder-Paba relations===
After more than 2000 years of being pacifists who were only willing to fight defensive wars, in the early 3700,s the Pabap royal family decided to becom e even more pacifistic, and abandoned all claims to its own territory but for a small sliver of land around the original settlements from 633 AD. They abolished Paba's army and navy and did nothing when Thaoa pushed its own army deeper and deeper into Paba, set up slave plantations, and forced Pabap people to sleep under trees while the Thaoans slept in their beds. Thaoa fought several "battles" against the unarmed Pabap citizens in which the Pabaps suffered four digit body counts and the THaoans suffered a few minor cuts and bruises. The Pabaps had fought back bravely with their pots and pans, figuring the Pabap army with its swords and spears was merely hiding out in the city and would soon rescue them, just as it had reliably done for 3000 years, but no army ever came. Finally the Pabaps realized that the royal family really had abolished the army and had effectively thrown away their entire nation so they could sit their castles sipping on raspberry wine.

Other nations felt bad for Paba, as even though the royal family had tried to diaper up their new philosophy as just another form of pacifism it was clear that they had stopped trying to govern their population and stopped caring about what would happen to the common people of Paba if they suffered simultaneous opportunistic invasions from all of their neighbors. Thaoa struck first, as they traditionally had been the cruelest and most violent of Paba's neighbors. But they were also invaded from places farther afield. The [[Crystals]] decided the time had come to finish the project that they had tried to build 1600 years earlier: a nation for Crystals only, carved out of Pabap territory near the Pabap capital city. The Crystals had become a lot less violent themselves over the centuries, as their fortunes had improved markedly. So they did not abuse the Pabaps, nor did they enslave the Pabaps.

Altotta was also very sympathetic towards the Pabaps, but its leaders had a difficult time understanding what was happening. Paba had fallen behind in technology, and its main partner, [[Nama]], had collapsed to a level even worse than Paba's, so they could no longer use Nama to announce to other nations what their foreign policy was. Paba had to rely instead on direct diplomatic connections with its surrounding empires, and there was no direct connection between Paba and Altotta. By 3919, there were 27 different hostile foreign armies occupying strips and patches of Paba's territory, each respecting the claims of the others but worrying about a potential future civil war in which one colonizer would go to war with another. Many of these 27 armies were from nations that had previously been very poor and weak, but had heard of the collapse of Paba and realized that even a tiny nation could defeat Paba in a war now. There were also some colonists who were not even part of the 27 armies, but simply came of their own will and conquered a small town. At the most extreme were towns that were held in siege by just one person, who had the only weapons in the town, and was able to hold the entire town's population in slavery.

===Contact with Nepiki===

===Widening of the war===
\

===Unrest at home===

====Background====
For most of their history, the blonde, blue-eyed '''Thunder''' people had been strong allies of the dark-skinned [[Crystals]]. They both had founded large, powerful empires built on territory taken from their shared enemy [[Nama]], and both had acquired new shared enemies, chiefly [[Dreamland]]. Both had originated as political parties within their respective tribes: the Thunderers were part of the [[Lenia]]n tribe, and the Crystals were aboriginals chiefly from [[Atlam]]. Both groups considered themselves to have risen above tribal politics, but intermarriage was rare, and the laws of both empires stated that all children of mixed marriages must choose to be either Crystals or Thunderers; there were no split identities. This was because each political party also associated itself with a religion, and these religions were not compatible.

In 3765, the Crystals declared war on the Thunder Empire and conquered their capital city. Lenians were assigned to submissive roles in society and denied the ability to own large amounts of money. Resistance was weak, and although the Crystal occupation lasted only 80 years, its end came not with a Thunder uprising but with yet another invasion, this time from the neighboring empire of [[Dreamland]].

By invading the Thunder Empire, the Dreamers had revived their ancient war against the Crystals. The Crystals had quickly surrendered their occupied territory to Dreamland, but in order to control this territory, the Dreamers had been forced to build settlements in the wilderness which could be easily reached by Crystals. The Crystals chose to attack these delicate supply-line settlements rather than attempt to regain control of the former Thunder Empire, and this made the Dreamer occupation much weaker than the Crystal occupation had been. In 3884, the Thunderers overthrew the Dreamers, and instituted slavery for all Dreamers. The Crystals did not help the Thunderers in this revolt, and therefore the Thunderers also enslaved the Crystals, but promised that the punishment given to the Crystals would be milder and that the Crystal Empire would be allowed to buy the stranded people out of slavery, whereas the Dreamers would never be set free.

====Uprising in Lypelpyp====
The Thunder coup of 3884 restored tribalism, saying that their long history of oppression by other tribes had taught them that a government based on tribal loyalties would be the best for its people. The dark-skinned Crystals were thus enslaved, and although the [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] had been of mixed racial origins, the Thunder government redefined them as a tribe and assigned them to a slavery even more oppressive than that given to the Crystals. The Thunderers reaffirmed that they were descendants of the [[Lenia]]n tribe, and identified themselves with blonde hair and blue eyes. They promised their people that all other tribes would be enslaved, and that people could not change their tribal identity, even through marriage.

In 3915, a large number of dark-skinned [[Crystal]] people settled in the Thunder city of [[Lypelpyp]]. Here, they founded a corporation, [[STW]], and took control of most trade routes with the Crystal Empire. Trade with the Crystals had continued despite the Thunder government's racist policies because even the racists had promised to remain allies of the Crystals, as both empires considered their longstanding tribal rivalry to be of a much lesser importance than their shared hatred of [[Dreamland]] and resistance to Dreamland's attempts to invade both of them.

But now the Crystals began constructing large houses for the STW members to live in, and these buildings quickly overshadowed the Lenians' older, more delicately built homes. Racial tension dominated life in Lypelpyp, as the Lenians had been promised just thirty years earlier that they would be allowed to enslave all other races of people, and yet their military had allowed a dark-skinned tribe to invade and colonize them.

Some Lenians in Lypelpyp tried to revolt, but STW was ready for them, and quickly defeated them with its own army comprised of illegal immigrants. Lypelpyp accused the Thunder government of abandonment, as they had not only broken their promise of eternal slavery for all tribal enemies, but had allowed a foreign army to enter an important city and attack unarmed native citizens who had protested the invasion. The Thunder government refused to respond to this complaint, but in secret signed an agreement with STW in which they recognized STW as a legal entity so long as STW paid taxes to the Thunder capital. Previously, STW had refused even this, saying that because all of their employees were illegal immigrants, they were not citizens, and should not pay taxes.

Soon, in 3918, yet another coup overthrew the Thunder government. This time, the perpetrators were a faction within the Thunder party: they practiced a milder version of the Thunder philosophy, and upon their victory, they publicly repudiated racism and immediately ended the slavery of all Crystals. They sanctioned the invasion of Lypelpyp and forged a new alliance with the Crystal Empire and the [[STW]] corporation which the Crystals had founded. This coup ended the hopes of the Lenians in Lypelpyp that they would ever be restored to their promised superior status, and therefore the Lenians began an underground resistance movement seeking to restore the earlier, more militant government. They realized that STW had been very clever to invade Lypelpyp only, enabling them to control important trade routers without launching a large-scale military invasion, as previous invaders had done. Since the militant Lenians were out of power, they declared themselves an independent nation and built settlements in areas of the wilderness which no outside party considered worthy of settlement.

Ironically, by pledging to oppose the Crystals on racial grounds, the submerged Lenian resistance actually improved their standing in the Crystal capital city of [[Baeba]]. Baeba was suspicious of STW, as STW's founders had tried to evade paying taxes to the Crystals as well, and seemed intent on drawing as much power as possible from their opportunistic invasion while giving nothing back to either empire. Baeba saw the Lenians' racial resistance to the illegal invasion as proof that the Lenians would be more reliable opponents against STW than would the mainline Thunderers who opposed STW only on economic grounds. In return, the Lenian resistors promised to respect the Crystals as allies in the greater war against [[Dreamland]], and Baeba Swamp's government allowed them to build an embassy in Baeba and attain recognition as the new, independent nation of '''Lypelpyp'''.

Despite this, the Crystals still preferred to interface with the more powerful mainline Thunder government, not the Lenian resistance, and since both parties claimed control of Lypelpyp, the Crystals promised not to intervene in this conflict, even if the Thunderers decided to crush the resistance. In anticipation that the Thunderers would eventually do this, the Crystals promised the Lenians refugee status in Baeba Swamp, further heightening the irony by promising the only safe place for a tribe of people who hated all dark-skinned people would be in the center of the world's oldest city founded and run by that same tribe of dark-skinned people.
.

===War front in Paba===

===War front in Baeba===

====Background====
In [[Baeba Swamp]], news of Adabawa's war threatened to destabilize Baeba's government.<ref>Note: in most cases, the "Baeba" referred to here is actually [[Lypelpyp]], who claimed jurisdiction over Baeba and promised to move its capital there in the distant future. Baeba allowed Lypelpyp to have an embassy there, and many people from Lypelpyp lived in Baeba, but they had no independent military.</ref> Baeba was the world's oldest city, having been continuously inhabited for more than ten thousand years by the dark-skinned aboriginal tribes who had first reached the area after a long journey across the continent. Over the millenia, though power had changed hands many times, the population of Baeba Swamp was never greatly affected. The most recent conqueror had been the [[Crystals|Crystal Empire]], which had taken over Baeba in the 3370s as part of a wider war against the invading empire of [[Dreamland]], whose leaders had made enemies of both the Crystals and the aboriginal Baebans.

The Crystals had originated from the nation of [[Atlam]],<ref>This may be a mistake for Amade.</ref> near the Equator, whose climate was similar to Baeba's but with no detectable seasonal temperature variation. The Crystals and the aboriginal Baebans were of a similar physical type: while some intertribal differences manifested themselves, both were very dark-skinned people with similar body types and facial features, and the Crystals quickly came to adopt the Baebans as part of their family.

Baeba's prosperity as the new capital of the Crystal Empire also brought other people to the Swamp; most of these were aboriginals from the deserts, seeking a better life near the coast, but many [[Subumpam|Lenians]] from the much colder Thunder Empire had also moved to Baeba. These people originally participated in trade, bringing hardy tropical fruits such as pineapples to the colder biomes of the north and east, but in Baeba, the appeal of economic prosperity soon overwhelmed their tribal loyalties, and even the blonde blue-eyed Lenians came to think of themselves as Baebans.

When the Crystal Empire, headquartered in Baeba, invaded and conquered the Thunder Empire around the year 3785, many Crystals worried that the Lenians in Baeba Swamp would object to the invasion and start a campaign of civil disobedience in Baeba.

===Conflict at home===
Even as the Thunder army racked up victories against Adabawa, dissent at home spread doubt about their long-term chances of victory.

====Debate of the Feminist War Council====
A group of feminists formed an organization called the '''Feminist War Council''' and at their first meeting declared an end to the war.

At their second meeting, they invited diplomats from [[Laba]] and [[Moonshine]] to a '''symposium''', intending to issue a formal military surrender to the winner of the debate. They reached no conclusion here, however, because the members of the Feminist War Council each had their own covert sympathies to guide them. Finally, at a third meeting the diplomats were again present, but also were diplomats from third-party nations such as [[Nama]]. These nations also had their own sympathies, with most favoring Laba, but many of the pro-Laba nations were strongly anti-Thunder. Therefore, with this additional input, the Feminist War Council decided unanimously to surrender to [[Moonshine]]. Because Moonshine had not been involved in the war, this treaty did not end the war; Adabawa's army was still invading. However, the Council ordered the military to build barricades in various areas of the Thunder Empire that would help repel invaders, but also make it difficult for the Thunder soldiers to pursue their enemies. Funding for weapons production was halted, leaving soldiers with an ever-dwindling supply.

====Reform in Sakwalo====
Adabawa's victory over the Thunder Empire led to a revolution in the state of Sakwalo that actually returned a stronger Thunder government to power; these people revived the strictest form of racial discrimination that had ever been practiced by banning all non-Lenians from living in Sakwalo and enslaving those whom they could not push out. Sakwalo had no military to patrol its borders, but since the capital of Sakwalo was in a remote area, Adabawa's armies had not been able to occupy it, and the radical new Thunder government maintained its hold on power.

====Sapeepa-Taryte relations====
Meanwhile, the state of '''Sapeepa'''<ref>somewhere between Blop and Baeba ....</ref> reacted to their defeat by launching a new war against [[Taryte]], which had been helping them against Adabawa but whose people had a longstanding mutual blood feud stemming from a war in 3704 in which Taryte had invaded and killed many Sapeepans. The Thunder military leaders refused to allow this war, and therefore Sapeepa seceded from the Thunder Empire, which was still in control of Sakwalo, cutting themselves off from any hope of power even if the Thunderers were to later reemerge from their defeat in Sakwalo and restore their original borders.

Both sides of this war also refused help from Adabawa, as they realized that Adabawa would almost certainly violate any treaty his people signed with a small, isolated power such as Taryte or Sapeepa. Therefore, the four armies of [[Meromo|Sapeepa]], [[Taryte]], '''Sakwalo''', and Adabawa were all at war with each other, each refusing even a temporary alliance with any of the other three. However, Sakwalo's forces had been so utterly destroyed that they realized their participation would be limited to the choice of which of the other three armies they would prefer to be invaded by. Likewise, Adabawa chose to let Sapeepa and Taryte wear each other down so that when their war was over he would have a much easier time invading and destroying both of them.

====Surrender of Nama====
The Thunder Empire had been long ago founded on land taken entirely from [[Nama]]. In 3953, after Adabawa had conquered all of Altotta and secured an unconditional surrender, [[Nama]] had reaffirmed its independence from Altotta, and continued the war with its own much weaker military. Nama declared that its borders encircled all of the land not yet under control of Adabawa's military, figuring that even triply hostile states like Sapeepa and Taryte would sooner side with Nama than with Adabawa. Since Sapeepa and Taryte had not yet been subdued by Adabawa, Nama claimed that Sapeepa and Taryte were part of Nama. However, Nama also insisted that in order to earn Nama's hand in an alliance, each of those states would need to first surrender unconditionally to Nama.

Like Sakwalo, Nama consisted primarily of difficult terrain, whose inhabitants were militarily impotent but also difficult for Adabawa's armies to reach. Adabawa had originally considered a treaty with Nama in which he would respect Nama's independence so long as they promised to remain neutral and form an economic compact with Laba's armies. Though Nama had once been the world's foremost military power, their fortunes had been declining for more than a thousand years, and Adabawa hoped that he could entice Nama into an alliance with the promise that Nama would regain its lost territory and the ability to once again make colonies of surrounding nations. Most Naman leaders favored Adabawa because he had defeated the Thunder Empire which had taken the most from Nama.

But the leader of Nama's independence movement, '''Likwàkwa''', had taken full control of Nama's army, and therefore the will of the generally pacifistic Naman confederation had no standing. She refused to surrender, and Adabawa chose to engage his army in a full-scale invasion of Nama, planning to bring even the most remote areas of resistance under his control. Adabawa thus strove to conquer Nama only, figuring that minor regional powers such as Sapeepa and Taryte would fall apart on their own once Nama was his.

Likwakwa's army held off Adabawa for many years before she handed power to her successor, a woman named '''Lakaxw''' (in [[Moonshine language |Moonshine ]], Lakaf). Lakaf's army in turn held off Adabawa as he became more and more detached from his military campaign. Though he had preferred to be present near the front lines of combat, as the armies spread out Adabawa was forced to remain geographically distant and delegate decisions to commanders over whom he had little control.

Nevertheless, Adabawa's army steadily penetrated further into Lakaf's upland forest refuge areas, and as the war dragged on, more and more often it was she who had no reliable means of contact with her increasingly scattered military holdouts. Adabawa was invading primarily from the north, and pushing ever southward into Nama, and into ever drier climates. By 3976, Adabawa had cut through all of the prairies and pushed her up against the '''Hykwus Mountains''', whose climate was far too barren to support her population. She agreed to finally surrender to Adabawa, but rather than issue a formal diplomatic surrender, she and her army scattered throughout the mountains, separating even from each other, hoping to buy time for a coordinated escape to the ocean while Adabawa's army struggled to find out where she had gone.

====Survival at sea====
To reach the ocean, Lakaf's army had to pass through territory that had been neutral in the war but had been forced into economic cooperation with Adabawa. Once they reached the ocean, however, they knew they would be safe, since even after his total victory Adabawa had no means of patrolling the long, winding tropical seacoast securely enough to discover even a tiny, disorganized army such as hers. Her most immediate trouble, she realized, was that she would need to either purchase or pirate a fleet of ships to bring her and her army to a place where they could be free from all governments, even friendly ones, as she realized that Adabawa was interested in controlling the entire world.

====Nama-Sakwalo relations====
When the governors of Sakwalo learned that Lakaf's army had held off Adabawa for many years longer than Sakwalo itself had, they offered Lakaf total control of Sakwalo, even if she demanded the Thunder resistance to abdicate and set up a tyranny with absolute power reserved for Lakaf. Lakaf agreed, and therefore Sakwalo's leaders formally abolished the emergency '''Loporomo''' government and set up a new monarchy to begin when Lakaf and her fleet arrived. Power was formally transferred to Lakaf even though the Thunderers had no guarantee she would ever arrive; most of the world had sided with Adabawa in this war, and Adabawa promised a reward for Lakaf's capture.

At this time, Sakwalo was restricted to inland areas around 45°N, which had been Sakwalo's capital all along. Lakaf's ships were fairly close by — docked along the coast of [[Kava]] at around 27°N at the same longitude — but in order to reach safety, she would need to circle around the entire continent, a sea journey that, no matter in which direction she began, would be more than ten thousand miles long and pass through many hostile territories. She hoped to find a much shorter path, even if it involved abandoning her ships after a journey to a hostile but out-of-the-way nation such as [[Thaoa]] to the east or [[Taryte]] to the west. And she knew that, just thirty years earlier, the [[Moonshine]] people had been in the same situation, and had arrived safely at the same destination despite passing through much hostile territory.

Queen Lakaf promised the Sakwaloans she would bring a stable and internally homogeneous government, but she directed what remained of their combined military forces to focus entirely on defense, and that they would make no attempts to gain any additional territory for their monarchy.

===Postwar Sakwalo===
Just one year later, in 3977, Adabawa's empire suffered a civil war which forced him to pull back his entire military force from the continent in order to reinforce his control over the islands of Laba. Many of the countries he had been occupying remained in alliance with each other, but they no longer considered themselves to be fighting for Laba. [[Dreamland]] soon emerged as the leader of the remnant coalition.

When the leaders of Sapeepa and [[Taryte]], who had revived a 300-year-old blood feud, heard that Adabawa had fallen from power, they declared a truce in order to fight [[Dreamland]], who had a 600-year-old war still raging against both of them. When Adabawa had been in control, Dreamland had obeyed his commands to shift the focus of their military campaigns towards targets more valuable to Adabawa. But now that Dreamland was back in charge, they returned the struggle for [[Baeba]] to their top priority.

==Other information==
This sequences of events overlaps with the above but is kept separate.

===Identity of Baeba===
In the STRAWB.DOC writeup, it says that Taryte is at war with Baeba Swamp, but that in 3844, Baeba Swamp loses its war against the '''Thunderers'''. <s>It is likely that the Baeba Swamp in this writeup is Sapeepa, whose leaders claimed jurisdiction over the distant Crystal city of Baeba Swamp. </s>

Another possibility, however, is that it refers to Amade, which in this case would have been included in the Oyster roundup of around 3400 AD, and would mean that the Oysters also conquered both Taryte and AlphaLeap, only to later lose those two areas without losing Amade.

In this war, the Thunderers did not side with the Lenians living in Taryte or in "Baeba Swamp", and in fact explicitly signed a pact with an alliance of non-Lenian tribes. The writeup also explains that Lenians were the majority. Note that the writeup also says that "Baeba" was populated primarily by Lenians and non-native peoples, rather than just saying Lenians.

The paragraphs in which Taryte is at war with Baeba are separate from those describing Taryte's invasion of Sapeepa. The Thunder party sided with Taryte in this conflict even though the Tarises were explicitly killing Lenians, and the Thunderers were also Lenians. This may explain why Baeba Swamp "fell to the Thunderers"; the Thunderers were given control over the territory they called Baeba even though from a military standpoint they had not only lost the war, but accelerated their defeat by siding with the invaders.

Even in 3844, many Lenians who were not pro-Thunder remained in the territory they called Baeba, in areas that were good for producing food and could thus not be easily swept over. The district of '''Rasilisana''' is described as being a part of Baeba having come under Thunder control in the mid-3840s. This became the capital of the Taryte/Sapeepa alliance.

If "Baeba" is Amade, it is possible that the so-called Lenians were in fact fellow dark-skinned tribes who had for quite some time come to ally with the Lenians of Paba for political reasons. This would explain little, however, as it would require an alliance to last for more than a thousand years while both sides maintained strict tribal identities, and where the Star-derived tribes ruled over the Lenians without the Lenians complaining.

Baeba may also be a region of Taryte, if it can be assumed that Amade and Taryte were united by the earlier Crystal conquest. Indeed this may be the likeliest explanation.

Dreamland continued its war against the Thunderers even after being thrown out of power in 3884, and had "Laba" on their side. Laba here may be a diplomatic entity, since Dreamland already controlled Laba's military. Dreamland identified Taryte as the progenitor of the Thunder state, even though they had been enemies before uniting against Dreamland in desperation.

When the Crystals conquered the Thunder Empire in 3765, they were unwilling or unable to push the Thunderers out of the territory around Amade, since in 3844, the Thunderers conquered Amade. It may be that the Thunderers were effectively fighting AlphaLeap, not the Crystals, but even so, the Crystals must have regained control of Amade by 4108 at the latest, and thus had had control of it for at least two generations by the time the Firestones arrived.

====Summary====
The Thunder Empire seems to have conquered the land as far south as 15°N, perhaps even to 13°N ... in either case, the location of the capital of the merged Amade/Taryte region of the Crystal Empire. They did this even while they were in a military alliance with the Crystals; however, the Crystals almost certainly had violated the treaty first by invading various Thunder nations in the preceding century. Thus, the alliance was effectively meaningless by this time. This means that few of the people moving into the tropics were Crystals, and that most were Lenians.

Because this happened ''after'' Taryte's war against the Thunderers, the Tarises cannot move back in and replace the Thunderers in this area. It is still possible that the Crystals will displace the Thunderers from at least parts of the area, because the Thunderers immediately lost a war against Dreamland and had no means with which to hold onto their newly conquered territory in the tropics. Thus, it could be that the Amade-Taryte zone is very diverse by 4164 when the '''Firestones''' invade. Unlike all previous invasions, the Thunderers rode in from the north, which is why they were able to win their war without conquering [[AlphaLeap]], which controlled the only available sea route.

'''THIS MEANS THAT AMADE AND TARYTE ARE WITHIN THE ANCHOR EMPIRE.''' Therefore, Dreamland and AlphaLeap both claim the area, with AlphaLeap still controlling the sea and Dreamland attempting to exert control over the land. However, Dreamland never had a serious chance of winning this conflict, and so Amade-Taryte became independent again, with Leapers controlling the economy but no longer able to occupy the land.

The tribal makeup of the Amade-Taryte region in 3844 was similar to that of the Crystal-Thunder empire broadly speaking ... blonde Lenian people (both Thunderers and people who by then would have been considered aboriginals) and dark-skinned people living side by side, with relatively few people of intermediate physical types. When the Firestone army reaches this area, they may have considered themselves to belong to neither group.

The Oysters and their descendants invaded or crossed into this region many times, though with varying boundaries:
#The initial invasion in 2175, during the foundation of the Oyster Empire, which likely excluded the areas nearest the Equator.
#An "invasion" to regain lost territory in 2668 AD as the aboriginals overthrew the Oysters, which may nonetheless have brought Oysters into new areas even as they were pushed out of their home territory.
#Another invasion sometime around 3100 AD.
#Another invasion around 3431 AD, although probably stopped at the border of AlphaLeap since the invasion came from the east.
#The war against Taryte, though initially a loss, brought Thunderers into the tropics once again. By this time, they no longer identified with the Lenians who had been left behind by previous migrations, and in fact sided with the enemies of those Lenians.

Note that the Thunder invasion of "the south" only encompassed what they called Aboa, which included Paba and points eastward. It may have also included Subumpam and Lobexon but these areas were not part of Aboa in other writeups. This invasion soon decayed, which may mean that they were driven back. In any case, Paba was united with the Thunder Empire in the end because both were part of the Anchor Empire.

Despite all of the invasions, the Crystals were never pushed out of the territory, and may have remained the true majority from at least 3565 AD onward, if not well before this time. Lenians (but not any one specific group) may have been the majority even if the Crystals were the largest tribe, but by whatever means, the Lenians had lost their majority status in Amade and AlphaLeap by 4108 at the very latest (and likely much sooner), and since it seems that Taryte no longer had any legal status at this time, they would have also lost Tarise. This means that when the Firestones invade, the Crystals really are the majority, though they may have adopted some Lenians through intermarriage.

===Relations with AlphaLeap===
Also, this same writeup explains this war as having an event in 3710 that destroyed [[AlphaLeap]]'s grip on power in the region, and that Taryte did not declare war on AlphaLeap, but defeated the Leapers by creating a self-sufficient economy despite their desert climate. (AlphaLeap was also a desert, but had better access to the sea.) The writeup also implies that the Leapers may have been the reason why so many Lenians lived in the tropics .... most were slaves, but it does not say that they arrived as slaves; the Leapers may have brought them there as voluntary immigrants to allow future Leapers to stoke racial conflicts in the tropics.

AlphaLeap nonetheless provided food to Taryte during the war .... it was unintended, however, as the food "had been brought to Sapeepa by AlphaLeap".

This information may be necessary to understand why AlphaLeap was only a minor power in future conflicts, and despite claiming the right to rule the entire [[Halasala|Anchor Empire]] in 4108, were likely only able to control the southern coast, using their navy, and perhaps held political (but not military) supremacy in Baeba Swamp (the real Baeba Swamp).

===Languages===
At least two of the five Tarise language families must survive until 3710, and at least one ("River People") must survive until the 4200s. It is likely that more than just these will survive, but the survival of the languages in 3710 makes most sense if they had been driven into submission by the Leapers, making [[Khulls|Leaper]] the official language of Tarise until (if ever) it was regained by the Crystals.

The slaves likely would have spoken Leaper as well, since they were for all practical purposes Leaper property, not Star property or any other group. It is possible that the Leapers would have kept the slaves apart from the language of power, however, and instructed slaveowners to learn the languages of the slaves. If there is just one language for all of the slaves, it is probably [[Babakiam|Play]], which had not yet lost its tones, and would have sounded in some ways like a childish version of the Leaper language. The Oyster language may have also been spoken by some slaves, but it is not clear where the Leapers were getting their slaves from, or even if they needed to continually capture slaves as opposed to breeding their existing slaves.

If the Leapers' slaves do not speak [[Leaper]], their language would either have been a Gold language from the Play branch, or a remnant strain of [[Paleo-Pabappa]] that survived precisely ''because'' it cut them off from the soceity around them.

The Oyster language is almost certainly spoken by some Lenians living somewhere within this area, as it is unlikely they were driven out entirely, even if they lost ground. This is because none of the outside powers in the area would have been able to accomplish such a decisive victory, as they had all been weakened by the same wider war.

Dreamer settlement is unlikely, as they were strong in their homeland but had not won an offensive war since 3370 AD.

==Taryte in the Cosmopolitan Age==
===AlphaLeap===
After the decline of AlphaLeap and sea traffic around their coastlines, it is likely that the former Leaper territory devolves into tribal rule, possibly even becoming nomadic as most food would be taken from the sea. Here there were two groups of Lenians: the first was the escaped slaves, who spoke a dialect of Leaper; the other was the descendants of the Thunderers, who were dominant in some areas nearby but also had lost ground and included refugees who had been pushed eastward by the Crystals. Also in this area were the descendants of those same Crystals, since they too had been pushed eastward by the Firestones. These three tribes would be numerically dominant in the area, but they may have had difficulty finding food, and it could be that those with the means to do so fled to other areas, leaving the poorest classes behind.

Early on, there would have been a modest correlation between light skin and high social status, because the descendants of the slaves had had 400 years to organize their state, whereas the next group who fled in was light-skinned and had had ample time to work towards a society as well (likely separate from the Leaper speakers), and the third group was dark-skinned, and would have had the lowest status, and no time to organize in their own defense.

Moreover, despite the tropical latitude, the surrounding peoples were the Firestones and other Lenian tribes, and so the Crystals would have been the only dark-skinned people in the region apart from some descendants of tribes like the Merari who may have been also driven into this area and enslaved. They may have tried to flee back towards the Equator, or northwards to Baeba Swamp, with those who remained peaceably blending into the society around them. This assumes, however, that the upper class did not quickly sail away towards more bountiful waters, leaving the descendants of the Crystals and the Thunderers to deal with each other.

The language of the slaves was almost certainly a dialect of Leaper, and at least some Crystals would also have spoken Leaper, so the lowest and highest class of society had their language in common.

====Possible three-tiered society====
It is possible that the descendants of the slaves live peaceably but separately from the other Lenians because they are of a different body type .... tall-male whereas the Oysters are tall-female. This separation could have persisted for thousands of years. If this is the case, and yet they lived in the same society, this would be the primary division in society, with the skin and hair color secondary, and the language barrier tertiary. There would be three groups:
#The '''Dətiās''' people, slaves who were held by the Leapers for more than a thousand years without a significant rebellion, and were stereotyped as being passive and nonviolent. Historically, they could trace their ancestry to the '''Pēles''' colonists, to slaves abducted from Paba and Subumpam, and to various non-Lenian groups who happened to live nearby. They likely spoke the Leaper language.
#The descendants of the Oysters and Thunderers, who spoke Oyster languages, and possibly just a single language.
#The descendants of the '''Crystals''', who may have continued to call themselves Crystals, considering the traditional Crystal capital, Baeba Swamp, to have been abandoned.

==Notes==
<references />
[[Category:Teppala]]

Mevumep

2025-06-20T23:17:20Z

Poswob Rare: /* Northern mountains */

==Languages==
:''See [[User:Soap/PC]].''

==Census of 4198==

'''NOTE''': All names in this section are given either as exonyms, trade names, or ciphers; none is from an original language of Mevumep.

====Key to placenames====
The Slopes ciphered the Andanese root ''yuku'' "city" through a different cipher for each territory, which meant that their Play names of each city was different. Likewise ''puni'' in cipher was their word for districts. These were not standalone Andanese words, but the tradition was to take the head of the corresponding word, which was most often a (C)V(C)V disyllabic sequence.

The base cipher for the entire Union was Stargazer's modified cipher, since the Slopes felt it was the most culturebound of all ciphers, and that culture was Stargazer's own, so it was equally foreign to all 40 districts in the Union.

The four zones had their own ciphers, and each of the forty districts had their own ciphers, for a total of 45 ciphers.

===Fox Island===
'''Fox Island''' was home to 367,000 PBC's spread across nine districts, with about 40,000 aboriginals in the southern tail region and 16,500 inland; these were not counted as part of the PBC population. In the west of the island there were an additional 94,000 people where tribal affiliation was not recognized; indeed this entire area was just one district as well, as it had its own system.

====Southern peninsula====
The Southern peninsula had for 3,500 years run on a system whereby a landholding family would host hundreds of people on their land, who were meant to forage in the wilderness for food and mostly take care of themselves; the landlords were responsible for protecting them from invasion, wild animals, and to some extent caring for their children. This last bit was important as the landholders learned early on that they needed a large child population to keep their landholdings from withering away.

These people were '''Wand''' (men taller than women), and among the tallest and strongest people overall. The slaves were a mixture of these same people and the aboriginals who were also Wand.

The Southern landholders worked their slaves very hard, and punished slow workers by exile. These people could also leave of their own will (and thus the landholders sometimes said their practice was not slavery), but had to leave the property immediately and could not legally remain in the wilderness.

Over the centuries, the landholders in the tropical forests of the southern peninsula sent more and more slow workers, rebels, and other unwanted peoples north into the rest of the island. They did not want a war, so they tried to keep good relations with the northern part of the island. The northern societies were much poorer, and had a much higher birth rate but also a high infant mortality rate.

The border between north and south shifted many times over the 3,500 years, with the south ending up with more land than just the peninsula, but they did not spread over the mountains because the climate here was cooler. Thus the plantation economies remained a minority. Some landholders spoke about migrating to the mainland, but the mainland societies were mostly not interested.

====Northern mountains====
These people were '''Womb''' (women taller than men) and much shorter and more delicate overall than the Southerners. They had been there for about ten thousand years before the Southern landholders, and thus were aboriginals (but they were not the only group of aboriginals). Most were not interested in moving to the South, and they knew that the hard labor of the South would not treat them well anyhow. They were thus much poorer than the people to their south, but their land was mostly free of Southern intrusion and relations overall were good.

===Hăla===
Only about 87,500 people lived in all of Hăla's 9 recognized districts, about 10,000 in each one. This number had been higher before the [[Players]] conquered all of the coastal territory. The Players had chosen to accept these people into their coalition rather than driving them into the highlands. Thus, the only Hăla that had remained was the highlands, and these districts were not connected to each other.

===Northwest===
About 83,400 people lived here, in nine districts, again with about ten thousand people per district.

===Northeast===
With 118,000 people, this area had the lowest population density, but with 12 districts, also held about 10,000 people per district.

==Older edits==
:''This pertained to a much smaller area than what I am now referring to as Mevumep. I may need a new name for one or both of them.''
Northeast corner of continental area... dolphin shaped country. No aboriginals at all ... all 4 tribes are macro-Pabap people.<ref>lenians?</ref> Glacial, rocky landscape... no agriculture possible. The language may be [[Paleo-Pabappa|Birch]], even though the Birch society arose as a blend of aboriginals and Lenians.

==Notes==

==See also==
*[[Macro-Pabap languages]]
*[[Paleo-Pabappa]]

==Notes==

Mevumep

2025-06-20T23:17:00Z

Poswob Rare: /* Northern mountains */

==Languages==
:''See [[User:Soap/PC]].''

==Census of 4198==

'''NOTE''': All names in this section are given either as exonyms, trade names, or ciphers; none is from an original language of Mevumep.

====Key to placenames====
The Slopes ciphered the Andanese root ''yuku'' "city" through a different cipher for each territory, which meant that their Play names of each city was different. Likewise ''puni'' in cipher was their word for districts. These were not standalone Andanese words, but the tradition was to take the head of the corresponding word, which was most often a (C)V(C)V disyllabic sequence.

The base cipher for the entire Union was Stargazer's modified cipher, since the Slopes felt it was the most culturebound of all ciphers, and that culture was Stargazer's own, so it was equally foreign to all 40 districts in the Union.

The four zones had their own ciphers, and each of the forty districts had their own ciphers, for a total of 45 ciphers.

===Fox Island===
'''Fox Island''' was home to 367,000 PBC's spread across nine districts, with about 40,000 aboriginals in the southern tail region and 16,500 inland; these were not counted as part of the PBC population. In the west of the island there were an additional 94,000 people where tribal affiliation was not recognized; indeed this entire area was just one district as well, as it had its own system.

====Southern peninsula====
The Southern peninsula had for 3,500 years run on a system whereby a landholding family would host hundreds of people on their land, who were meant to forage in the wilderness for food and mostly take care of themselves; the landlords were responsible for protecting them from invasion, wild animals, and to some extent caring for their children. This last bit was important as the landholders learned early on that they needed a large child population to keep their landholdings from withering away.

These people were '''Wand''' (men taller than women), and among the tallest and strongest people overall. The slaves were a mixture of these same people and the aboriginals who were also Wand.

The Southern landholders worked their slaves very hard, and punished slow workers by exile. These people could also leave of their own will (and thus the landholders sometimes said their practice was not slavery), but had to leave the property immediately and could not legally remain in the wilderness.

Over the centuries, the landholders in the tropical forests of the southern peninsula sent more and more slow workers, rebels, and other unwanted peoples north into the rest of the island. They did not want a war, so they tried to keep good relations with the northern part of the island. The northern societies were much poorer, and had a much higher birth rate but also a high infant mortality rate.

The border between north and south shifted many times over the 3,500 years, with the south ending up with more land than just the peninsula, but they did not spread over the mountains because the climate here was cooler. Thus the plantation economies remained a minority. Some landholders spoke about migrating to the mainland, but the mainland societies were mostly not interested.

====Northern mountains====
These people were '''Womb''' (women taller than men) and much shorter and more delicate overall than the Southerners. They had been there tens of thousands of years before the Southern landholders, and thus were aboriginals (but they were not the only group of aboriginals). Most were not interested in moving to the South, and they knew that the hard labor of the South would not treat them well anyhow. They were thus much poorer than the people to their south, but their land was mostly free of Southern intrusion and relations overall were good.

===Hăla===
Only about 87,500 people lived in all of Hăla's 9 recognized districts, about 10,000 in each one. This number had been higher before the [[Players]] conquered all of the coastal territory. The Players had chosen to accept these people into their coalition rather than driving them into the highlands. Thus, the only Hăla that had remained was the highlands, and these districts were not connected to each other.

===Northwest===
About 83,400 people lived here, in nine districts, again with about ten thousand people per district.

===Northeast===
With 118,000 people, this area had the lowest population density, but with 12 districts, also held about 10,000 people per district.

==Older edits==
:''This pertained to a much smaller area than what I am now referring to as Mevumep. I may need a new name for one or both of them.''
Northeast corner of continental area... dolphin shaped country. No aboriginals at all ... all 4 tribes are macro-Pabap people.<ref>lenians?</ref> Glacial, rocky landscape... no agriculture possible. The language may be [[Paleo-Pabappa|Birch]], even though the Birch society arose as a blend of aboriginals and Lenians.

==Notes==

==See also==
*[[Macro-Pabap languages]]
*[[Paleo-Pabappa]]

==Notes==

Mevumep

2025-06-20T23:12:38Z

Poswob Rare: /* Southern peninsula */

==Languages==
:''See [[User:Soap/PC]].''

==Census of 4198==

'''NOTE''': All names in this section are given either as exonyms, trade names, or ciphers; none is from an original language of Mevumep.

====Key to placenames====
The Slopes ciphered the Andanese root ''yuku'' "city" through a different cipher for each territory, which meant that their Play names of each city was different. Likewise ''puni'' in cipher was their word for districts. These were not standalone Andanese words, but the tradition was to take the head of the corresponding word, which was most often a (C)V(C)V disyllabic sequence.

The base cipher for the entire Union was Stargazer's modified cipher, since the Slopes felt it was the most culturebound of all ciphers, and that culture was Stargazer's own, so it was equally foreign to all 40 districts in the Union.

The four zones had their own ciphers, and each of the forty districts had their own ciphers, for a total of 45 ciphers.

===Fox Island===
'''Fox Island''' was home to 367,000 PBC's spread across nine districts, with about 40,000 aboriginals in the southern tail region and 16,500 inland; these were not counted as part of the PBC population. In the west of the island there were an additional 94,000 people where tribal affiliation was not recognized; indeed this entire area was just one district as well, as it had its own system.

====Southern peninsula====
The Southern peninsula had for 3,500 years run on a system whereby a landholding family would host hundreds of people on their land, who were meant to forage in the wilderness for food and mostly take care of themselves; the landlords were responsible for protecting them from invasion, wild animals, and to some extent caring for their children. This last bit was important as the landholders learned early on that they needed a large child population to keep their landholdings from withering away.

These people were '''Wand''' (men taller than women), and among the tallest and strongest people overall. The slaves were a mixture of these same people and the aboriginals who were also Wand.

The Southern landholders worked their slaves very hard, and punished slow workers by exile. These people could also leave of their own will (and thus the landholders sometimes said their practice was not slavery), but had to leave the property immediately and could not legally remain in the wilderness.

Over the centuries, the landholders in the tropical forests of the southern peninsula sent more and more slow workers, rebels, and other unwanted peoples north into the rest of the island. They did not want a war, so they tried to keep good relations with the northern part of the island. The northern societies were much poorer, and had a much higher birth rate but also a high infant mortality rate.

The border between north and south shifted many times over the 3,500 years, with the south ending up with more land than just the peninsula, but they did not spread over the mountains because the climate here was cooler. Thus the plantation economies remained a minority. Some landholders spoke about migrating to the mainland, but the mainland societies were mostly not interested.

====Northern mountains====
These people were '''Womb''' (women taller than men) and much shorter and more delicate overall than the Southerners. Most were not interested in moving to the South, and they knew that the hard labor of the South would not treat them well anyhow. They were thus much poorer than the people to their south, but their land was mostly free of Southern intrusion and relations overall were good.

===Hăla===
Only about 87,500 people lived in all of Hăla's 9 recognized districts, about 10,000 in each one. This number had been higher before the [[Players]] conquered all of the coastal territory. The Players had chosen to accept these people into their coalition rather than driving them into the highlands. Thus, the only Hăla that had remained was the highlands, and these districts were not connected to each other.

===Northwest===
About 83,400 people lived here, in nine districts, again with about ten thousand people per district.

===Northeast===
With 118,000 people, this area had the lowest population density, but with 12 districts, also held about 10,000 people per district.

==Older edits==
:''This pertained to a much smaller area than what I am now referring to as Mevumep. I may need a new name for one or both of them.''
Northeast corner of continental area... dolphin shaped country. No aboriginals at all ... all 4 tribes are macro-Pabap people.<ref>lenians?</ref> Glacial, rocky landscape... no agriculture possible. The language may be [[Paleo-Pabappa|Birch]], even though the Birch society arose as a blend of aboriginals and Lenians.

==Notes==

==See also==
*[[Macro-Pabap languages]]
*[[Paleo-Pabappa]]

==Notes==

Mevumep

2025-06-20T23:10:25Z

Poswob Rare: /* Fox Island */

==Languages==
:''See [[User:Soap/PC]].''

==Census of 4198==

'''NOTE''': All names in this section are given either as exonyms, trade names, or ciphers; none is from an original language of Mevumep.

====Key to placenames====
The Slopes ciphered the Andanese root ''yuku'' "city" through a different cipher for each territory, which meant that their Play names of each city was different. Likewise ''puni'' in cipher was their word for districts. These were not standalone Andanese words, but the tradition was to take the head of the corresponding word, which was most often a (C)V(C)V disyllabic sequence.

The base cipher for the entire Union was Stargazer's modified cipher, since the Slopes felt it was the most culturebound of all ciphers, and that culture was Stargazer's own, so it was equally foreign to all 40 districts in the Union.

The four zones had their own ciphers, and each of the forty districts had their own ciphers, for a total of 45 ciphers.

===Fox Island===
'''Fox Island''' was home to 367,000 PBC's spread across nine districts, with about 40,000 aboriginals in the southern tail region and 16,500 inland; these were not counted as part of the PBC population. In the west of the island there were an additional 94,000 people where tribal affiliation was not recognized; indeed this entire area was just one district as well, as it had its own system.

====Southern peninsula====
The Southern peninsula had for 3,500 years run on a system whereby a landholding family would host hundreds of people on their land, who were meant to forage in the wilderness for food and mostly take care of themselves; the landlords were responsible for protecting them from invasion, wild animals, and to some extent caring for their children. This last bit was important as the landholders learned early on that they needed a large child population to keep their landholdings from withering away.

The Southern landholders worked their slaves very hard, and punished slow workers by exile. These people could also leave of their own will (and thus the landholders sometimes said their practice was not slavery), but had to leave the property immediately and could not legally remain in the wilderness.

Over the centuries, the landholders in the tropical forests of the southern peninsula sent more and more slow workers, rebels, and other unwanted peoples north into the rest of the island. They did not want a war, so they tried to keep good relations with the northern part of the island. The northern societies were much poorer, and had a much higher birth rate but also a high infant mortality rate.

The border between north and south shifted many times over the 3,500 years, with the south ending up with more land than just the peninsula, but they did not spread over the mountains because the climate here was cooler. Thus the plantation economies remained a minority. Some landholders spoke about migrating to the mainland, but the mainland societies were mostly not interested.

===Hăla===
Only about 87,500 people lived in all of Hăla's 9 recognized districts, about 10,000 in each one. This number had been higher before the [[Players]] conquered all of the coastal territory. The Players had chosen to accept these people into their coalition rather than driving them into the highlands. Thus, the only Hăla that had remained was the highlands, and these districts were not connected to each other.

===Northwest===
About 83,400 people lived here, in nine districts, again with about ten thousand people per district.

===Northeast===
With 118,000 people, this area had the lowest population density, but with 12 districts, also held about 10,000 people per district.

==Older edits==
:''This pertained to a much smaller area than what I am now referring to as Mevumep. I may need a new name for one or both of them.''
Northeast corner of continental area... dolphin shaped country. No aboriginals at all ... all 4 tribes are macro-Pabap people.<ref>lenians?</ref> Glacial, rocky landscape... no agriculture possible. The language may be [[Paleo-Pabappa|Birch]], even though the Birch society arose as a blend of aboriginals and Lenians.

==Notes==

==See also==
*[[Macro-Pabap languages]]
*[[Paleo-Pabappa]]

==Notes==

Dolphin Riders

2025-06-20T01:33:58Z

Poswob Rare: /* Lower-class occupations */

The '''MFZ''' Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the [[Cosmopolitan Age]]. The original Empire, ''Mayuvas'', was [[Dreamland]], which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the [[Gold party]], as the word for gold in [[babakiam|Play]] was ''mayu''. The other two empires, ''Fayuvas'' and ''Žayuvas'', were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, [[Baeba Swamp]], which at the time was run primarily by the '''Iron''' party, an offshoot of the much older [[Zenith]] party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel '''ū''', giving ''Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas'', but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like '''uv''' (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

==Background==

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with [[Baeba Swamp]] to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of [[Moonshine]] and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with '''Tata''', also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

==Structure of Parliament==
Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the [[ppot#DPR|Dolphin Riders]], who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient [[Gold party]]. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

==Recognition of new tribes==
Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the '''Tippers''' who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

==Language==
The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited [[Lenian languages#DPR|Dolphin Rider]] language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near [[Baeba Swamp]] came to speak [[Ogili_II|Ogili]], the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

==Growth of the Kapa corporation==
An umbrella corporation called '''Kapa''' (in full, ''Nobōbo Kapa'') arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The ''kapa'' part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like '''Teenprop'''. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like '''Teens for Tomorrow''', though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after [[STW]]; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing '''Bottom''' party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the '''Yukiese''' family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of [[Paba]]. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the '''Teenprop''' political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

==Development of new political parties==
===Two-party stage===
The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support '''feminism''', believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world. The Dolphin Riders realized that if feminism took hold even in Dreamland, there would be no more land in the world run by men; free men would only exist as nomadic minorities within female nations.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support '''sarabism''', the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

==Creation of new parties==
'''Gatotōl''' had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the '''Comb''' party (''Pōrupu Resini'') which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's<ref>A vague and tentative date</ref> the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the '''Hipsoft''' party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new '''Carriage''' party (''āliki'') was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new '''Pointer''' party (''Pēbobi Lisuelesi'') was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a ''pēbobi''.

The '''Permission''' party (''Lepusepu Lesinepu'') was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the '''Butterfly''' party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

====Minor parties====
The '''Frame''' party (''Pōrupu Uimeka'') also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term ''sepu'' (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet ''lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu'' is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

==Culturebound issues==
The [[Gold party]] did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the '''Wildfire''' party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the '''Treehouse''' army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the '''Tippers''' came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

===Hupodas===
There was a ''Hupodas'' ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be ''lepisese'' "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

===Family issues===
====Early years====
The founding '''Dolphin Riders''' planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.<ref>While this logic may seem counterintuitive from the point of view of Earth, it was well illustrated in feminist societies like Moonshine that women were eager to raise children because they would be able to remain at home, and not need to work, while their husbands provided the entire financial support for raising each child.</ref>

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

====Later years====
A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

===Ilhina===
This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.
===Sarabism===
Related to the carrying of weapons.

===Capitalism and communism===
These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

===Censorship and propaganda===
These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

===Feminism===
Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

===Pimuo bopi===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as '''pacifism''' but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive [[Matrix]] army.

''This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as '''bopo''' below.''

===Pasio===
A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

===Bepolere===
Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

===Bopo===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as '''pacifism'''; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

==Proclamation of Empire==
===Proclamation of Empire in 4108===
In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the [[Play party|Play]] parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population.

Yet, 1,300<ref>an exact figure</ref> Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, [[Baeba Swamp]] had become the center of world diplomacy.

===General election of 4111===
The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the '''Treehouse''' party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the '''Wildfire''' party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

==Conflicts over hygiene==

===Hygiene laws===
The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (This is separate from the Hupodas issue.) One reason for the strong attention to hygiene was that the Dolphin Riders were tolerant of nudism, an issue that Dreamers had often gone back and forth on in the past.

The Dreamer Parliament had the power to make laws that applied to the entire empire. Thus it became a crime in Dreamland for a teenager or adult to leave a mess in a public bathroom, or even in nature, without immediately cleaning it up. The Dreamers also had to prove that they were bathing everyday, washing their clothes, and keeping their belongings clean as well. But the Parliament did not have the power to enact a tax applying to the whole Empire; this power was reserved to the states.
====Soapmaking corporation====
Thus, the Dreamer Parliament was unable to subsidize the purchase of soap and other hygiene-related goods, and Dreamers had to rely on their monthly income to buy these products. This immediately led to the rise of a powerful soapmaking class, who founded a corporation, '''Nobōbo Pobo Mosesene''' (PBM), named after the founding Mosesene family. PBM's workers allied themselves with the factions of the Baywatch and Rider parties that favored strict hygiene laws, and pledged to cooperate with each other across state and party lines since they were united on a single issue.

PBM's prices were expensive. The government's bathroom police (''pusepo serakale'') signed a contract with PBM stating that they would ride along with PBM's soap distributors to ensure that citizens were buying the product and keeping their homes and belongings clean. Thus the PBM corporation had a strong ally in the government and assumed they would not be easily shut down.

====Use of currency exchanges====
Nearly two centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. By tying the value of the currency to food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and over time, nations came to use the Ξ tokens as a neutral currency so that they could more easily compare their economies without needing to factor in inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.

The Dreamers had no STW stores and had always been hostile to STW, just as STW had always been hostile to them and had periodically raided Dreamer territory in the past to procure goods to sell in their stores. Therefore the Dreamers did not like STW's Ξ meal token currency either. But they had conceded to use it when comparing their economy to other economies, as it showed that the cost of living in Dreamland was quite high compared to most other nations, and that their people were not living as comfortably as a measure of total economic output would make it seem.

Dreamland's people had an average annual income around '''Ξ70,000''', but much higher in the east, in '''Baywatch''' territory, where the banks and most major corporations were. In fact the average per capita income ranged from about Ξ200,000 in Baywatch territory to Ξ20,000 in the various states of the west.

====Prices of hygiene and associated services====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living. The bathroom guards were separate from the bathroom police, meaning that someone needing to use the bathroom would sometimes need to greet two people just to get in, pay for the experience, and then clean up any mess they had made. Meanwhile it was illegal to hide in nature instead of using the bathroom except when that area was on private property and the landowner took it upon themselves to clean the landscape; in such a case, they were in turn subject to police oversight.

The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early.

===General election of 4116===

===General election of 4125===

===General election of 4129===

==War against the Players==
In 4132, Dreamland's '''Baywatch''' and '''Dolphin Rider''' parties voted together for a war against the distant [[Players|Play]] empire, with the Baywatchers expected to shoulder most of the combat and therefore also reserve the most gains, both territorial and political, for themselves.

===General election of 4134===
===General election of 4140===
As the soldiers of the [[Players|Play]] army massacred Dreamers in the '''Baywatch''' theater of the war, and spread plagues beyond it, the Dreamers (all states) voted to disarm their civilian population to turn over their weapons to the Dreamer army, whom they hoped would keep the Players from spreading further west.

===General election of 4142===
As the [[Play party]] occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of '''Mipatatatatai''', the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

====Immigration====
The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: The sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

====Hipsofts====
Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. These were moved to a city near the middle of the Dolphin Riders' territory, far from Moonshine and also far from the Players. The Dolphin Riders hoped that these immigrants would align themselves with Dreamland or at least become apolitical.

The '''Hipsoft''' faction of the Dolphin Rider party appeared soon after the immigrants were settled. The Hipsofts lived in the area where the immigrants had moved to and opposed the resettlement program. The other Riders seemed to have little interest in the situation, saying that they had done a good deed by adopting refugees from a pacifist nation but also unwilling to spread the immigrants around the rest of Dreamland. At this time, the immigrants had no political party of their own, and the mainstream Riders hoped that the appearance of the Hipsofts would encourage the immigrants to become strongly supportive of the mainstream Riders.

==Reforms to hygiene laws==
The Dolphin Riders had come to power in 4108 with a permissive attitude towards nudism and a strict hygiene policy, requiring all Dreamers to bathe and be clean after using the bathroom. They were required to purchase soap and other hygiene supplies on their own. This was to prevent the spread of disease. The Dreamer parliament had the authority to require Dreamer citizens to purchase soap and other supplies, but not to enact a tax to pay for the hygiene supplies, or to subsidize them in any other way. Even though there was more than one soap company, the price of soap rose high as soapmakers knew the demand for their product would never cease.

====Claims of soapmakers' complicity====
But now, the Dreamers increasingly began to blame their hygiene problems on the [[Players]] to the east, whom they suspected were deliberately polluting the rivers which flowed into coastal areas of Dreamland. The new generation of Dreamers thus came to support laws requiring Dreamers to wear clothing and deemphasizing the use of soap. Soapmakers were invested into their craft now, however, and opposed the new changes as they knew it would decrease their standard of living. The reformists accused the soapmakers of forcing the Dreamer population into a humiliating position, where they spent much of their time and money cleaning up after the Players, knowing that the Players could just as easily pollute the environment even more and thus force the Dreamers to scrub and clean themselves twice as much, all to the joy of the soapmakers. This led to accusations that the soapmakers themselves were cooperating with the Players to spread filth throughout Dreamland.

==Rise of pessimism==
Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only [[Baeba Swamp]], pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the [[Players]], but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

:''Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.''
Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

===Dreamers envy Players===
The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than 800,000 enrolled Players, more than Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself '''Hipsoft''' emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

===Comparative census of 4162===
By 4162, the Dreamer birthrate had increased, while the Player birthrate had fallen, and they had lost territory to the '''Tinks'''. Now, Dreamland's population was about double the Play population of 639,000.

====Census statistics====

{| class="wikitable"
|+ CENSUS OF 4162
|-
! Statistic
! Play
! Dreamland
! COMMENTS
|-
| Population
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 639,000
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 1,243,000
| Play population excludes '''Tata'''
|-
| Land area
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"|
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"|
|
|-
| Per capita GDP
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| Ξ3,832
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| > Ξ50,000
|
|-
| Fertility rate
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 4.74
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 3.58
|
|-
| Median age
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 12.7
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| ~24
|
|}

Although the fertility rates were not greatly different, the actual birth rate was much higher in Play territory because their adult population was primarily female (having fought many recent wars) whereas Dreamland's population consisted mostly of the Dreamers who had not been exposed to any recent wars.

===Other developments===
====Worries about defeat====
Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

===Dissolutionism===
Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

==Defeatist art and propaganda==
The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the [[Players]], as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.
===Depictions of the sun===
Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season. This meant that the entire planet experienced its summer season at the same time, and that even near the Equator, summer was much hotter than winter.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

====The Sun is Too Big====
Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but often riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

====Suntan vs sunburn====
Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, '''Pūpepas''', was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

===Linguistic issues===
The Dreamers were also ashamed of their languages, particularly the eastern ones.

====Phonology====
The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. Though both Dreamers and Players had learned to speak languages such as [[khulls|Leaper]] in the past, it required greater physical effort on their part to pronounce sounds like /k/ than it did for the native Leaper speakers, and therefore both the Dreamers and the Players had spoken languages with a similar acoustic sound for thousands of years. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

====Script====
Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

====Grammar====
Play was a ferociously complex language, with a grammar resembling [[khulls|Leaper]] but famously more difficult. For this reason, the '''Crystals''' and other groups such as the Leapers had an easier time mastering the Play language than did the Dreamers. This embarrassed the Dreamers doubly because the common perception was that Play would be an easy language for the Dreamers to learn because of its simple sound inventory. The Dreamers' inability to competently learn to speak Play had become deadly early in the Play occupation of Tata, as Play military leaders massacred Dreamer teachers for not quickly learning the language.

===Hunger===
Although the Dreamers were not short of food, even after losing the war, they spent more of their time and money on acquiring food than did the Players, who simply built their settlements around food sources so that they would never go hungry.

===Unhealable wounds===
====Hard and soft====
Even when conceding that the Dreamers were physically strong, the artists drew the Players as having square body shapes, whereas the Dreamers were depicted as being made of soft curves.

====Depiction of weapons====
A common stereotype was that Dreamers were physically delicate, but better able to handle weapons than were small, stoutly built tribes such as the Players. Some artists said that once the Dreamers lost their weapons, the Players' weakness would turn into a strength, as their poor ability to handle weapons would mean that every kill would be bloody rather than quick and clean. Meanwhile, other artists depicted the Players as fashioning better weapons, weapons that they could hold and the Dreamers could not.

====Depiction of other sharp objects====
The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The [[Crystals]] had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the [[Players]] and with the [[Soap Bubbles]] living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

====Metaphorical use====
The Dolphin Rider term for an unhealable wound was ''nu silika o pō okuleli'', which could be shortened to ''popōkuleli'' "unhealable". They saw that their people were inflicted with many such wounds, both physically and metaphorically, as they could not protect themselves from the local animal and plant life, but also could not regain territories lost to them by invasions in recent wars such as their war against the Players. Where other nations rose and fell, the Dreamers only grew around the hard barriers outsiders built for them.

The Dreamer propagandists reminded their people that the Players were only the most recent example of an army which had invaded Dreamland and come to permanently reside there. Earlier, the feminist '''Womb Justice''' army, fleeing from their homeland, took refuge in Dreamland but immediately demanded that all Dreamers move out so they could build a society run by women. The Dreamers did not fight these women, fearing that their own people would be unwilling to take up arms against such a society, but within a generation the Dreamers had grown tired of the Wombs and no longer believed that they needed to remain in Dreamland. Yet they were unable to push the Womb army out of Dreamland, and they conceded that they would remain in Dreamland for the indefinite future.

===Positive counterpoints===
For nearly a thousand years, outside cultures had stereotyped the Dreamers as being hypersexual and eager to engage in deviant sexual practices that made their men soft. This stereotype had been repeated by so many different foreign powers that the Dreamers had come to accept that it was true, but they made no plans to change their lifestyles. Instead, the Dreamers said that they were motivated by love, and that most of their enemies were motivated by hate and incapable of love. Rather than consider themselves immoral, the Dreamers said it was cultures such as the [[Players]] who were immoral, for instead of loving each other and their enemies, they sought to start a new war every year and took joy in their enemies' suffering.

==Debates over economics==
The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. [[STW]] mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of [[AlphaLeap]] in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

====Issues involving trade====
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

''this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.''

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly [[STW]], openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

===Arguments for capitalism===
The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising '''Teenprop''' corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, and then paying taxes in their own nations so that both the company and the citizens could benefit from the company's presence.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the '''Teenprop''' corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as the '''Anchor Empire''' (where STW sold most of its goods), and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

====Wealth creation theory====
The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as [[Kxesh]] that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

===Rise of pacifism===
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of [[Paba]], which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

====Secret diplomacy====
As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of '''capitalism''', the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

==Diplomatic outreach to Players==
In the mid-4160s, Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into [[Memnumu]] to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

The [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] also feared the Players and had suffered from their plagues. But when the Dreamers heard that the Players had broken up into four political parties, they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with at least one of them, and form an alliance between Dreamland and the most pro-Dreamer political party in the Play empire.

Because their main contact with the Players was through '''Tata''', the Dreamers understood little of the Players' internal struggles in Memnumu. The Dreamers knew that the original Play faction, the Milk Bottles, had been extremist, and that they had given way to the Pillows after a series of disasters mostly involving young children. They had heard of the rise of the Purses, but most Dreamers did not know that they were racists; they only knew that the Purses' positions on issues in general were more moderate than those of the Pillows, who were in turn more moderate than the Bottles. Therefore, the Dreamers believed that the Play nation as a whole was on a steady path towards more moderate politics, and could therefore become an ally of the Dreamers if they were able to continue along that path. The Dreamers were dismayed when they later learned that the Pillows had recovered their parliamentary majority, but figured that so long as the Purses were also represented in the Play parliament, the Dreamers still had an ally among the Players. (Most Dreamers still did not know, even years on, that the Purses considered Dreamers racially inferior, because the Purses had always focused on internal divisions among the Players in Memnumu.)

===Dreamers meet with Players===
The Dreamers had heard about the Players' new balance system, in which four parties would compete for power in the Parliament, and all four would be allowed to use game-like voting strategies, for example allowing people to vote outside their home districts, figuring that the resulting fierce competition would lead to better governance. They had been shown some anti-Dreamer literature known to have been written by the '''Milk Bottle''' faction of the Play party. With this, and other information they had learned about early happenings in the Play nation, Dreamland labeled the Milk Bottles as an extremist Play faction, and assumed that the other Play factions would thus be more friendly to Dreamland.

The Dreamers sent a team of tall, handsome male diplomats to meet with the female representatives of each of the four main Play parties, comparing and contrasting the Dolphin Riders' party platform with those of the women. The Players were feminists, but unlike the Moonshines, they respected foreign cultural norms, and therefore were accustomed to meeting with male diplomats. The Dreamers told the men to talk strictly about politics, but hoped that they could subliminally woo the women with their charms and return to Dreamland having signed a formal treaty of alliance with at least one, and perhaps more, of the new Play parties.

Four Dreamer men greeted the four Player women in the Play capital city of '''Pūpepas'''.
====Results of the meeting====
At the meeting, the Dreamer men realized that the Milk Bottles they had been calling Play extremists were in fact the most moderate of all the Play philosophies, and that the other three factions were even more hostile than that. Put another way, the Dreamers had assumed that the spectrum of Play political opinions ran the gamut from the fierce nationalism of the Milk Bottles to a cosmopolitan faction of unknown identity with whom they could form an alliance. But rather than ranging from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the Dreamers found out that the Players spanned from nationalism to racism.

Furthermore, even the racist Play faction, the '''Purses''', were nationalists, saying that the hated Eggs were still their allies in any conflict that involved a foreign power. Thus, even though the Purses had openly supported arresting the Eggs, they recognized the Eggs as fellow Players. Therefore none of the Play factions was willing to support Dreamland either militarily or economically.

The Dreamers were frustrated even by the name "balance system", confident that the Players had borrowed the idea of balance from the politics of Dreamland.

====Explanations to common people====
Dreamer diplomats had difficulty explaining to their own people why they had classified all four of Memnumu's Play parties as anti-Dreamer extremists, when the Dreamers had been expecting to find allies in the Play nation. Many Dreamers simply did not believe the diplomats' claims, arguing that at least the Eggs must be friendly towards Dreamland since they had been opposed by all of the other Play factions and had been attacked with no apparent provocation in a recent war led by the Firestones. But the Dreamers had diplomatic contacts with the wider Crystal party, who refused to accept any connection between the Dreamers and the Eggs, and still claimed that the reason the Crystals had abandoned the Eggs was because the required rescue mission would have been impossible.

====Dreamers embrace Tata====
When the Dreamers obtained a clearer understanding of the Play situation, they began to oppose the often talked about integration of Tata into a single unified Play nation, which had been proposed in 4151 but delayed over and over again for various reasons. The Dreamers believed that Tata's ruling '''Club''' party, though formally identical to the Pillows, was the only true moderate Play party, since they had legalized the Dreamer party in their own territory and did not take part in radical Play practices such as child labor and home invasions, even though they had never formally written these out of their party platform. The Dreamers considered all four of the Play parties in Memnumu's Milk Parliament to be extremists. They stated that the Purse ideology was moderate, but that because they were tribalists, the Dreamers could not ally with them after all, and therefore they were off the map of political discourse in Dreamland. The other three factions were also extremists, and most Dreamers considered them even worse than the Purses, since they all opposed Dreamland as well.

====Worries about population growth====
To the Dreamers, the greatest threat posed by the Players was their extremely high birthrate, which had for their first twenty years in power been so high that children under age thirteen comprised 3/4 of the Play population, and the population had doubled in this twenty-year period despite the many plagues, famines, and wars that the Players had endured and created. Meanwhile, though the Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had been youth-based, and had come to power with a high birthrate as well, theirs had never been nearly as high as the Players', and had been in decline for several generations, such that they had come to rely on '''Gold''' party arguments that the political power of a nation should not be related to the size of its population. By now, the Players had already outgrown the Dreamers despite having a much smaller land area, and it seemed inevitable to the Dreamers that the Players would grow even more. Since the Players had already won one major war against Dreamland, the Dreamers worried that their rapidly growing population would in the future lead them to win another.

The Players' birthrate had declined sharply around 4150 when they broke up into factions, however, and the Dreamers knew of this because of diplomatic contacts through Tata. The Dreamers stopped worrying so much about the Players' population expansion and began to focus on their problems at home. But then, when they heard that the Players were reviving the Milk Bottle party, they worried that Play women would once again have more children than they could care for, and that the children would grow up and start wars against Dreamland out of pure hunger, ignoring all common sense.

==Hipsoft war of 4183==
The immigrant '''Tipper''' party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent '''Hipsoft''' party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves '''Tippers''', disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant '''Hipsoft''' party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles
that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

===Moonshine's reaction===
Moonshine endorsed the Tippers' massacres, saying that the men were doing the right thing. Moonshine offered citizenship to all female Tippers, but stated that Tipper men would never be allowed into Moonshine territory, even though they had done a great favor for the Moonshines by killing many Dreamers. This was because Moonshine culture considered men's lives expendable, and that the best thing that men could do for Moonshine would be to stay at war and wear down the enemies of Moonshine without expecting any sort of reward other than the right to abuse the conquered people. Therefore Moonshine stated that if Tipper men wanted to marry women, they should take their wives from among the Dreamer population.

===Contact with the Matrix===
In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful [[Matrix]] army based in the nearby nation of '''Tata'''. Tata was on the north coast and was one of a chain of nations that had long been a buffer area between Dreamland and Moonshine, but had recently grown into a regional power in its own right.

The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland to focus their efforts on the city of [[Baeba Swamp]].

NOTE: The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.<ref>This is from a dream in which Russia did likewise.</ref>

==Newer economic developments==
Losing two wars had led to economic decline, and the increasing isolation of Dreamland drove up the cost of living. Furthermore, the rising cost of living made it difficult for the poorest Dreamers to afford food, and although the Dreamer states solved this problem with welfare payments, some of the western states were now encouraging people to desert their towns in order to live along the coast, much as the [[Players]] did, and obtain their food from the sea.

===Currency conversion===
Nearly three centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had opened stores in the [[Thunder Empire]], whose people owned Dreamer slaves and had little interest in friendly contacts with Dreamland. STW went further, declaring that slavery was not punishment enough, and declared war on [[Dreamland]] on its first official day of business. The result of this, over time, was that any economic growth for STW led to decline for Dreamland, and vice versa.

Dreamland had won its war with STW, even though STW was backed by the traditional military of the Thunder Empire, and nearly drove the corporation out of business despite the great physical distance between Dreamland and the primary STW stores. But in 4108, Dreamland lost control of its newly won territory, and STW returned to business holding a larger grudge against Dreamland than ever before. Dreamland continued to lose wars and cede economic supremacy for the next decades, and although STW was not a major driving force in this, STW reaped some benefit from it because their leaders were better able to take advantage of changing economic tides than were the politicians of the nations they did business with.
====The Ξ4 meal promise====
STW had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. The price of a meal was fixed at Ξ4, and STW's leaders promised that the price would never rise, regardless of what happened to the economies around them, including STW's non-restaurant stores, which did not accept the meal tokens. By tying the currency only to the price of food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and thus came to be used in international comparisons even by countries who had no interest in attracting business from STW.

The Dreamers disliked the so-called universal currency, since STW did not do business in Dreamland, and had always been hostile to Dreamland. The Dreamers stated the Ξ4 meal promise was humiliating because no Dreamers could expect to receive a meal for that price at any restaurant within Dreamland, and that STW had deliberately created an unfair setup that was only sustainable because they owned slaves and their restaurants served foods that had been obtained through slave labor and with minimal transportation and preparation costs.

====Economic restructuring====
Nonetheless, in comparing their economy to those of other nations, the Dreamers were forced to acknowledge STW's meal token currency rather than using their own. By this time, the an STW-like corporation had arisen in Dreamland, intent on solving the problems of Dreamland's economic isolation by producing goods locally and thus relieving the Dreamers' dependence on trade.

The annual per capita income of Dreamland as a whole had declined to about '''Ξ40,000''' by this time, even as the price of a meal in a typical restaurant had remained around Ξ80. The Dreamers were not bankrupted by their food prices because most Dreamers acquired some of their food themselves, cooking it at home during their free time or eating it raw if possible. Thus restaurants catered to travelers and to the wealthiest classes. On top of this, Dreamland's government encouraged its states to distribute welfare tickets to Dreamer families so that they could afford food, particularly in those areas where the natural supply of food was irregular. But Dreamland was a confederation, and could not tax its people directly, and therefore the disbursement of welfare was up to the states.

====Unskilled labor wages====
Dreamland practiced unregulated capitalism supported by welfare payments. There was no minimum wage, so it was common for young and unskilled laborers to receive just Ξ20 or Ξ25 for a day's work. Those who could not find stable employment would often work for even lower wages. Meanwhile, workers in some trades were paid only by selling things they produced and could go for months at a time without income. Therefore, Dreamland's lower class was materially poor even compared to the lower classes of poorer nations, but malnutrition was rare and usually of a sort that money would not have prevented.

===Distribution of necessities===
The charter of the ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party stated that the government must provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care for all citizens, even those Dreamers who chose to live in outlying areas where transportation costs were significant. Since transportation of food and essential goods was the responsibility of the government, the costs were socialized, and Dreamland's taxes were very high. However, the tax policies were the responsibilities of the states, and the Dolphin Riders' parliament could not enact a tax applying to a specific geographic area to force that area to improve its citizens' standard of living.

====Clothing====
Clothing was not defined as a basic human need in the Dolphin Rider platform, and on this they agreed with most of the minor Dreamer parties as well. Therefore, humans who needed protective clothes to work had to buy them on their own, disposable diapers were expensive, and people huddled together in blankets during Dreamland's rare cold winter nights.

The Dreamers and the Players had both often supported nudism, and largely for the same reasons, but opposition to nudism took different perspectives in the two empires. For the Players, opposition to nudism was entirely about hygiene, as the Players' child population had suffered from several plagues and spread these plagues outside their nation. However the Players were so tightly compacted into seaside habitats that they had early on exhausted their supply of plant fibers to weave new diapers, and the Play Parliament shut down the textile industry entirely so they could focus on fishing the sea. By contrast, the Dreamers' much lower fertility rate had kept them free of such problems. Rather, the Dreamers who supported wearing clothes were more concerned with secondary issues: since Dreamers often carried money with them, it was far more convenient for them to wear clothes to help carry the coins, and there were many trades that were much easier to perform while wearing protective clothes. The Dreamers mostly did wear clothes when it was convenient, and indeed their clothing production costs were lower than those in some poorer nations, but all clothes were distributed by private corporations who were free to charge any price they wished, even in areas where they had achieved a monopoly. Thus, many Dreamers spent much of their disposable income on clothing and could not afford to replace clothes that were worn out from daily use.

====Homes and furniture====
Likewise, Dreamland's climate was hot and sunny, and in some areas, people had traditionally lived on the beach, exposed to the elements, and not in any home at all. This extreme lifestyle was associated with the pre-Dreamer aboriginal population, numbering only a few thousand by this time, who lived in very specific locations such that the construction of a building to live in would make little difference. Nonetheless, most Dreamer homes were very simple, and the government promise as understood by the people was that Dreamers would have the right to a place to seek shelter from the rain, which might or might not be their everyday home.

===Typical prices===
The Dreamers embraced capitalism and therefore did not set standard prices on goods. Their government's role in providing for their people was limited to the welfare benefits described above, to medical care, and to providing shelter from nature. The average per capita GDP was around '''Ξ50,000'''. Note that this includes the entire population, not just those in work; the average salary of a worker was therefore significantly higher.

====Hygiene====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean. The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early. A full-body coat made from animal hides could cost around '''Ξ375'''.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living.

====Non-essential foods====
Palm wine and fruit juice averaged about the same price, about '''Ξ120''' per jug.

====Intangibles and services====
Because of the calm weather, travelers often slept outside, exposed to the elements. There was thus relatively little demands for inns, and most tended to be found in cities. A night's sleep in a room with many other travelers could cost around '''Ξ80''', and accomodations with more privacy were rare.

====Illegal transactions====
Slaves could be bought for around '''Ξ100,000''' to '''Ξ1 million''', a vastly higher price than the Ξ10,000 — Ξ50,000 that paid for their abduction and transportation from weakened nations such as Thaoa. The [[Players]] had contemplated selling people from their lower classes to foreign nations for even lower prices to relieve their population stress and also bring money into their economy, but such people were often profitable for the Players since they were little more than slaves already. Since slavery was illegal in Dreamland, such people could not be held openly, and therefore were typically prostitutes who remained in one place and were bound to a master. Male slaves nonetheless were sometimes used to row ships, where they were bound into place and released only when under the close watch of an armed guard.

===Private schools===
Dreamland's education system was privatized, and teachers charged families to enroll their pupils. This was unlike the [[Players|Play]] system, where education was free, and unlike [[STW]], which actually ''paid'' students to attend, albeit in a currency that could only be redeemed at STW.

There was no law requiring Dreamer adults to care for their aging parents, either financially or materially, since the elderly were covered under the same programs that covered disabled and sick people. (This is a relic of the '''Plume''' system that predated the Dolphin Riders.) Therefore parents had no guarantee that their children would portion off their future income to the parents, and no financial incentive to seek the best education for their children, nor to have large numbers of children, or even to have children at all.

Many Dreamer women remained at or near their homes during the daytime, and so teaching their children was simply part of their daily routine, and school systems tended to exist only in large cities. Nonetheless, tuition was affordable, averaging around '''Ξ4,000''' per student per year, much less than the average income of even the lowest class of Dreamers. This tuition covered the teachers' salaries only, and did not pay for the students' meals or their belongings, which often cost more than the tuition.

Dreamland's private schools worked both in competition and in cooperation with each other, as when two schools opened in the same city, typically each school would specialize in different subjects of study.

====Proposal for a public school system====
Nonetheless, the lack of free public education was a disincentive for couples planning to have children, and many Dreamer politicians wanted to start a tax-supported public school system based on a foreign model. But because they could not institute a tax on the entire Dreamer empire, each state would need to do this individually.

Opponents of this plan argued that a public school system would immediately turn into an unrestrained child labor operation, as the state-run school would have no authority above them and thus could not be shut down. As evidence they pointed to the school system of '''Moonshine''', which considered its students to be slaves, and to [[STW]], a private school system which had nonetheless functioned as an education monopoly for much of its existence and had relied on child labor (although with pay) to sustain itself.

The '''Play''' school system, however, did not force its students to work, or even to do schoolwork, and was a legally established government monopoly accountable to no outside authority. Supporters of the new plan claimed that the Play nation disproved all of their doubts. The opponents of the public school plan countered this argument by saying that the Players represented everything the Dreamers opposed, and that the Players in fact were the worst child abusers in the world, as they forced their children to find food for their parents with no salary at all.

==Impossible burdens==
In Dreamland, the middle class was the largest class, and therefore, in Dreamland's democratic elections, policies favoring the middle class tended to succeed. There was no welfare system, and many middle-class Dreamers believed that if they were to set up a welfare system for their poorest citizens, as some other nations had, Dreamland would become as poor as those other nations. Indeed, Dreamer economists had proven that having a state-supported welfare system correlated very well with a nation's overall poverty, though they could not prove causation. Their ancient rival across the sea, [[Oyster Empire|Kxesh]], had supported its lowest class with generous welfare benefits for thousands of years and had also been poorer than Dreamland for thousands of years.<ref>Note that welfare in Kxesh probably predates the Oyster takeover.</ref>

Thus the lowest class remained poor.

Some Dreamers wished that the lowest class would migrate to surrounding nations but there was no legal means of expelling a citizen, and the Dreamers realized that many emigrants would join the armies of Dreamland's enemies and could possibly lead an invasion against Dreamland in the future.

Because the lowest class made only about Ξ20 per day, and meals often cost more than this, these people could not afford their basic needs and had to steal food or turn to other crimes to make money. Many young women, including married women, worked as prostitutes, but because there were so many prostitutes, their earnings were meager and they were worse off than men who made a career from robbing people and stealing transported goods. (These people were called pirates in most languages, because this lifestyle was not confined to the sea.)

It was nearly impossible for a poor person to meet their needs for even a day in Dreamland without committing a crime. As above, they could not even legally use the bathroom without spending more than their entire income for a day, and strict hygiene rules prohibited them relieving themselves in nature as did the poorest inhabitants of all other nations. This meant that Dreamland's various police forces could arrest almost any poor person at any time and put them in prison. However, in general, the middle class preferred to have the lower class out on the streets, since they performed useful jobs for the rest of society, and although it was a common subject of debate, the majority of middle-class Dreamers felt that they would rather tolerate the crime than lose the services of their lower class.

===Lower-class occupations===
Some occupations held by the lowest class were themselves illegal, but most were simply very low-paying jobs in the main economy. The Dreamers acknowledged that no person could support themselves on one of these legal jobs, and had used various explanations for why the wages were so low.

====Illegal occupations====
Young women tended to work as prostitutes, and all other illegal work done by women was considered a part of their prostitution duties. Thus even a woman who worked as a maid for a private household and never had sex would still be considered a prostitute because her keepers could order her to perform sexual duties as well. A prostitute's daily wages were often in the range from Ξ100 to Ξ200, which was still well below middle class wages and often not enough to survive. The middle class felt that it was good not to let prostitutes become too comfortable, since their dependency helped keep them from rebelling.

Young men tended to work as ''pirates'', which encompassed anyone who made a living from stealing other people's goods. Near the borders of Dreamland there were opportunities to steal mostly from merchants bringing things in, but poor people tended to live far away from the border, since the economy was poorer overall towards the west, and the western states could not force the pirates to move. Thus the poorest states had the highest rates of theft and looting.

These people tended not to live very long.

====Self-employed====
A second category of people were self-employed, and could sometimes make a lot of money in a short period of time, but then make no money at all for weeks or months. These people were often hunters, foragers, and other food producers who could not open restaurants in major cities and had to sell their wares by the road. This was legal, but the governments of cities typically limited the number of restaurants within city limits since any waste food would be thrown out and this would harm everyone. Thus these people catered to travelers. Some also hosted inns and taverns.

A tiny number of full-time artists were also in this group, but most people in Dreamland who produced art did so as a hobby rather than a job.

====Low-wage market jobs====
Lastly, there were some low-skilled jobs that simply paid very low wages. These people were the ones most often brought up by reformers, since while the other two groups lived on the edges of society, those in the market had wages that should not exist according to the doctrine that everyone with a job should be able to meet their needs. These people's jobs were either of very little value to society, or depressed by some outside force such as trade.

==Matrix treaty of 4190==
By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of '''Memnumu''' once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny [[Matrix]] army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

==Slope treaty==

===General election of 4205===
The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in [[Memnumu]].<ref>It is possible that the descendants of the Hipsides, now adults, still practiced this lifestyle in some territory between Dreamland and Tāmta.</ref>

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

====Arrival of the Cupbearers====
Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of '''Cupbearer''' refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.<ref>This may or may not be the state of Senampattore. Where it is on the map is clear, but the borders may have changed.</ref>

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the [[Players]] in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:
#The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
#Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
#The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in [[Baeba Swamp]] as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
#The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves ''pavača'',<ref>This word is ''čava'' "long hair" spelled backwards inside the circumfix ''p-..-a'' "having (a)". This method of word formation was dying out in Play, but persisted in some groups who were influenced by Andanese, because even though Andanese itself did not use this, it was more convenient with pure CV words, as Andanese had, than with Play whose syllable structure was more diverse.</ref> just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

===Capture of Crystal slaves===
A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising '''Slope''' party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

==Postwar period==
After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

===General election of 4227===
Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The ''bopo'' philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the ''bopo'' supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The '''Cupbearers''' may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

===General election of 4238===
Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

===General election of 4254===
After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the [[Memnumu|Play army]] and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.
==Naval war==
In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the [[Players]], which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the [[Ghost Empire|Ghosts]], who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called '''Laba'''. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of [[Moonshine]], but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world.
But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the [[Players|Play]] population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

==Inversion of propaganda==
Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the [[Players]], but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the [[Matrix]] propaganda of a hundred years prior.

===Weather metaphors===
Though living right along the Equator, the people of Hipatal and Laba in general had the same variety of body types found elsewhere. Some outsiders believed that they were all dark-skinned people, but immigrants such as '''Sašuasa''' had been of the same Lenian body type as the stereotypical eastern Dreamers who had fallen into ruin.

==Naval war in the Play sea==
===General election of 4287===
As the Dreamer navy,<ref>this did not actually take twenty years, but there were no global elections in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty</ref>, '''Laba''', invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the '''Teenprop''' corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

''NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.''

===Antiwar movement in Dreamland===
===="The Real Dreamland"====
Just as Dreamland seemed likely to win its war, a group of pacifists declared themselves to be the only true Dreamers, and pledged allegiance to the '''Cupbearers''' without formally joining the Cupbearer party. They said that the earlier Dreamers' pessimism was correct, and that Dreamland should be a pacifist multinational empire trading economically with foreign nations but without military expansionist goals. They supported '''Moonshine''', and thus while committed to pacifism, assumed that they would soon be targets in the war, and perhaps could be such easy targets that they would distract the navy from their war against the Players. Thus these new pacifists felt they could help the Players whether they were successful in remaking Dreamland into an economic power, in which case the war would stall, or unsuccessful, in which case they would be slaughtered by the pirates but could hopefully still save the Players.

The pacifists' claim to be the only true Dreamers closely resembled the Players' contemporary claim that the Play navy was the only true Laba. They had made their declarations independently, however, as the Play diplomats were blocked from contacting the pacifists by the Ghosts over land and by the pirates at sea.

===General election of 4295===
The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became popular.

===General election of 4316===
After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.
===General election of 4321===
Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

===General election of 4327===
===General election of 4343===
Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

==Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)==
Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing ''bepolere'', which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The ''Pōbipōpu'' and ''Pōronopa'' distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

===Contacts with Moonshine===
The '''Habit''' party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the '''Hipsoft''' settlements to and including the '''Womb Justice''' settlements. The Habits were the sons and daughters of the Crystals who had been pushed into the underclass in Baeba Swamp when the Leapers took over. That is, they were a faction of Crystals who resisted the Leapers.

====Tribal identity====
The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

====Partition====
By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small '''Hipsoft''' migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the '''Womb Justice ''' party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name '''Dreamland''' was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

====Moonshine-Habit relations====
The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's '''Habit''' party (''Tăta'')<ref>Note that this is not a homonym of the state name '''Tàta''' because the tones are different, but that in languages such as Play, the two may have been merged.</ref> to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called '''Wagillàra''', the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

===Demographic shifts===
After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the [[Players]] had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

:''Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.''

===General election of 4351===
Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

===General election of 4390===
Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

===General election of 4402===
Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

===General election of 4412===
The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.
===General election of 4419===
Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

===General election of 4438===
Luxury goods came back into fashion.

====Tribal reform====
Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The '''Tipper''' population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the '''Hipatal''' immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

===General election of 4440===
Luxury goods fell out of fashion.
===General election of 4445===
Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

===General election of 4462===
Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.
===General election of 4468===
Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.
===General election of 4485===
Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.
===General election of 4492===
The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.
===General election of 4500===
Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.
===General election of 4511===
Little changed in this election.
===General election of 4529===
Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.
===General election of 4531===
Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.
===General election of 4538===
Luxury goods became popular.
===General election of 4540===
Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

===Humanitarian attempts at intervention===
The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier.<ref>But remember that this from a different timeline. The figure cannot be taken as an exact count.</ref> Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both [[Baeba Swamp]] and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

''Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.''

==Other developments==
*56 (4150)
*52 (4202)
*13 (4215)
*24 (4239)
*79 (4318)
*80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the [[Hipatal]] people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

=Dreamer-Doll relations=
:''See [[Dolls]].''
Note that there is no convenient way to represent the [[babakiam|Play]]-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with ''dream'' and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the [[Dolls|Bottom]] party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (''nuufa''), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Bottoms did not allow their members to even have protruding fingernails. The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: '''fubap''' describing something soft and thus flexible, and '''nuufa''' describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

===Scope===
It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the '''Hiboh''' Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

===Dedication to pacifism===
The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon [[ppot#upl|drafted a party platform]] denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling '''Hailstorm''' army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

=Dreamer-Play relations=
''Žayuvas'' got its name when the rebel '''Tink''' army invaded their ally, the [[Play party]], and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, [[Dreamland]], than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory ''Memnumu''.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling '''Police''' faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the [[Play party]]. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the [[alphaleap|Leapers]] had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the '''Magic Combs''') never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

===Scope of Žayuvas===
It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of '''Šasa Kaina''', located near and traditionally friendly towards [[Thaoa]], at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

===Fertility calculations===
On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

;Oct 10 2021
There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding '''Tata''', where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

===Apportionment of representatives===
Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

==Evolution from factions to parties==
The [[Play party|Play]] charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

==Party membership==
The '''Police''' party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

==Culturebound issues of the Play Empire==
:''See also [[Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues]]''.
True to its name, the [[Play party]] dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

===Children's issues===
====Education====
The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory [[Raspara]] army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

===Tribal conflicts (general) ===
:''This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.''
====Height and hair color====

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured [[Paba]]p tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were [[#feminism|taller than their men]], this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

====Background====
Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive [[Raspara]] party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious [[swamp Kids|Tink]] army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall [[Repilia]]n tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the '''Flower Bees''' and the '''Rusted Pearls'''. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

====Conflicting tribal definitions====
Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the [[Palli]]-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

=Diplomatic contacts between the empires=

=Later periods=
These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.
===Hiboh===
The '''Hiboh''' era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true '''Sleeperism'''.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the '''Cold Men''', until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

===RKE Wars===
The '''RKE''' movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used [[Matrix]]-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.

=Notes in boats=
==Notes==

Dolphin Riders

2025-06-20T01:17:55Z

Poswob Rare: /* Illegal occupations */

The '''MFZ''' Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the [[Cosmopolitan Age]]. The original Empire, ''Mayuvas'', was [[Dreamland]], which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the [[Gold party]], as the word for gold in [[babakiam|Play]] was ''mayu''. The other two empires, ''Fayuvas'' and ''Žayuvas'', were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, [[Baeba Swamp]], which at the time was run primarily by the '''Iron''' party, an offshoot of the much older [[Zenith]] party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel '''ū''', giving ''Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas'', but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like '''uv''' (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

==Background==

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with [[Baeba Swamp]] to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of [[Moonshine]] and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with '''Tata''', also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

==Structure of Parliament==
Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the [[ppot#DPR|Dolphin Riders]], who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient [[Gold party]]. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

==Recognition of new tribes==
Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the '''Tippers''' who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

==Language==
The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited [[Lenian languages#DPR|Dolphin Rider]] language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near [[Baeba Swamp]] came to speak [[Ogili_II|Ogili]], the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

==Growth of the Kapa corporation==
An umbrella corporation called '''Kapa''' (in full, ''Nobōbo Kapa'') arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The ''kapa'' part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like '''Teenprop'''. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like '''Teens for Tomorrow''', though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after [[STW]]; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing '''Bottom''' party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the '''Yukiese''' family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of [[Paba]]. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the '''Teenprop''' political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

==Development of new political parties==
===Two-party stage===
The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support '''feminism''', believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world. The Dolphin Riders realized that if feminism took hold even in Dreamland, there would be no more land in the world run by men; free men would only exist as nomadic minorities within female nations.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support '''sarabism''', the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

==Creation of new parties==
'''Gatotōl''' had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the '''Comb''' party (''Pōrupu Resini'') which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's<ref>A vague and tentative date</ref> the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the '''Hipsoft''' party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new '''Carriage''' party (''āliki'') was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new '''Pointer''' party (''Pēbobi Lisuelesi'') was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a ''pēbobi''.

The '''Permission''' party (''Lepusepu Lesinepu'') was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the '''Butterfly''' party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

====Minor parties====
The '''Frame''' party (''Pōrupu Uimeka'') also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term ''sepu'' (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet ''lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu'' is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

==Culturebound issues==
The [[Gold party]] did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the '''Wildfire''' party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the '''Treehouse''' army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the '''Tippers''' came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

===Hupodas===
There was a ''Hupodas'' ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be ''lepisese'' "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

===Family issues===
====Early years====
The founding '''Dolphin Riders''' planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.<ref>While this logic may seem counterintuitive from the point of view of Earth, it was well illustrated in feminist societies like Moonshine that women were eager to raise children because they would be able to remain at home, and not need to work, while their husbands provided the entire financial support for raising each child.</ref>

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

====Later years====
A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

===Ilhina===
This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.
===Sarabism===
Related to the carrying of weapons.

===Capitalism and communism===
These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

===Censorship and propaganda===
These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

===Feminism===
Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

===Pimuo bopi===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as '''pacifism''' but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive [[Matrix]] army.

''This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as '''bopo''' below.''

===Pasio===
A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

===Bepolere===
Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

===Bopo===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as '''pacifism'''; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

==Proclamation of Empire==
===Proclamation of Empire in 4108===
In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the [[Play party|Play]] parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population.

Yet, 1,300<ref>an exact figure</ref> Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, [[Baeba Swamp]] had become the center of world diplomacy.

===General election of 4111===
The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the '''Treehouse''' party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the '''Wildfire''' party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

==Conflicts over hygiene==

===Hygiene laws===
The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (This is separate from the Hupodas issue.) One reason for the strong attention to hygiene was that the Dolphin Riders were tolerant of nudism, an issue that Dreamers had often gone back and forth on in the past.

The Dreamer Parliament had the power to make laws that applied to the entire empire. Thus it became a crime in Dreamland for a teenager or adult to leave a mess in a public bathroom, or even in nature, without immediately cleaning it up. The Dreamers also had to prove that they were bathing everyday, washing their clothes, and keeping their belongings clean as well. But the Parliament did not have the power to enact a tax applying to the whole Empire; this power was reserved to the states.
====Soapmaking corporation====
Thus, the Dreamer Parliament was unable to subsidize the purchase of soap and other hygiene-related goods, and Dreamers had to rely on their monthly income to buy these products. This immediately led to the rise of a powerful soapmaking class, who founded a corporation, '''Nobōbo Pobo Mosesene''' (PBM), named after the founding Mosesene family. PBM's workers allied themselves with the factions of the Baywatch and Rider parties that favored strict hygiene laws, and pledged to cooperate with each other across state and party lines since they were united on a single issue.

PBM's prices were expensive. The government's bathroom police (''pusepo serakale'') signed a contract with PBM stating that they would ride along with PBM's soap distributors to ensure that citizens were buying the product and keeping their homes and belongings clean. Thus the PBM corporation had a strong ally in the government and assumed they would not be easily shut down.

====Use of currency exchanges====
Nearly two centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. By tying the value of the currency to food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and over time, nations came to use the Ξ tokens as a neutral currency so that they could more easily compare their economies without needing to factor in inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.

The Dreamers had no STW stores and had always been hostile to STW, just as STW had always been hostile to them and had periodically raided Dreamer territory in the past to procure goods to sell in their stores. Therefore the Dreamers did not like STW's Ξ meal token currency either. But they had conceded to use it when comparing their economy to other economies, as it showed that the cost of living in Dreamland was quite high compared to most other nations, and that their people were not living as comfortably as a measure of total economic output would make it seem.

Dreamland's people had an average annual income around '''Ξ70,000''', but much higher in the east, in '''Baywatch''' territory, where the banks and most major corporations were. In fact the average per capita income ranged from about Ξ200,000 in Baywatch territory to Ξ20,000 in the various states of the west.

====Prices of hygiene and associated services====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living. The bathroom guards were separate from the bathroom police, meaning that someone needing to use the bathroom would sometimes need to greet two people just to get in, pay for the experience, and then clean up any mess they had made. Meanwhile it was illegal to hide in nature instead of using the bathroom except when that area was on private property and the landowner took it upon themselves to clean the landscape; in such a case, they were in turn subject to police oversight.

The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early.

===General election of 4116===

===General election of 4125===

===General election of 4129===

==War against the Players==
In 4132, Dreamland's '''Baywatch''' and '''Dolphin Rider''' parties voted together for a war against the distant [[Players|Play]] empire, with the Baywatchers expected to shoulder most of the combat and therefore also reserve the most gains, both territorial and political, for themselves.

===General election of 4134===
===General election of 4140===
As the soldiers of the [[Players|Play]] army massacred Dreamers in the '''Baywatch''' theater of the war, and spread plagues beyond it, the Dreamers (all states) voted to disarm their civilian population to turn over their weapons to the Dreamer army, whom they hoped would keep the Players from spreading further west.

===General election of 4142===
As the [[Play party]] occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of '''Mipatatatatai''', the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

====Immigration====
The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: The sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

====Hipsofts====
Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. These were moved to a city near the middle of the Dolphin Riders' territory, far from Moonshine and also far from the Players. The Dolphin Riders hoped that these immigrants would align themselves with Dreamland or at least become apolitical.

The '''Hipsoft''' faction of the Dolphin Rider party appeared soon after the immigrants were settled. The Hipsofts lived in the area where the immigrants had moved to and opposed the resettlement program. The other Riders seemed to have little interest in the situation, saying that they had done a good deed by adopting refugees from a pacifist nation but also unwilling to spread the immigrants around the rest of Dreamland. At this time, the immigrants had no political party of their own, and the mainstream Riders hoped that the appearance of the Hipsofts would encourage the immigrants to become strongly supportive of the mainstream Riders.

==Reforms to hygiene laws==
The Dolphin Riders had come to power in 4108 with a permissive attitude towards nudism and a strict hygiene policy, requiring all Dreamers to bathe and be clean after using the bathroom. They were required to purchase soap and other hygiene supplies on their own. This was to prevent the spread of disease. The Dreamer parliament had the authority to require Dreamer citizens to purchase soap and other supplies, but not to enact a tax to pay for the hygiene supplies, or to subsidize them in any other way. Even though there was more than one soap company, the price of soap rose high as soapmakers knew the demand for their product would never cease.

====Claims of soapmakers' complicity====
But now, the Dreamers increasingly began to blame their hygiene problems on the [[Players]] to the east, whom they suspected were deliberately polluting the rivers which flowed into coastal areas of Dreamland. The new generation of Dreamers thus came to support laws requiring Dreamers to wear clothing and deemphasizing the use of soap. Soapmakers were invested into their craft now, however, and opposed the new changes as they knew it would decrease their standard of living. The reformists accused the soapmakers of forcing the Dreamer population into a humiliating position, where they spent much of their time and money cleaning up after the Players, knowing that the Players could just as easily pollute the environment even more and thus force the Dreamers to scrub and clean themselves twice as much, all to the joy of the soapmakers. This led to accusations that the soapmakers themselves were cooperating with the Players to spread filth throughout Dreamland.

==Rise of pessimism==
Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only [[Baeba Swamp]], pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the [[Players]], but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

:''Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.''
Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

===Dreamers envy Players===
The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than 800,000 enrolled Players, more than Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself '''Hipsoft''' emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

===Comparative census of 4162===
By 4162, the Dreamer birthrate had increased, while the Player birthrate had fallen, and they had lost territory to the '''Tinks'''. Now, Dreamland's population was about double the Play population of 639,000.

====Census statistics====

{| class="wikitable"
|+ CENSUS OF 4162
|-
! Statistic
! Play
! Dreamland
! COMMENTS
|-
| Population
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 639,000
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 1,243,000
| Play population excludes '''Tata'''
|-
| Land area
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"|
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"|
|
|-
| Per capita GDP
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| Ξ3,832
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| > Ξ50,000
|
|-
| Fertility rate
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 4.74
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 3.58
|
|-
| Median age
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 12.7
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| ~24
|
|}

Although the fertility rates were not greatly different, the actual birth rate was much higher in Play territory because their adult population was primarily female (having fought many recent wars) whereas Dreamland's population consisted mostly of the Dreamers who had not been exposed to any recent wars.

===Other developments===
====Worries about defeat====
Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

===Dissolutionism===
Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

==Defeatist art and propaganda==
The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the [[Players]], as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.
===Depictions of the sun===
Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season. This meant that the entire planet experienced its summer season at the same time, and that even near the Equator, summer was much hotter than winter.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

====The Sun is Too Big====
Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but often riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

====Suntan vs sunburn====
Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, '''Pūpepas''', was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

===Linguistic issues===
The Dreamers were also ashamed of their languages, particularly the eastern ones.

====Phonology====
The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. Though both Dreamers and Players had learned to speak languages such as [[khulls|Leaper]] in the past, it required greater physical effort on their part to pronounce sounds like /k/ than it did for the native Leaper speakers, and therefore both the Dreamers and the Players had spoken languages with a similar acoustic sound for thousands of years. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

====Script====
Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

====Grammar====
Play was a ferociously complex language, with a grammar resembling [[khulls|Leaper]] but famously more difficult. For this reason, the '''Crystals''' and other groups such as the Leapers had an easier time mastering the Play language than did the Dreamers. This embarrassed the Dreamers doubly because the common perception was that Play would be an easy language for the Dreamers to learn because of its simple sound inventory. The Dreamers' inability to competently learn to speak Play had become deadly early in the Play occupation of Tata, as Play military leaders massacred Dreamer teachers for not quickly learning the language.

===Hunger===
Although the Dreamers were not short of food, even after losing the war, they spent more of their time and money on acquiring food than did the Players, who simply built their settlements around food sources so that they would never go hungry.

===Unhealable wounds===
====Hard and soft====
Even when conceding that the Dreamers were physically strong, the artists drew the Players as having square body shapes, whereas the Dreamers were depicted as being made of soft curves.

====Depiction of weapons====
A common stereotype was that Dreamers were physically delicate, but better able to handle weapons than were small, stoutly built tribes such as the Players. Some artists said that once the Dreamers lost their weapons, the Players' weakness would turn into a strength, as their poor ability to handle weapons would mean that every kill would be bloody rather than quick and clean. Meanwhile, other artists depicted the Players as fashioning better weapons, weapons that they could hold and the Dreamers could not.

====Depiction of other sharp objects====
The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The [[Crystals]] had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the [[Players]] and with the [[Soap Bubbles]] living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

====Metaphorical use====
The Dolphin Rider term for an unhealable wound was ''nu silika o pō okuleli'', which could be shortened to ''popōkuleli'' "unhealable". They saw that their people were inflicted with many such wounds, both physically and metaphorically, as they could not protect themselves from the local animal and plant life, but also could not regain territories lost to them by invasions in recent wars such as their war against the Players. Where other nations rose and fell, the Dreamers only grew around the hard barriers outsiders built for them.

The Dreamer propagandists reminded their people that the Players were only the most recent example of an army which had invaded Dreamland and come to permanently reside there. Earlier, the feminist '''Womb Justice''' army, fleeing from their homeland, took refuge in Dreamland but immediately demanded that all Dreamers move out so they could build a society run by women. The Dreamers did not fight these women, fearing that their own people would be unwilling to take up arms against such a society, but within a generation the Dreamers had grown tired of the Wombs and no longer believed that they needed to remain in Dreamland. Yet they were unable to push the Womb army out of Dreamland, and they conceded that they would remain in Dreamland for the indefinite future.

===Positive counterpoints===
For nearly a thousand years, outside cultures had stereotyped the Dreamers as being hypersexual and eager to engage in deviant sexual practices that made their men soft. This stereotype had been repeated by so many different foreign powers that the Dreamers had come to accept that it was true, but they made no plans to change their lifestyles. Instead, the Dreamers said that they were motivated by love, and that most of their enemies were motivated by hate and incapable of love. Rather than consider themselves immoral, the Dreamers said it was cultures such as the [[Players]] who were immoral, for instead of loving each other and their enemies, they sought to start a new war every year and took joy in their enemies' suffering.

==Debates over economics==
The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. [[STW]] mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of [[AlphaLeap]] in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

====Issues involving trade====
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

''this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.''

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly [[STW]], openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

===Arguments for capitalism===
The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising '''Teenprop''' corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, and then paying taxes in their own nations so that both the company and the citizens could benefit from the company's presence.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the '''Teenprop''' corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as the '''Anchor Empire''' (where STW sold most of its goods), and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

====Wealth creation theory====
The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as [[Kxesh]] that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

===Rise of pacifism===
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of [[Paba]], which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

====Secret diplomacy====
As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of '''capitalism''', the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

==Diplomatic outreach to Players==
In the mid-4160s, Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into [[Memnumu]] to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

The [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] also feared the Players and had suffered from their plagues. But when the Dreamers heard that the Players had broken up into four political parties, they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with at least one of them, and form an alliance between Dreamland and the most pro-Dreamer political party in the Play empire.

Because their main contact with the Players was through '''Tata''', the Dreamers understood little of the Players' internal struggles in Memnumu. The Dreamers knew that the original Play faction, the Milk Bottles, had been extremist, and that they had given way to the Pillows after a series of disasters mostly involving young children. They had heard of the rise of the Purses, but most Dreamers did not know that they were racists; they only knew that the Purses' positions on issues in general were more moderate than those of the Pillows, who were in turn more moderate than the Bottles. Therefore, the Dreamers believed that the Play nation as a whole was on a steady path towards more moderate politics, and could therefore become an ally of the Dreamers if they were able to continue along that path. The Dreamers were dismayed when they later learned that the Pillows had recovered their parliamentary majority, but figured that so long as the Purses were also represented in the Play parliament, the Dreamers still had an ally among the Players. (Most Dreamers still did not know, even years on, that the Purses considered Dreamers racially inferior, because the Purses had always focused on internal divisions among the Players in Memnumu.)

===Dreamers meet with Players===
The Dreamers had heard about the Players' new balance system, in which four parties would compete for power in the Parliament, and all four would be allowed to use game-like voting strategies, for example allowing people to vote outside their home districts, figuring that the resulting fierce competition would lead to better governance. They had been shown some anti-Dreamer literature known to have been written by the '''Milk Bottle''' faction of the Play party. With this, and other information they had learned about early happenings in the Play nation, Dreamland labeled the Milk Bottles as an extremist Play faction, and assumed that the other Play factions would thus be more friendly to Dreamland.

The Dreamers sent a team of tall, handsome male diplomats to meet with the female representatives of each of the four main Play parties, comparing and contrasting the Dolphin Riders' party platform with those of the women. The Players were feminists, but unlike the Moonshines, they respected foreign cultural norms, and therefore were accustomed to meeting with male diplomats. The Dreamers told the men to talk strictly about politics, but hoped that they could subliminally woo the women with their charms and return to Dreamland having signed a formal treaty of alliance with at least one, and perhaps more, of the new Play parties.

Four Dreamer men greeted the four Player women in the Play capital city of '''Pūpepas'''.
====Results of the meeting====
At the meeting, the Dreamer men realized that the Milk Bottles they had been calling Play extremists were in fact the most moderate of all the Play philosophies, and that the other three factions were even more hostile than that. Put another way, the Dreamers had assumed that the spectrum of Play political opinions ran the gamut from the fierce nationalism of the Milk Bottles to a cosmopolitan faction of unknown identity with whom they could form an alliance. But rather than ranging from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the Dreamers found out that the Players spanned from nationalism to racism.

Furthermore, even the racist Play faction, the '''Purses''', were nationalists, saying that the hated Eggs were still their allies in any conflict that involved a foreign power. Thus, even though the Purses had openly supported arresting the Eggs, they recognized the Eggs as fellow Players. Therefore none of the Play factions was willing to support Dreamland either militarily or economically.

The Dreamers were frustrated even by the name "balance system", confident that the Players had borrowed the idea of balance from the politics of Dreamland.

====Explanations to common people====
Dreamer diplomats had difficulty explaining to their own people why they had classified all four of Memnumu's Play parties as anti-Dreamer extremists, when the Dreamers had been expecting to find allies in the Play nation. Many Dreamers simply did not believe the diplomats' claims, arguing that at least the Eggs must be friendly towards Dreamland since they had been opposed by all of the other Play factions and had been attacked with no apparent provocation in a recent war led by the Firestones. But the Dreamers had diplomatic contacts with the wider Crystal party, who refused to accept any connection between the Dreamers and the Eggs, and still claimed that the reason the Crystals had abandoned the Eggs was because the required rescue mission would have been impossible.

====Dreamers embrace Tata====
When the Dreamers obtained a clearer understanding of the Play situation, they began to oppose the often talked about integration of Tata into a single unified Play nation, which had been proposed in 4151 but delayed over and over again for various reasons. The Dreamers believed that Tata's ruling '''Club''' party, though formally identical to the Pillows, was the only true moderate Play party, since they had legalized the Dreamer party in their own territory and did not take part in radical Play practices such as child labor and home invasions, even though they had never formally written these out of their party platform. The Dreamers considered all four of the Play parties in Memnumu's Milk Parliament to be extremists. They stated that the Purse ideology was moderate, but that because they were tribalists, the Dreamers could not ally with them after all, and therefore they were off the map of political discourse in Dreamland. The other three factions were also extremists, and most Dreamers considered them even worse than the Purses, since they all opposed Dreamland as well.

====Worries about population growth====
To the Dreamers, the greatest threat posed by the Players was their extremely high birthrate, which had for their first twenty years in power been so high that children under age thirteen comprised 3/4 of the Play population, and the population had doubled in this twenty-year period despite the many plagues, famines, and wars that the Players had endured and created. Meanwhile, though the Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had been youth-based, and had come to power with a high birthrate as well, theirs had never been nearly as high as the Players', and had been in decline for several generations, such that they had come to rely on '''Gold''' party arguments that the political power of a nation should not be related to the size of its population. By now, the Players had already outgrown the Dreamers despite having a much smaller land area, and it seemed inevitable to the Dreamers that the Players would grow even more. Since the Players had already won one major war against Dreamland, the Dreamers worried that their rapidly growing population would in the future lead them to win another.

The Players' birthrate had declined sharply around 4150 when they broke up into factions, however, and the Dreamers knew of this because of diplomatic contacts through Tata. The Dreamers stopped worrying so much about the Players' population expansion and began to focus on their problems at home. But then, when they heard that the Players were reviving the Milk Bottle party, they worried that Play women would once again have more children than they could care for, and that the children would grow up and start wars against Dreamland out of pure hunger, ignoring all common sense.

==Hipsoft war of 4183==
The immigrant '''Tipper''' party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent '''Hipsoft''' party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves '''Tippers''', disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant '''Hipsoft''' party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles
that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

===Moonshine's reaction===
Moonshine endorsed the Tippers' massacres, saying that the men were doing the right thing. Moonshine offered citizenship to all female Tippers, but stated that Tipper men would never be allowed into Moonshine territory, even though they had done a great favor for the Moonshines by killing many Dreamers. This was because Moonshine culture considered men's lives expendable, and that the best thing that men could do for Moonshine would be to stay at war and wear down the enemies of Moonshine without expecting any sort of reward other than the right to abuse the conquered people. Therefore Moonshine stated that if Tipper men wanted to marry women, they should take their wives from among the Dreamer population.

===Contact with the Matrix===
In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful [[Matrix]] army based in the nearby nation of '''Tata'''. Tata was on the north coast and was one of a chain of nations that had long been a buffer area between Dreamland and Moonshine, but had recently grown into a regional power in its own right.

The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland to focus their efforts on the city of [[Baeba Swamp]].

NOTE: The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.<ref>This is from a dream in which Russia did likewise.</ref>

==Newer economic developments==
Losing two wars had led to economic decline, and the increasing isolation of Dreamland drove up the cost of living. Furthermore, the rising cost of living made it difficult for the poorest Dreamers to afford food, and although the Dreamer states solved this problem with welfare payments, some of the western states were now encouraging people to desert their towns in order to live along the coast, much as the [[Players]] did, and obtain their food from the sea.

===Currency conversion===
Nearly three centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had opened stores in the [[Thunder Empire]], whose people owned Dreamer slaves and had little interest in friendly contacts with Dreamland. STW went further, declaring that slavery was not punishment enough, and declared war on [[Dreamland]] on its first official day of business. The result of this, over time, was that any economic growth for STW led to decline for Dreamland, and vice versa.

Dreamland had won its war with STW, even though STW was backed by the traditional military of the Thunder Empire, and nearly drove the corporation out of business despite the great physical distance between Dreamland and the primary STW stores. But in 4108, Dreamland lost control of its newly won territory, and STW returned to business holding a larger grudge against Dreamland than ever before. Dreamland continued to lose wars and cede economic supremacy for the next decades, and although STW was not a major driving force in this, STW reaped some benefit from it because their leaders were better able to take advantage of changing economic tides than were the politicians of the nations they did business with.
====The Ξ4 meal promise====
STW had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. The price of a meal was fixed at Ξ4, and STW's leaders promised that the price would never rise, regardless of what happened to the economies around them, including STW's non-restaurant stores, which did not accept the meal tokens. By tying the currency only to the price of food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and thus came to be used in international comparisons even by countries who had no interest in attracting business from STW.

The Dreamers disliked the so-called universal currency, since STW did not do business in Dreamland, and had always been hostile to Dreamland. The Dreamers stated the Ξ4 meal promise was humiliating because no Dreamers could expect to receive a meal for that price at any restaurant within Dreamland, and that STW had deliberately created an unfair setup that was only sustainable because they owned slaves and their restaurants served foods that had been obtained through slave labor and with minimal transportation and preparation costs.

====Economic restructuring====
Nonetheless, in comparing their economy to those of other nations, the Dreamers were forced to acknowledge STW's meal token currency rather than using their own. By this time, the an STW-like corporation had arisen in Dreamland, intent on solving the problems of Dreamland's economic isolation by producing goods locally and thus relieving the Dreamers' dependence on trade.

The annual per capita income of Dreamland as a whole had declined to about '''Ξ40,000''' by this time, even as the price of a meal in a typical restaurant had remained around Ξ80. The Dreamers were not bankrupted by their food prices because most Dreamers acquired some of their food themselves, cooking it at home during their free time or eating it raw if possible. Thus restaurants catered to travelers and to the wealthiest classes. On top of this, Dreamland's government encouraged its states to distribute welfare tickets to Dreamer families so that they could afford food, particularly in those areas where the natural supply of food was irregular. But Dreamland was a confederation, and could not tax its people directly, and therefore the disbursement of welfare was up to the states.

====Unskilled labor wages====
Dreamland practiced unregulated capitalism supported by welfare payments. There was no minimum wage, so it was common for young and unskilled laborers to receive just Ξ20 or Ξ25 for a day's work. Those who could not find stable employment would often work for even lower wages. Meanwhile, workers in some trades were paid only by selling things they produced and could go for months at a time without income. Therefore, Dreamland's lower class was materially poor even compared to the lower classes of poorer nations, but malnutrition was rare and usually of a sort that money would not have prevented.

===Distribution of necessities===
The charter of the ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party stated that the government must provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care for all citizens, even those Dreamers who chose to live in outlying areas where transportation costs were significant. Since transportation of food and essential goods was the responsibility of the government, the costs were socialized, and Dreamland's taxes were very high. However, the tax policies were the responsibilities of the states, and the Dolphin Riders' parliament could not enact a tax applying to a specific geographic area to force that area to improve its citizens' standard of living.

====Clothing====
Clothing was not defined as a basic human need in the Dolphin Rider platform, and on this they agreed with most of the minor Dreamer parties as well. Therefore, humans who needed protective clothes to work had to buy them on their own, disposable diapers were expensive, and people huddled together in blankets during Dreamland's rare cold winter nights.

The Dreamers and the Players had both often supported nudism, and largely for the same reasons, but opposition to nudism took different perspectives in the two empires. For the Players, opposition to nudism was entirely about hygiene, as the Players' child population had suffered from several plagues and spread these plagues outside their nation. However the Players were so tightly compacted into seaside habitats that they had early on exhausted their supply of plant fibers to weave new diapers, and the Play Parliament shut down the textile industry entirely so they could focus on fishing the sea. By contrast, the Dreamers' much lower fertility rate had kept them free of such problems. Rather, the Dreamers who supported wearing clothes were more concerned with secondary issues: since Dreamers often carried money with them, it was far more convenient for them to wear clothes to help carry the coins, and there were many trades that were much easier to perform while wearing protective clothes. The Dreamers mostly did wear clothes when it was convenient, and indeed their clothing production costs were lower than those in some poorer nations, but all clothes were distributed by private corporations who were free to charge any price they wished, even in areas where they had achieved a monopoly. Thus, many Dreamers spent much of their disposable income on clothing and could not afford to replace clothes that were worn out from daily use.

====Homes and furniture====
Likewise, Dreamland's climate was hot and sunny, and in some areas, people had traditionally lived on the beach, exposed to the elements, and not in any home at all. This extreme lifestyle was associated with the pre-Dreamer aboriginal population, numbering only a few thousand by this time, who lived in very specific locations such that the construction of a building to live in would make little difference. Nonetheless, most Dreamer homes were very simple, and the government promise as understood by the people was that Dreamers would have the right to a place to seek shelter from the rain, which might or might not be their everyday home.

===Typical prices===
The Dreamers embraced capitalism and therefore did not set standard prices on goods. Their government's role in providing for their people was limited to the welfare benefits described above, to medical care, and to providing shelter from nature. The average per capita GDP was around '''Ξ50,000'''. Note that this includes the entire population, not just those in work; the average salary of a worker was therefore significantly higher.

====Hygiene====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean. The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early. A full-body coat made from animal hides could cost around '''Ξ375'''.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living.

====Non-essential foods====
Palm wine and fruit juice averaged about the same price, about '''Ξ120''' per jug.

====Intangibles and services====
Because of the calm weather, travelers often slept outside, exposed to the elements. There was thus relatively little demands for inns, and most tended to be found in cities. A night's sleep in a room with many other travelers could cost around '''Ξ80''', and accomodations with more privacy were rare.

====Illegal transactions====
Slaves could be bought for around '''Ξ100,000''' to '''Ξ1 million''', a vastly higher price than the Ξ10,000 — Ξ50,000 that paid for their abduction and transportation from weakened nations such as Thaoa. The [[Players]] had contemplated selling people from their lower classes to foreign nations for even lower prices to relieve their population stress and also bring money into their economy, but such people were often profitable for the Players since they were little more than slaves already. Since slavery was illegal in Dreamland, such people could not be held openly, and therefore were typically prostitutes who remained in one place and were bound to a master. Male slaves nonetheless were sometimes used to row ships, where they were bound into place and released only when under the close watch of an armed guard.

===Private schools===
Dreamland's education system was privatized, and teachers charged families to enroll their pupils. This was unlike the [[Players|Play]] system, where education was free, and unlike [[STW]], which actually ''paid'' students to attend, albeit in a currency that could only be redeemed at STW.

There was no law requiring Dreamer adults to care for their aging parents, either financially or materially, since the elderly were covered under the same programs that covered disabled and sick people. (This is a relic of the '''Plume''' system that predated the Dolphin Riders.) Therefore parents had no guarantee that their children would portion off their future income to the parents, and no financial incentive to seek the best education for their children, nor to have large numbers of children, or even to have children at all.

Many Dreamer women remained at or near their homes during the daytime, and so teaching their children was simply part of their daily routine, and school systems tended to exist only in large cities. Nonetheless, tuition was affordable, averaging around '''Ξ4,000''' per student per year, much less than the average income of even the lowest class of Dreamers. This tuition covered the teachers' salaries only, and did not pay for the students' meals or their belongings, which often cost more than the tuition.

Dreamland's private schools worked both in competition and in cooperation with each other, as when two schools opened in the same city, typically each school would specialize in different subjects of study.

====Proposal for a public school system====
Nonetheless, the lack of free public education was a disincentive for couples planning to have children, and many Dreamer politicians wanted to start a tax-supported public school system based on a foreign model. But because they could not institute a tax on the entire Dreamer empire, each state would need to do this individually.

Opponents of this plan argued that a public school system would immediately turn into an unrestrained child labor operation, as the state-run school would have no authority above them and thus could not be shut down. As evidence they pointed to the school system of '''Moonshine''', which considered its students to be slaves, and to [[STW]], a private school system which had nonetheless functioned as an education monopoly for much of its existence and had relied on child labor (although with pay) to sustain itself.

The '''Play''' school system, however, did not force its students to work, or even to do schoolwork, and was a legally established government monopoly accountable to no outside authority. Supporters of the new plan claimed that the Play nation disproved all of their doubts. The opponents of the public school plan countered this argument by saying that the Players represented everything the Dreamers opposed, and that the Players in fact were the worst child abusers in the world, as they forced their children to find food for their parents with no salary at all.

==Impossible burdens==
In Dreamland, the middle class was the largest class, and therefore, in Dreamland's democratic elections, policies favoring the middle class tended to succeed. There was no welfare system, and many middle-class Dreamers believed that if they were to set up a welfare system for their poorest citizens, as some other nations had, Dreamland would become as poor as those other nations. Indeed, Dreamer economists had proven that having a state-supported welfare system correlated very well with a nation's overall poverty, though they could not prove causation. Their ancient rival across the sea, [[Oyster Empire|Kxesh]], had supported its lowest class with generous welfare benefits for thousands of years and had also been poorer than Dreamland for thousands of years.<ref>Note that welfare in Kxesh probably predates the Oyster takeover.</ref>

Thus the lowest class remained poor.

Some Dreamers wished that the lowest class would migrate to surrounding nations but there was no legal means of expelling a citizen, and the Dreamers realized that many emigrants would join the armies of Dreamland's enemies and could possibly lead an invasion against Dreamland in the future.

Because the lowest class made only about Ξ20 per day, and meals often cost more than this, these people could not afford their basic needs and had to steal food or turn to other crimes to make money. Many young women, including married women, worked as prostitutes, but because there were so many prostitutes, their earnings were meager and they were worse off than men who made a career from robbing people and stealing transported goods. (These people were called pirates in most languages, because this lifestyle was not confined to the sea.)

It was nearly impossible for a poor person to meet their needs for even a day in Dreamland without committing a crime. As above, they could not even legally use the bathroom without spending more than their entire income for a day, and strict hygiene rules prohibited them relieving themselves in nature as did the poorest inhabitants of all other nations. This meant that Dreamland's various police forces could arrest almost any poor person at any time and put them in prison. However, in general, the middle class preferred to have the lower class out on the streets, since they performed useful jobs for the rest of society, and although it was a common subject of debate, the majority of middle-class Dreamers felt that they would rather tolerate the crime than lose the services of their lower class.

===Lower-class occupations===
Some occupations held by the lowest class were themselves illegal, but most were simply very low-paying jobs in the main economy. The Dreamers acknowledged that no person could support themselves on one of these legal jobs, and had used various explanations for why the wages were so low.

====Illegal occupations====
Young women tended to work as prostitutes, and all other illegal work done by women was considered a part of their prostitution duties. Thus even a woman who worked as a maid for a private household and never had sex would still be considered a prostitute because her keepers could order her to perform sexual duties as well. A prostitute's daily wages were often in the range from Ξ100 to Ξ200, which was still well below middle class wages and often not enough to survive. The middle class felt that it was good not to let prostitutes become too comfortable, since their dependency helped keep them from rebelling.

Young men tended to work as ''pirates'', which encompassed anyone who made a living from stealing other people's goods. Near the borders of Dreamland there were opportunities to steal mostly from merchants bringing things in, but poor people tended to live far away from the border, since the economy was poorer overall towards the west, and the western states could not force the pirates to move. Thus the poorest states had the highest rates of theft and looting.

==Matrix treaty of 4190==
By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of '''Memnumu''' once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny [[Matrix]] army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

==Slope treaty==

===General election of 4205===
The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in [[Memnumu]].<ref>It is possible that the descendants of the Hipsides, now adults, still practiced this lifestyle in some territory between Dreamland and Tāmta.</ref>

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

====Arrival of the Cupbearers====
Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of '''Cupbearer''' refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.<ref>This may or may not be the state of Senampattore. Where it is on the map is clear, but the borders may have changed.</ref>

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the [[Players]] in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:
#The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
#Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
#The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in [[Baeba Swamp]] as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
#The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves ''pavača'',<ref>This word is ''čava'' "long hair" spelled backwards inside the circumfix ''p-..-a'' "having (a)". This method of word formation was dying out in Play, but persisted in some groups who were influenced by Andanese, because even though Andanese itself did not use this, it was more convenient with pure CV words, as Andanese had, than with Play whose syllable structure was more diverse.</ref> just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

===Capture of Crystal slaves===
A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising '''Slope''' party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

==Postwar period==
After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

===General election of 4227===
Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The ''bopo'' philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the ''bopo'' supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The '''Cupbearers''' may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

===General election of 4238===
Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

===General election of 4254===
After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the [[Memnumu|Play army]] and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.
==Naval war==
In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the [[Players]], which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the [[Ghost Empire|Ghosts]], who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called '''Laba'''. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of [[Moonshine]], but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world.
But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the [[Players|Play]] population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

==Inversion of propaganda==
Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the [[Players]], but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the [[Matrix]] propaganda of a hundred years prior.

===Weather metaphors===
Though living right along the Equator, the people of Hipatal and Laba in general had the same variety of body types found elsewhere. Some outsiders believed that they were all dark-skinned people, but immigrants such as '''Sašuasa''' had been of the same Lenian body type as the stereotypical eastern Dreamers who had fallen into ruin.

==Naval war in the Play sea==
===General election of 4287===
As the Dreamer navy,<ref>this did not actually take twenty years, but there were no global elections in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty</ref>, '''Laba''', invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the '''Teenprop''' corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

''NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.''

===Antiwar movement in Dreamland===
===="The Real Dreamland"====
Just as Dreamland seemed likely to win its war, a group of pacifists declared themselves to be the only true Dreamers, and pledged allegiance to the '''Cupbearers''' without formally joining the Cupbearer party. They said that the earlier Dreamers' pessimism was correct, and that Dreamland should be a pacifist multinational empire trading economically with foreign nations but without military expansionist goals. They supported '''Moonshine''', and thus while committed to pacifism, assumed that they would soon be targets in the war, and perhaps could be such easy targets that they would distract the navy from their war against the Players. Thus these new pacifists felt they could help the Players whether they were successful in remaking Dreamland into an economic power, in which case the war would stall, or unsuccessful, in which case they would be slaughtered by the pirates but could hopefully still save the Players.

The pacifists' claim to be the only true Dreamers closely resembled the Players' contemporary claim that the Play navy was the only true Laba. They had made their declarations independently, however, as the Play diplomats were blocked from contacting the pacifists by the Ghosts over land and by the pirates at sea.

===General election of 4295===
The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became popular.

===General election of 4316===
After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.
===General election of 4321===
Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

===General election of 4327===
===General election of 4343===
Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

==Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)==
Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing ''bepolere'', which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The ''Pōbipōpu'' and ''Pōronopa'' distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

===Contacts with Moonshine===
The '''Habit''' party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the '''Hipsoft''' settlements to and including the '''Womb Justice''' settlements. The Habits were the sons and daughters of the Crystals who had been pushed into the underclass in Baeba Swamp when the Leapers took over. That is, they were a faction of Crystals who resisted the Leapers.

====Tribal identity====
The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

====Partition====
By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small '''Hipsoft''' migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the '''Womb Justice ''' party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name '''Dreamland''' was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

====Moonshine-Habit relations====
The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's '''Habit''' party (''Tăta'')<ref>Note that this is not a homonym of the state name '''Tàta''' because the tones are different, but that in languages such as Play, the two may have been merged.</ref> to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called '''Wagillàra''', the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

===Demographic shifts===
After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the [[Players]] had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

:''Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.''

===General election of 4351===
Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

===General election of 4390===
Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

===General election of 4402===
Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

===General election of 4412===
The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.
===General election of 4419===
Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

===General election of 4438===
Luxury goods came back into fashion.

====Tribal reform====
Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The '''Tipper''' population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the '''Hipatal''' immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

===General election of 4440===
Luxury goods fell out of fashion.
===General election of 4445===
Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

===General election of 4462===
Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.
===General election of 4468===
Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.
===General election of 4485===
Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.
===General election of 4492===
The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.
===General election of 4500===
Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.
===General election of 4511===
Little changed in this election.
===General election of 4529===
Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.
===General election of 4531===
Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.
===General election of 4538===
Luxury goods became popular.
===General election of 4540===
Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

===Humanitarian attempts at intervention===
The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier.<ref>But remember that this from a different timeline. The figure cannot be taken as an exact count.</ref> Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both [[Baeba Swamp]] and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

''Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.''

==Other developments==
*56 (4150)
*52 (4202)
*13 (4215)
*24 (4239)
*79 (4318)
*80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the [[Hipatal]] people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

=Dreamer-Doll relations=
:''See [[Dolls]].''
Note that there is no convenient way to represent the [[babakiam|Play]]-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with ''dream'' and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the [[Dolls|Bottom]] party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (''nuufa''), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Bottoms did not allow their members to even have protruding fingernails. The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: '''fubap''' describing something soft and thus flexible, and '''nuufa''' describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

===Scope===
It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the '''Hiboh''' Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

===Dedication to pacifism===
The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon [[ppot#upl|drafted a party platform]] denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling '''Hailstorm''' army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

=Dreamer-Play relations=
''Žayuvas'' got its name when the rebel '''Tink''' army invaded their ally, the [[Play party]], and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, [[Dreamland]], than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory ''Memnumu''.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling '''Police''' faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the [[Play party]]. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the [[alphaleap|Leapers]] had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the '''Magic Combs''') never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

===Scope of Žayuvas===
It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of '''Šasa Kaina''', located near and traditionally friendly towards [[Thaoa]], at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

===Fertility calculations===
On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

;Oct 10 2021
There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding '''Tata''', where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

===Apportionment of representatives===
Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

==Evolution from factions to parties==
The [[Play party|Play]] charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

==Party membership==
The '''Police''' party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

==Culturebound issues of the Play Empire==
:''See also [[Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues]]''.
True to its name, the [[Play party]] dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

===Children's issues===
====Education====
The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory [[Raspara]] army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

===Tribal conflicts (general) ===
:''This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.''
====Height and hair color====

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured [[Paba]]p tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were [[#feminism|taller than their men]], this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

====Background====
Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive [[Raspara]] party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious [[swamp Kids|Tink]] army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall [[Repilia]]n tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the '''Flower Bees''' and the '''Rusted Pearls'''. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

====Conflicting tribal definitions====
Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the [[Palli]]-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

=Diplomatic contacts between the empires=

=Later periods=
These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.
===Hiboh===
The '''Hiboh''' era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true '''Sleeperism'''.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the '''Cold Men''', until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

===RKE Wars===
The '''RKE''' movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used [[Matrix]]-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.

=Notes in boats=
==Notes==

Dolphin Riders

2025-06-20T00:30:30Z

Poswob Rare: /* Impossible burdens */

The '''MFZ''' Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the [[Cosmopolitan Age]]. The original Empire, ''Mayuvas'', was [[Dreamland]], which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the [[Gold party]], as the word for gold in [[babakiam|Play]] was ''mayu''. The other two empires, ''Fayuvas'' and ''Žayuvas'', were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, [[Baeba Swamp]], which at the time was run primarily by the '''Iron''' party, an offshoot of the much older [[Zenith]] party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel '''ū''', giving ''Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas'', but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like '''uv''' (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

==Background==

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with [[Baeba Swamp]] to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of [[Moonshine]] and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with '''Tata''', also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

==Structure of Parliament==
Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the [[ppot#DPR|Dolphin Riders]], who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient [[Gold party]]. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

==Recognition of new tribes==
Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the '''Tippers''' who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

==Language==
The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited [[Lenian languages#DPR|Dolphin Rider]] language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near [[Baeba Swamp]] came to speak [[Ogili_II|Ogili]], the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

==Growth of the Kapa corporation==
An umbrella corporation called '''Kapa''' (in full, ''Nobōbo Kapa'') arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The ''kapa'' part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like '''Teenprop'''. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like '''Teens for Tomorrow''', though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after [[STW]]; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing '''Bottom''' party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the '''Yukiese''' family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of [[Paba]]. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the '''Teenprop''' political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

==Development of new political parties==
===Two-party stage===
The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support '''feminism''', believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world. The Dolphin Riders realized that if feminism took hold even in Dreamland, there would be no more land in the world run by men; free men would only exist as nomadic minorities within female nations.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support '''sarabism''', the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

==Creation of new parties==
'''Gatotōl''' had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the '''Comb''' party (''Pōrupu Resini'') which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's<ref>A vague and tentative date</ref> the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the '''Hipsoft''' party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new '''Carriage''' party (''āliki'') was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new '''Pointer''' party (''Pēbobi Lisuelesi'') was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a ''pēbobi''.

The '''Permission''' party (''Lepusepu Lesinepu'') was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the '''Butterfly''' party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

====Minor parties====
The '''Frame''' party (''Pōrupu Uimeka'') also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term ''sepu'' (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet ''lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu'' is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

==Culturebound issues==
The [[Gold party]] did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the '''Wildfire''' party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the '''Treehouse''' army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the '''Tippers''' came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

===Hupodas===
There was a ''Hupodas'' ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be ''lepisese'' "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

===Family issues===
====Early years====
The founding '''Dolphin Riders''' planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.<ref>While this logic may seem counterintuitive from the point of view of Earth, it was well illustrated in feminist societies like Moonshine that women were eager to raise children because they would be able to remain at home, and not need to work, while their husbands provided the entire financial support for raising each child.</ref>

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

====Later years====
A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

===Ilhina===
This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.
===Sarabism===
Related to the carrying of weapons.

===Capitalism and communism===
These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

===Censorship and propaganda===
These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

===Feminism===
Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

===Pimuo bopi===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as '''pacifism''' but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive [[Matrix]] army.

''This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as '''bopo''' below.''

===Pasio===
A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

===Bepolere===
Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

===Bopo===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as '''pacifism'''; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

==Proclamation of Empire==
===Proclamation of Empire in 4108===
In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the [[Play party|Play]] parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population.

Yet, 1,300<ref>an exact figure</ref> Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, [[Baeba Swamp]] had become the center of world diplomacy.

===General election of 4111===
The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the '''Treehouse''' party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the '''Wildfire''' party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

==Conflicts over hygiene==

===Hygiene laws===
The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (This is separate from the Hupodas issue.) One reason for the strong attention to hygiene was that the Dolphin Riders were tolerant of nudism, an issue that Dreamers had often gone back and forth on in the past.

The Dreamer Parliament had the power to make laws that applied to the entire empire. Thus it became a crime in Dreamland for a teenager or adult to leave a mess in a public bathroom, or even in nature, without immediately cleaning it up. The Dreamers also had to prove that they were bathing everyday, washing their clothes, and keeping their belongings clean as well. But the Parliament did not have the power to enact a tax applying to the whole Empire; this power was reserved to the states.
====Soapmaking corporation====
Thus, the Dreamer Parliament was unable to subsidize the purchase of soap and other hygiene-related goods, and Dreamers had to rely on their monthly income to buy these products. This immediately led to the rise of a powerful soapmaking class, who founded a corporation, '''Nobōbo Pobo Mosesene''' (PBM), named after the founding Mosesene family. PBM's workers allied themselves with the factions of the Baywatch and Rider parties that favored strict hygiene laws, and pledged to cooperate with each other across state and party lines since they were united on a single issue.

PBM's prices were expensive. The government's bathroom police (''pusepo serakale'') signed a contract with PBM stating that they would ride along with PBM's soap distributors to ensure that citizens were buying the product and keeping their homes and belongings clean. Thus the PBM corporation had a strong ally in the government and assumed they would not be easily shut down.

====Use of currency exchanges====
Nearly two centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. By tying the value of the currency to food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and over time, nations came to use the Ξ tokens as a neutral currency so that they could more easily compare their economies without needing to factor in inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.

The Dreamers had no STW stores and had always been hostile to STW, just as STW had always been hostile to them and had periodically raided Dreamer territory in the past to procure goods to sell in their stores. Therefore the Dreamers did not like STW's Ξ meal token currency either. But they had conceded to use it when comparing their economy to other economies, as it showed that the cost of living in Dreamland was quite high compared to most other nations, and that their people were not living as comfortably as a measure of total economic output would make it seem.

Dreamland's people had an average annual income around '''Ξ70,000''', but much higher in the east, in '''Baywatch''' territory, where the banks and most major corporations were. In fact the average per capita income ranged from about Ξ200,000 in Baywatch territory to Ξ20,000 in the various states of the west.

====Prices of hygiene and associated services====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living. The bathroom guards were separate from the bathroom police, meaning that someone needing to use the bathroom would sometimes need to greet two people just to get in, pay for the experience, and then clean up any mess they had made. Meanwhile it was illegal to hide in nature instead of using the bathroom except when that area was on private property and the landowner took it upon themselves to clean the landscape; in such a case, they were in turn subject to police oversight.

The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early.

===General election of 4116===

===General election of 4125===

===General election of 4129===

==War against the Players==
In 4132, Dreamland's '''Baywatch''' and '''Dolphin Rider''' parties voted together for a war against the distant [[Players|Play]] empire, with the Baywatchers expected to shoulder most of the combat and therefore also reserve the most gains, both territorial and political, for themselves.

===General election of 4134===
===General election of 4140===
As the soldiers of the [[Players|Play]] army massacred Dreamers in the '''Baywatch''' theater of the war, and spread plagues beyond it, the Dreamers (all states) voted to disarm their civilian population to turn over their weapons to the Dreamer army, whom they hoped would keep the Players from spreading further west.

===General election of 4142===
As the [[Play party]] occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of '''Mipatatatatai''', the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

====Immigration====
The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: The sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

====Hipsofts====
Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. These were moved to a city near the middle of the Dolphin Riders' territory, far from Moonshine and also far from the Players. The Dolphin Riders hoped that these immigrants would align themselves with Dreamland or at least become apolitical.

The '''Hipsoft''' faction of the Dolphin Rider party appeared soon after the immigrants were settled. The Hipsofts lived in the area where the immigrants had moved to and opposed the resettlement program. The other Riders seemed to have little interest in the situation, saying that they had done a good deed by adopting refugees from a pacifist nation but also unwilling to spread the immigrants around the rest of Dreamland. At this time, the immigrants had no political party of their own, and the mainstream Riders hoped that the appearance of the Hipsofts would encourage the immigrants to become strongly supportive of the mainstream Riders.

==Reforms to hygiene laws==
The Dolphin Riders had come to power in 4108 with a permissive attitude towards nudism and a strict hygiene policy, requiring all Dreamers to bathe and be clean after using the bathroom. They were required to purchase soap and other hygiene supplies on their own. This was to prevent the spread of disease. The Dreamer parliament had the authority to require Dreamer citizens to purchase soap and other supplies, but not to enact a tax to pay for the hygiene supplies, or to subsidize them in any other way. Even though there was more than one soap company, the price of soap rose high as soapmakers knew the demand for their product would never cease.

====Claims of soapmakers' complicity====
But now, the Dreamers increasingly began to blame their hygiene problems on the [[Players]] to the east, whom they suspected were deliberately polluting the rivers which flowed into coastal areas of Dreamland. The new generation of Dreamers thus came to support laws requiring Dreamers to wear clothing and deemphasizing the use of soap. Soapmakers were invested into their craft now, however, and opposed the new changes as they knew it would decrease their standard of living. The reformists accused the soapmakers of forcing the Dreamer population into a humiliating position, where they spent much of their time and money cleaning up after the Players, knowing that the Players could just as easily pollute the environment even more and thus force the Dreamers to scrub and clean themselves twice as much, all to the joy of the soapmakers. This led to accusations that the soapmakers themselves were cooperating with the Players to spread filth throughout Dreamland.

==Rise of pessimism==
Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only [[Baeba Swamp]], pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the [[Players]], but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

:''Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.''
Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

===Dreamers envy Players===
The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than 800,000 enrolled Players, more than Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself '''Hipsoft''' emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

===Comparative census of 4162===
By 4162, the Dreamer birthrate had increased, while the Player birthrate had fallen, and they had lost territory to the '''Tinks'''. Now, Dreamland's population was about double the Play population of 639,000.

====Census statistics====

{| class="wikitable"
|+ CENSUS OF 4162
|-
! Statistic
! Play
! Dreamland
! COMMENTS
|-
| Population
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 639,000
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 1,243,000
| Play population excludes '''Tata'''
|-
| Land area
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"|
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"|
|
|-
| Per capita GDP
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| Ξ3,832
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| > Ξ50,000
|
|-
| Fertility rate
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 4.74
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 3.58
|
|-
| Median age
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 12.7
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| ~24
|
|}

Although the fertility rates were not greatly different, the actual birth rate was much higher in Play territory because their adult population was primarily female (having fought many recent wars) whereas Dreamland's population consisted mostly of the Dreamers who had not been exposed to any recent wars.

===Other developments===
====Worries about defeat====
Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

===Dissolutionism===
Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

==Defeatist art and propaganda==
The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the [[Players]], as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.
===Depictions of the sun===
Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season. This meant that the entire planet experienced its summer season at the same time, and that even near the Equator, summer was much hotter than winter.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

====The Sun is Too Big====
Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but often riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

====Suntan vs sunburn====
Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, '''Pūpepas''', was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

===Linguistic issues===
The Dreamers were also ashamed of their languages, particularly the eastern ones.

====Phonology====
The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. Though both Dreamers and Players had learned to speak languages such as [[khulls|Leaper]] in the past, it required greater physical effort on their part to pronounce sounds like /k/ than it did for the native Leaper speakers, and therefore both the Dreamers and the Players had spoken languages with a similar acoustic sound for thousands of years. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

====Script====
Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

====Grammar====
Play was a ferociously complex language, with a grammar resembling [[khulls|Leaper]] but famously more difficult. For this reason, the '''Crystals''' and other groups such as the Leapers had an easier time mastering the Play language than did the Dreamers. This embarrassed the Dreamers doubly because the common perception was that Play would be an easy language for the Dreamers to learn because of its simple sound inventory. The Dreamers' inability to competently learn to speak Play had become deadly early in the Play occupation of Tata, as Play military leaders massacred Dreamer teachers for not quickly learning the language.

===Hunger===
Although the Dreamers were not short of food, even after losing the war, they spent more of their time and money on acquiring food than did the Players, who simply built their settlements around food sources so that they would never go hungry.

===Unhealable wounds===
====Hard and soft====
Even when conceding that the Dreamers were physically strong, the artists drew the Players as having square body shapes, whereas the Dreamers were depicted as being made of soft curves.

====Depiction of weapons====
A common stereotype was that Dreamers were physically delicate, but better able to handle weapons than were small, stoutly built tribes such as the Players. Some artists said that once the Dreamers lost their weapons, the Players' weakness would turn into a strength, as their poor ability to handle weapons would mean that every kill would be bloody rather than quick and clean. Meanwhile, other artists depicted the Players as fashioning better weapons, weapons that they could hold and the Dreamers could not.

====Depiction of other sharp objects====
The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The [[Crystals]] had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the [[Players]] and with the [[Soap Bubbles]] living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

====Metaphorical use====
The Dolphin Rider term for an unhealable wound was ''nu silika o pō okuleli'', which could be shortened to ''popōkuleli'' "unhealable". They saw that their people were inflicted with many such wounds, both physically and metaphorically, as they could not protect themselves from the local animal and plant life, but also could not regain territories lost to them by invasions in recent wars such as their war against the Players. Where other nations rose and fell, the Dreamers only grew around the hard barriers outsiders built for them.

The Dreamer propagandists reminded their people that the Players were only the most recent example of an army which had invaded Dreamland and come to permanently reside there. Earlier, the feminist '''Womb Justice''' army, fleeing from their homeland, took refuge in Dreamland but immediately demanded that all Dreamers move out so they could build a society run by women. The Dreamers did not fight these women, fearing that their own people would be unwilling to take up arms against such a society, but within a generation the Dreamers had grown tired of the Wombs and no longer believed that they needed to remain in Dreamland. Yet they were unable to push the Womb army out of Dreamland, and they conceded that they would remain in Dreamland for the indefinite future.

===Positive counterpoints===
For nearly a thousand years, outside cultures had stereotyped the Dreamers as being hypersexual and eager to engage in deviant sexual practices that made their men soft. This stereotype had been repeated by so many different foreign powers that the Dreamers had come to accept that it was true, but they made no plans to change their lifestyles. Instead, the Dreamers said that they were motivated by love, and that most of their enemies were motivated by hate and incapable of love. Rather than consider themselves immoral, the Dreamers said it was cultures such as the [[Players]] who were immoral, for instead of loving each other and their enemies, they sought to start a new war every year and took joy in their enemies' suffering.

==Debates over economics==
The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. [[STW]] mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of [[AlphaLeap]] in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

====Issues involving trade====
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

''this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.''

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly [[STW]], openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

===Arguments for capitalism===
The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising '''Teenprop''' corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, and then paying taxes in their own nations so that both the company and the citizens could benefit from the company's presence.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the '''Teenprop''' corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as the '''Anchor Empire''' (where STW sold most of its goods), and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

====Wealth creation theory====
The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as [[Kxesh]] that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

===Rise of pacifism===
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of [[Paba]], which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

====Secret diplomacy====
As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of '''capitalism''', the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

==Diplomatic outreach to Players==
In the mid-4160s, Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into [[Memnumu]] to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

The [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] also feared the Players and had suffered from their plagues. But when the Dreamers heard that the Players had broken up into four political parties, they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with at least one of them, and form an alliance between Dreamland and the most pro-Dreamer political party in the Play empire.

Because their main contact with the Players was through '''Tata''', the Dreamers understood little of the Players' internal struggles in Memnumu. The Dreamers knew that the original Play faction, the Milk Bottles, had been extremist, and that they had given way to the Pillows after a series of disasters mostly involving young children. They had heard of the rise of the Purses, but most Dreamers did not know that they were racists; they only knew that the Purses' positions on issues in general were more moderate than those of the Pillows, who were in turn more moderate than the Bottles. Therefore, the Dreamers believed that the Play nation as a whole was on a steady path towards more moderate politics, and could therefore become an ally of the Dreamers if they were able to continue along that path. The Dreamers were dismayed when they later learned that the Pillows had recovered their parliamentary majority, but figured that so long as the Purses were also represented in the Play parliament, the Dreamers still had an ally among the Players. (Most Dreamers still did not know, even years on, that the Purses considered Dreamers racially inferior, because the Purses had always focused on internal divisions among the Players in Memnumu.)

===Dreamers meet with Players===
The Dreamers had heard about the Players' new balance system, in which four parties would compete for power in the Parliament, and all four would be allowed to use game-like voting strategies, for example allowing people to vote outside their home districts, figuring that the resulting fierce competition would lead to better governance. They had been shown some anti-Dreamer literature known to have been written by the '''Milk Bottle''' faction of the Play party. With this, and other information they had learned about early happenings in the Play nation, Dreamland labeled the Milk Bottles as an extremist Play faction, and assumed that the other Play factions would thus be more friendly to Dreamland.

The Dreamers sent a team of tall, handsome male diplomats to meet with the female representatives of each of the four main Play parties, comparing and contrasting the Dolphin Riders' party platform with those of the women. The Players were feminists, but unlike the Moonshines, they respected foreign cultural norms, and therefore were accustomed to meeting with male diplomats. The Dreamers told the men to talk strictly about politics, but hoped that they could subliminally woo the women with their charms and return to Dreamland having signed a formal treaty of alliance with at least one, and perhaps more, of the new Play parties.

Four Dreamer men greeted the four Player women in the Play capital city of '''Pūpepas'''.
====Results of the meeting====
At the meeting, the Dreamer men realized that the Milk Bottles they had been calling Play extremists were in fact the most moderate of all the Play philosophies, and that the other three factions were even more hostile than that. Put another way, the Dreamers had assumed that the spectrum of Play political opinions ran the gamut from the fierce nationalism of the Milk Bottles to a cosmopolitan faction of unknown identity with whom they could form an alliance. But rather than ranging from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the Dreamers found out that the Players spanned from nationalism to racism.

Furthermore, even the racist Play faction, the '''Purses''', were nationalists, saying that the hated Eggs were still their allies in any conflict that involved a foreign power. Thus, even though the Purses had openly supported arresting the Eggs, they recognized the Eggs as fellow Players. Therefore none of the Play factions was willing to support Dreamland either militarily or economically.

The Dreamers were frustrated even by the name "balance system", confident that the Players had borrowed the idea of balance from the politics of Dreamland.

====Explanations to common people====
Dreamer diplomats had difficulty explaining to their own people why they had classified all four of Memnumu's Play parties as anti-Dreamer extremists, when the Dreamers had been expecting to find allies in the Play nation. Many Dreamers simply did not believe the diplomats' claims, arguing that at least the Eggs must be friendly towards Dreamland since they had been opposed by all of the other Play factions and had been attacked with no apparent provocation in a recent war led by the Firestones. But the Dreamers had diplomatic contacts with the wider Crystal party, who refused to accept any connection between the Dreamers and the Eggs, and still claimed that the reason the Crystals had abandoned the Eggs was because the required rescue mission would have been impossible.

====Dreamers embrace Tata====
When the Dreamers obtained a clearer understanding of the Play situation, they began to oppose the often talked about integration of Tata into a single unified Play nation, which had been proposed in 4151 but delayed over and over again for various reasons. The Dreamers believed that Tata's ruling '''Club''' party, though formally identical to the Pillows, was the only true moderate Play party, since they had legalized the Dreamer party in their own territory and did not take part in radical Play practices such as child labor and home invasions, even though they had never formally written these out of their party platform. The Dreamers considered all four of the Play parties in Memnumu's Milk Parliament to be extremists. They stated that the Purse ideology was moderate, but that because they were tribalists, the Dreamers could not ally with them after all, and therefore they were off the map of political discourse in Dreamland. The other three factions were also extremists, and most Dreamers considered them even worse than the Purses, since they all opposed Dreamland as well.

====Worries about population growth====
To the Dreamers, the greatest threat posed by the Players was their extremely high birthrate, which had for their first twenty years in power been so high that children under age thirteen comprised 3/4 of the Play population, and the population had doubled in this twenty-year period despite the many plagues, famines, and wars that the Players had endured and created. Meanwhile, though the Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had been youth-based, and had come to power with a high birthrate as well, theirs had never been nearly as high as the Players', and had been in decline for several generations, such that they had come to rely on '''Gold''' party arguments that the political power of a nation should not be related to the size of its population. By now, the Players had already outgrown the Dreamers despite having a much smaller land area, and it seemed inevitable to the Dreamers that the Players would grow even more. Since the Players had already won one major war against Dreamland, the Dreamers worried that their rapidly growing population would in the future lead them to win another.

The Players' birthrate had declined sharply around 4150 when they broke up into factions, however, and the Dreamers knew of this because of diplomatic contacts through Tata. The Dreamers stopped worrying so much about the Players' population expansion and began to focus on their problems at home. But then, when they heard that the Players were reviving the Milk Bottle party, they worried that Play women would once again have more children than they could care for, and that the children would grow up and start wars against Dreamland out of pure hunger, ignoring all common sense.

==Hipsoft war of 4183==
The immigrant '''Tipper''' party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent '''Hipsoft''' party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves '''Tippers''', disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant '''Hipsoft''' party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles
that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

===Moonshine's reaction===
Moonshine endorsed the Tippers' massacres, saying that the men were doing the right thing. Moonshine offered citizenship to all female Tippers, but stated that Tipper men would never be allowed into Moonshine territory, even though they had done a great favor for the Moonshines by killing many Dreamers. This was because Moonshine culture considered men's lives expendable, and that the best thing that men could do for Moonshine would be to stay at war and wear down the enemies of Moonshine without expecting any sort of reward other than the right to abuse the conquered people. Therefore Moonshine stated that if Tipper men wanted to marry women, they should take their wives from among the Dreamer population.

===Contact with the Matrix===
In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful [[Matrix]] army based in the nearby nation of '''Tata'''. Tata was on the north coast and was one of a chain of nations that had long been a buffer area between Dreamland and Moonshine, but had recently grown into a regional power in its own right.

The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland to focus their efforts on the city of [[Baeba Swamp]].

NOTE: The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.<ref>This is from a dream in which Russia did likewise.</ref>

==Newer economic developments==
Losing two wars had led to economic decline, and the increasing isolation of Dreamland drove up the cost of living. Furthermore, the rising cost of living made it difficult for the poorest Dreamers to afford food, and although the Dreamer states solved this problem with welfare payments, some of the western states were now encouraging people to desert their towns in order to live along the coast, much as the [[Players]] did, and obtain their food from the sea.

===Currency conversion===
Nearly three centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had opened stores in the [[Thunder Empire]], whose people owned Dreamer slaves and had little interest in friendly contacts with Dreamland. STW went further, declaring that slavery was not punishment enough, and declared war on [[Dreamland]] on its first official day of business. The result of this, over time, was that any economic growth for STW led to decline for Dreamland, and vice versa.

Dreamland had won its war with STW, even though STW was backed by the traditional military of the Thunder Empire, and nearly drove the corporation out of business despite the great physical distance between Dreamland and the primary STW stores. But in 4108, Dreamland lost control of its newly won territory, and STW returned to business holding a larger grudge against Dreamland than ever before. Dreamland continued to lose wars and cede economic supremacy for the next decades, and although STW was not a major driving force in this, STW reaped some benefit from it because their leaders were better able to take advantage of changing economic tides than were the politicians of the nations they did business with.
====The Ξ4 meal promise====
STW had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. The price of a meal was fixed at Ξ4, and STW's leaders promised that the price would never rise, regardless of what happened to the economies around them, including STW's non-restaurant stores, which did not accept the meal tokens. By tying the currency only to the price of food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and thus came to be used in international comparisons even by countries who had no interest in attracting business from STW.

The Dreamers disliked the so-called universal currency, since STW did not do business in Dreamland, and had always been hostile to Dreamland. The Dreamers stated the Ξ4 meal promise was humiliating because no Dreamers could expect to receive a meal for that price at any restaurant within Dreamland, and that STW had deliberately created an unfair setup that was only sustainable because they owned slaves and their restaurants served foods that had been obtained through slave labor and with minimal transportation and preparation costs.

====Economic restructuring====
Nonetheless, in comparing their economy to those of other nations, the Dreamers were forced to acknowledge STW's meal token currency rather than using their own. By this time, the an STW-like corporation had arisen in Dreamland, intent on solving the problems of Dreamland's economic isolation by producing goods locally and thus relieving the Dreamers' dependence on trade.

The annual per capita income of Dreamland as a whole had declined to about '''Ξ40,000''' by this time, even as the price of a meal in a typical restaurant had remained around Ξ80. The Dreamers were not bankrupted by their food prices because most Dreamers acquired some of their food themselves, cooking it at home during their free time or eating it raw if possible. Thus restaurants catered to travelers and to the wealthiest classes. On top of this, Dreamland's government encouraged its states to distribute welfare tickets to Dreamer families so that they could afford food, particularly in those areas where the natural supply of food was irregular. But Dreamland was a confederation, and could not tax its people directly, and therefore the disbursement of welfare was up to the states.

====Unskilled labor wages====
Dreamland practiced unregulated capitalism supported by welfare payments. There was no minimum wage, so it was common for young and unskilled laborers to receive just Ξ20 or Ξ25 for a day's work. Those who could not find stable employment would often work for even lower wages. Meanwhile, workers in some trades were paid only by selling things they produced and could go for months at a time without income. Therefore, Dreamland's lower class was materially poor even compared to the lower classes of poorer nations, but malnutrition was rare and usually of a sort that money would not have prevented.

===Distribution of necessities===
The charter of the ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party stated that the government must provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care for all citizens, even those Dreamers who chose to live in outlying areas where transportation costs were significant. Since transportation of food and essential goods was the responsibility of the government, the costs were socialized, and Dreamland's taxes were very high. However, the tax policies were the responsibilities of the states, and the Dolphin Riders' parliament could not enact a tax applying to a specific geographic area to force that area to improve its citizens' standard of living.

====Clothing====
Clothing was not defined as a basic human need in the Dolphin Rider platform, and on this they agreed with most of the minor Dreamer parties as well. Therefore, humans who needed protective clothes to work had to buy them on their own, disposable diapers were expensive, and people huddled together in blankets during Dreamland's rare cold winter nights.

The Dreamers and the Players had both often supported nudism, and largely for the same reasons, but opposition to nudism took different perspectives in the two empires. For the Players, opposition to nudism was entirely about hygiene, as the Players' child population had suffered from several plagues and spread these plagues outside their nation. However the Players were so tightly compacted into seaside habitats that they had early on exhausted their supply of plant fibers to weave new diapers, and the Play Parliament shut down the textile industry entirely so they could focus on fishing the sea. By contrast, the Dreamers' much lower fertility rate had kept them free of such problems. Rather, the Dreamers who supported wearing clothes were more concerned with secondary issues: since Dreamers often carried money with them, it was far more convenient for them to wear clothes to help carry the coins, and there were many trades that were much easier to perform while wearing protective clothes. The Dreamers mostly did wear clothes when it was convenient, and indeed their clothing production costs were lower than those in some poorer nations, but all clothes were distributed by private corporations who were free to charge any price they wished, even in areas where they had achieved a monopoly. Thus, many Dreamers spent much of their disposable income on clothing and could not afford to replace clothes that were worn out from daily use.

====Homes and furniture====
Likewise, Dreamland's climate was hot and sunny, and in some areas, people had traditionally lived on the beach, exposed to the elements, and not in any home at all. This extreme lifestyle was associated with the pre-Dreamer aboriginal population, numbering only a few thousand by this time, who lived in very specific locations such that the construction of a building to live in would make little difference. Nonetheless, most Dreamer homes were very simple, and the government promise as understood by the people was that Dreamers would have the right to a place to seek shelter from the rain, which might or might not be their everyday home.

===Typical prices===
The Dreamers embraced capitalism and therefore did not set standard prices on goods. Their government's role in providing for their people was limited to the welfare benefits described above, to medical care, and to providing shelter from nature. The average per capita GDP was around '''Ξ50,000'''. Note that this includes the entire population, not just those in work; the average salary of a worker was therefore significantly higher.

====Hygiene====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean. The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early. A full-body coat made from animal hides could cost around '''Ξ375'''.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living.

====Non-essential foods====
Palm wine and fruit juice averaged about the same price, about '''Ξ120''' per jug.

====Intangibles and services====
Because of the calm weather, travelers often slept outside, exposed to the elements. There was thus relatively little demands for inns, and most tended to be found in cities. A night's sleep in a room with many other travelers could cost around '''Ξ80''', and accomodations with more privacy were rare.

====Illegal transactions====
Slaves could be bought for around '''Ξ100,000''' to '''Ξ1 million''', a vastly higher price than the Ξ10,000 — Ξ50,000 that paid for their abduction and transportation from weakened nations such as Thaoa. The [[Players]] had contemplated selling people from their lower classes to foreign nations for even lower prices to relieve their population stress and also bring money into their economy, but such people were often profitable for the Players since they were little more than slaves already. Since slavery was illegal in Dreamland, such people could not be held openly, and therefore were typically prostitutes who remained in one place and were bound to a master. Male slaves nonetheless were sometimes used to row ships, where they were bound into place and released only when under the close watch of an armed guard.

===Private schools===
Dreamland's education system was privatized, and teachers charged families to enroll their pupils. This was unlike the [[Players|Play]] system, where education was free, and unlike [[STW]], which actually ''paid'' students to attend, albeit in a currency that could only be redeemed at STW.

There was no law requiring Dreamer adults to care for their aging parents, either financially or materially, since the elderly were covered under the same programs that covered disabled and sick people. (This is a relic of the '''Plume''' system that predated the Dolphin Riders.) Therefore parents had no guarantee that their children would portion off their future income to the parents, and no financial incentive to seek the best education for their children, nor to have large numbers of children, or even to have children at all.

Many Dreamer women remained at or near their homes during the daytime, and so teaching their children was simply part of their daily routine, and school systems tended to exist only in large cities. Nonetheless, tuition was affordable, averaging around '''Ξ4,000''' per student per year, much less than the average income of even the lowest class of Dreamers. This tuition covered the teachers' salaries only, and did not pay for the students' meals or their belongings, which often cost more than the tuition.

Dreamland's private schools worked both in competition and in cooperation with each other, as when two schools opened in the same city, typically each school would specialize in different subjects of study.

====Proposal for a public school system====
Nonetheless, the lack of free public education was a disincentive for couples planning to have children, and many Dreamer politicians wanted to start a tax-supported public school system based on a foreign model. But because they could not institute a tax on the entire Dreamer empire, each state would need to do this individually.

Opponents of this plan argued that a public school system would immediately turn into an unrestrained child labor operation, as the state-run school would have no authority above them and thus could not be shut down. As evidence they pointed to the school system of '''Moonshine''', which considered its students to be slaves, and to [[STW]], a private school system which had nonetheless functioned as an education monopoly for much of its existence and had relied on child labor (although with pay) to sustain itself.

The '''Play''' school system, however, did not force its students to work, or even to do schoolwork, and was a legally established government monopoly accountable to no outside authority. Supporters of the new plan claimed that the Play nation disproved all of their doubts. The opponents of the public school plan countered this argument by saying that the Players represented everything the Dreamers opposed, and that the Players in fact were the worst child abusers in the world, as they forced their children to find food for their parents with no salary at all.

==Impossible burdens==
In Dreamland, the middle class was the largest class, and therefore, in Dreamland's democratic elections, policies favoring the middle class tended to succeed. There was no welfare system, and many middle-class Dreamers believed that if they were to set up a welfare system for their poorest citizens, as some other nations had, Dreamland would become as poor as those other nations. Indeed, Dreamer economists had proven that having a state-supported welfare system correlated very well with a nation's overall poverty, though they could not prove causation. Their ancient rival across the sea, [[Oyster Empire|Kxesh]], had supported its lowest class with generous welfare benefits for thousands of years and had also been poorer than Dreamland for thousands of years.<ref>Note that welfare in Kxesh probably predates the Oyster takeover.</ref>

Thus the lowest class remained poor.

Some Dreamers wished that the lowest class would migrate to surrounding nations but there was no legal means of expelling a citizen, and the Dreamers realized that many emigrants would join the armies of Dreamland's enemies and could possibly lead an invasion against Dreamland in the future.

Because the lowest class made only about Ξ20 per day, and meals often cost more than this, these people could not afford their basic needs and had to steal food or turn to other crimes to make money. Many young women, including married women, worked as prostitutes, but because there were so many prostitutes, their earnings were meager and they were worse off than men who made a career from robbing people and stealing transported goods. (These people were called pirates in most languages, because this lifestyle was not confined to the sea.)

It was nearly impossible for a poor person to meet their needs for even a day in Dreamland without committing a crime. As above, they could not even legally use the bathroom without spending more than their entire income for a day, and strict hygiene rules prohibited them relieving themselves in nature as did the poorest inhabitants of all other nations. This meant that Dreamland's various police forces could arrest almost any poor person at any time and put them in prison. However, in general, the middle class preferred to have the lower class out on the streets, since they performed useful jobs for the rest of society, and although it was a common subject of debate, the majority of middle-class Dreamers felt that they would rather tolerate the crime than lose the services of their lower class.

===Lower-class occupations===
Some occupations held by the lowest class were themselves illegal, but most were simply very low-paying jobs in the main economy. The Dreamers acknowledged that no person could support themselves on one of these legal jobs, and had used various explanations for why the wages were so low.

====Illegal occupations====
Young women tended to work as prostitutes, and all other illegal work done by women was considered a part of their prostitution duties. Thus even a woman who worked as a maid for a private household and never had sex would still be considered a prostitute because her keepers could order her to perform sexual duties as well.

Young men tended to work as ''pirates'', which encompassed anyone who made a living from stealing other people's goods. Near the borders of Dreamland there were opportunities to steal mostly from merchants bringing things in, but poor people tended to live far away from the border, since the economy was poorer overall towards the west, and the western states could not force the pirates to move. Thus the poorest states had the highest rates of theft and looting.

==Matrix treaty of 4190==
By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of '''Memnumu''' once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny [[Matrix]] army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

==Slope treaty==

===General election of 4205===
The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in [[Memnumu]].<ref>It is possible that the descendants of the Hipsides, now adults, still practiced this lifestyle in some territory between Dreamland and Tāmta.</ref>

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

====Arrival of the Cupbearers====
Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of '''Cupbearer''' refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.<ref>This may or may not be the state of Senampattore. Where it is on the map is clear, but the borders may have changed.</ref>

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the [[Players]] in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:
#The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
#Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
#The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in [[Baeba Swamp]] as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
#The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves ''pavača'',<ref>This word is ''čava'' "long hair" spelled backwards inside the circumfix ''p-..-a'' "having (a)". This method of word formation was dying out in Play, but persisted in some groups who were influenced by Andanese, because even though Andanese itself did not use this, it was more convenient with pure CV words, as Andanese had, than with Play whose syllable structure was more diverse.</ref> just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

===Capture of Crystal slaves===
A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising '''Slope''' party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

==Postwar period==
After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

===General election of 4227===
Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The ''bopo'' philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the ''bopo'' supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The '''Cupbearers''' may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

===General election of 4238===
Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

===General election of 4254===
After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the [[Memnumu|Play army]] and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.
==Naval war==
In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the [[Players]], which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the [[Ghost Empire|Ghosts]], who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called '''Laba'''. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of [[Moonshine]], but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world.
But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the [[Players|Play]] population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

==Inversion of propaganda==
Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the [[Players]], but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the [[Matrix]] propaganda of a hundred years prior.

===Weather metaphors===
Though living right along the Equator, the people of Hipatal and Laba in general had the same variety of body types found elsewhere. Some outsiders believed that they were all dark-skinned people, but immigrants such as '''Sašuasa''' had been of the same Lenian body type as the stereotypical eastern Dreamers who had fallen into ruin.

==Naval war in the Play sea==
===General election of 4287===
As the Dreamer navy,<ref>this did not actually take twenty years, but there were no global elections in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty</ref>, '''Laba''', invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the '''Teenprop''' corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

''NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.''

===Antiwar movement in Dreamland===
===="The Real Dreamland"====
Just as Dreamland seemed likely to win its war, a group of pacifists declared themselves to be the only true Dreamers, and pledged allegiance to the '''Cupbearers''' without formally joining the Cupbearer party. They said that the earlier Dreamers' pessimism was correct, and that Dreamland should be a pacifist multinational empire trading economically with foreign nations but without military expansionist goals. They supported '''Moonshine''', and thus while committed to pacifism, assumed that they would soon be targets in the war, and perhaps could be such easy targets that they would distract the navy from their war against the Players. Thus these new pacifists felt they could help the Players whether they were successful in remaking Dreamland into an economic power, in which case the war would stall, or unsuccessful, in which case they would be slaughtered by the pirates but could hopefully still save the Players.

The pacifists' claim to be the only true Dreamers closely resembled the Players' contemporary claim that the Play navy was the only true Laba. They had made their declarations independently, however, as the Play diplomats were blocked from contacting the pacifists by the Ghosts over land and by the pirates at sea.

===General election of 4295===
The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became popular.

===General election of 4316===
After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.
===General election of 4321===
Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

===General election of 4327===
===General election of 4343===
Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

==Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)==
Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing ''bepolere'', which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The ''Pōbipōpu'' and ''Pōronopa'' distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

===Contacts with Moonshine===
The '''Habit''' party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the '''Hipsoft''' settlements to and including the '''Womb Justice''' settlements. The Habits were the sons and daughters of the Crystals who had been pushed into the underclass in Baeba Swamp when the Leapers took over. That is, they were a faction of Crystals who resisted the Leapers.

====Tribal identity====
The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

====Partition====
By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small '''Hipsoft''' migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the '''Womb Justice ''' party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name '''Dreamland''' was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

====Moonshine-Habit relations====
The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's '''Habit''' party (''Tăta'')<ref>Note that this is not a homonym of the state name '''Tàta''' because the tones are different, but that in languages such as Play, the two may have been merged.</ref> to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called '''Wagillàra''', the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

===Demographic shifts===
After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the [[Players]] had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

:''Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.''

===General election of 4351===
Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

===General election of 4390===
Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

===General election of 4402===
Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

===General election of 4412===
The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.
===General election of 4419===
Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

===General election of 4438===
Luxury goods came back into fashion.

====Tribal reform====
Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The '''Tipper''' population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the '''Hipatal''' immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

===General election of 4440===
Luxury goods fell out of fashion.
===General election of 4445===
Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

===General election of 4462===
Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.
===General election of 4468===
Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.
===General election of 4485===
Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.
===General election of 4492===
The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.
===General election of 4500===
Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.
===General election of 4511===
Little changed in this election.
===General election of 4529===
Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.
===General election of 4531===
Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.
===General election of 4538===
Luxury goods became popular.
===General election of 4540===
Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

===Humanitarian attempts at intervention===
The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier.<ref>But remember that this from a different timeline. The figure cannot be taken as an exact count.</ref> Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both [[Baeba Swamp]] and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

''Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.''

==Other developments==
*56 (4150)
*52 (4202)
*13 (4215)
*24 (4239)
*79 (4318)
*80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the [[Hipatal]] people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

=Dreamer-Doll relations=
:''See [[Dolls]].''
Note that there is no convenient way to represent the [[babakiam|Play]]-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with ''dream'' and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the [[Dolls|Bottom]] party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (''nuufa''), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Bottoms did not allow their members to even have protruding fingernails. The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: '''fubap''' describing something soft and thus flexible, and '''nuufa''' describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

===Scope===
It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the '''Hiboh''' Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

===Dedication to pacifism===
The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon [[ppot#upl|drafted a party platform]] denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling '''Hailstorm''' army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

=Dreamer-Play relations=
''Žayuvas'' got its name when the rebel '''Tink''' army invaded their ally, the [[Play party]], and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, [[Dreamland]], than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory ''Memnumu''.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling '''Police''' faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the [[Play party]]. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the [[alphaleap|Leapers]] had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the '''Magic Combs''') never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

===Scope of Žayuvas===
It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of '''Šasa Kaina''', located near and traditionally friendly towards [[Thaoa]], at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

===Fertility calculations===
On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

;Oct 10 2021
There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding '''Tata''', where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

===Apportionment of representatives===
Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

==Evolution from factions to parties==
The [[Play party|Play]] charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

==Party membership==
The '''Police''' party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

==Culturebound issues of the Play Empire==
:''See also [[Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues]]''.
True to its name, the [[Play party]] dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

===Children's issues===
====Education====
The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory [[Raspara]] army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

===Tribal conflicts (general) ===
:''This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.''
====Height and hair color====

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured [[Paba]]p tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were [[#feminism|taller than their men]], this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

====Background====
Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive [[Raspara]] party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious [[swamp Kids|Tink]] army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall [[Repilia]]n tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the '''Flower Bees''' and the '''Rusted Pearls'''. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

====Conflicting tribal definitions====
Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the [[Palli]]-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

=Diplomatic contacts between the empires=

=Later periods=
These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.
===Hiboh===
The '''Hiboh''' era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true '''Sleeperism'''.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the '''Cold Men''', until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

===RKE Wars===
The '''RKE''' movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used [[Matrix]]-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.

=Notes in boats=
==Notes==

Dolphin Riders

2025-06-20T00:24:40Z

Poswob Rare: /* Impossible burdens */

The '''MFZ''' Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the [[Cosmopolitan Age]]. The original Empire, ''Mayuvas'', was [[Dreamland]], which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the [[Gold party]], as the word for gold in [[babakiam|Play]] was ''mayu''. The other two empires, ''Fayuvas'' and ''Žayuvas'', were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, [[Baeba Swamp]], which at the time was run primarily by the '''Iron''' party, an offshoot of the much older [[Zenith]] party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel '''ū''', giving ''Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas'', but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like '''uv''' (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

==Background==

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with [[Baeba Swamp]] to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of [[Moonshine]] and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with '''Tata''', also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

==Structure of Parliament==
Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the [[ppot#DPR|Dolphin Riders]], who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient [[Gold party]]. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

==Recognition of new tribes==
Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the '''Tippers''' who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

==Language==
The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited [[Lenian languages#DPR|Dolphin Rider]] language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near [[Baeba Swamp]] came to speak [[Ogili_II|Ogili]], the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

==Growth of the Kapa corporation==
An umbrella corporation called '''Kapa''' (in full, ''Nobōbo Kapa'') arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The ''kapa'' part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like '''Teenprop'''. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like '''Teens for Tomorrow''', though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after [[STW]]; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing '''Bottom''' party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the '''Yukiese''' family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of [[Paba]]. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the '''Teenprop''' political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

==Development of new political parties==
===Two-party stage===
The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support '''feminism''', believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world. The Dolphin Riders realized that if feminism took hold even in Dreamland, there would be no more land in the world run by men; free men would only exist as nomadic minorities within female nations.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support '''sarabism''', the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

==Creation of new parties==
'''Gatotōl''' had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the '''Comb''' party (''Pōrupu Resini'') which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's<ref>A vague and tentative date</ref> the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the '''Hipsoft''' party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new '''Carriage''' party (''āliki'') was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new '''Pointer''' party (''Pēbobi Lisuelesi'') was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a ''pēbobi''.

The '''Permission''' party (''Lepusepu Lesinepu'') was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the '''Butterfly''' party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

====Minor parties====
The '''Frame''' party (''Pōrupu Uimeka'') also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term ''sepu'' (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet ''lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu'' is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

==Culturebound issues==
The [[Gold party]] did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the '''Wildfire''' party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the '''Treehouse''' army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the '''Tippers''' came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

===Hupodas===
There was a ''Hupodas'' ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be ''lepisese'' "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

===Family issues===
====Early years====
The founding '''Dolphin Riders''' planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.<ref>While this logic may seem counterintuitive from the point of view of Earth, it was well illustrated in feminist societies like Moonshine that women were eager to raise children because they would be able to remain at home, and not need to work, while their husbands provided the entire financial support for raising each child.</ref>

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

====Later years====
A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

===Ilhina===
This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.
===Sarabism===
Related to the carrying of weapons.

===Capitalism and communism===
These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

===Censorship and propaganda===
These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

===Feminism===
Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

===Pimuo bopi===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as '''pacifism''' but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive [[Matrix]] army.

''This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as '''bopo''' below.''

===Pasio===
A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

===Bepolere===
Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

===Bopo===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as '''pacifism'''; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

==Proclamation of Empire==
===Proclamation of Empire in 4108===
In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the [[Play party|Play]] parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population.

Yet, 1,300<ref>an exact figure</ref> Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, [[Baeba Swamp]] had become the center of world diplomacy.

===General election of 4111===
The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the '''Treehouse''' party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the '''Wildfire''' party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

==Conflicts over hygiene==

===Hygiene laws===
The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (This is separate from the Hupodas issue.) One reason for the strong attention to hygiene was that the Dolphin Riders were tolerant of nudism, an issue that Dreamers had often gone back and forth on in the past.

The Dreamer Parliament had the power to make laws that applied to the entire empire. Thus it became a crime in Dreamland for a teenager or adult to leave a mess in a public bathroom, or even in nature, without immediately cleaning it up. The Dreamers also had to prove that they were bathing everyday, washing their clothes, and keeping their belongings clean as well. But the Parliament did not have the power to enact a tax applying to the whole Empire; this power was reserved to the states.
====Soapmaking corporation====
Thus, the Dreamer Parliament was unable to subsidize the purchase of soap and other hygiene-related goods, and Dreamers had to rely on their monthly income to buy these products. This immediately led to the rise of a powerful soapmaking class, who founded a corporation, '''Nobōbo Pobo Mosesene''' (PBM), named after the founding Mosesene family. PBM's workers allied themselves with the factions of the Baywatch and Rider parties that favored strict hygiene laws, and pledged to cooperate with each other across state and party lines since they were united on a single issue.

PBM's prices were expensive. The government's bathroom police (''pusepo serakale'') signed a contract with PBM stating that they would ride along with PBM's soap distributors to ensure that citizens were buying the product and keeping their homes and belongings clean. Thus the PBM corporation had a strong ally in the government and assumed they would not be easily shut down.

====Use of currency exchanges====
Nearly two centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. By tying the value of the currency to food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and over time, nations came to use the Ξ tokens as a neutral currency so that they could more easily compare their economies without needing to factor in inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.

The Dreamers had no STW stores and had always been hostile to STW, just as STW had always been hostile to them and had periodically raided Dreamer territory in the past to procure goods to sell in their stores. Therefore the Dreamers did not like STW's Ξ meal token currency either. But they had conceded to use it when comparing their economy to other economies, as it showed that the cost of living in Dreamland was quite high compared to most other nations, and that their people were not living as comfortably as a measure of total economic output would make it seem.

Dreamland's people had an average annual income around '''Ξ70,000''', but much higher in the east, in '''Baywatch''' territory, where the banks and most major corporations were. In fact the average per capita income ranged from about Ξ200,000 in Baywatch territory to Ξ20,000 in the various states of the west.

====Prices of hygiene and associated services====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living. The bathroom guards were separate from the bathroom police, meaning that someone needing to use the bathroom would sometimes need to greet two people just to get in, pay for the experience, and then clean up any mess they had made. Meanwhile it was illegal to hide in nature instead of using the bathroom except when that area was on private property and the landowner took it upon themselves to clean the landscape; in such a case, they were in turn subject to police oversight.

The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early.

===General election of 4116===

===General election of 4125===

===General election of 4129===

==War against the Players==
In 4132, Dreamland's '''Baywatch''' and '''Dolphin Rider''' parties voted together for a war against the distant [[Players|Play]] empire, with the Baywatchers expected to shoulder most of the combat and therefore also reserve the most gains, both territorial and political, for themselves.

===General election of 4134===
===General election of 4140===
As the soldiers of the [[Players|Play]] army massacred Dreamers in the '''Baywatch''' theater of the war, and spread plagues beyond it, the Dreamers (all states) voted to disarm their civilian population to turn over their weapons to the Dreamer army, whom they hoped would keep the Players from spreading further west.

===General election of 4142===
As the [[Play party]] occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of '''Mipatatatatai''', the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

====Immigration====
The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: The sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

====Hipsofts====
Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. These were moved to a city near the middle of the Dolphin Riders' territory, far from Moonshine and also far from the Players. The Dolphin Riders hoped that these immigrants would align themselves with Dreamland or at least become apolitical.

The '''Hipsoft''' faction of the Dolphin Rider party appeared soon after the immigrants were settled. The Hipsofts lived in the area where the immigrants had moved to and opposed the resettlement program. The other Riders seemed to have little interest in the situation, saying that they had done a good deed by adopting refugees from a pacifist nation but also unwilling to spread the immigrants around the rest of Dreamland. At this time, the immigrants had no political party of their own, and the mainstream Riders hoped that the appearance of the Hipsofts would encourage the immigrants to become strongly supportive of the mainstream Riders.

==Reforms to hygiene laws==
The Dolphin Riders had come to power in 4108 with a permissive attitude towards nudism and a strict hygiene policy, requiring all Dreamers to bathe and be clean after using the bathroom. They were required to purchase soap and other hygiene supplies on their own. This was to prevent the spread of disease. The Dreamer parliament had the authority to require Dreamer citizens to purchase soap and other supplies, but not to enact a tax to pay for the hygiene supplies, or to subsidize them in any other way. Even though there was more than one soap company, the price of soap rose high as soapmakers knew the demand for their product would never cease.

====Claims of soapmakers' complicity====
But now, the Dreamers increasingly began to blame their hygiene problems on the [[Players]] to the east, whom they suspected were deliberately polluting the rivers which flowed into coastal areas of Dreamland. The new generation of Dreamers thus came to support laws requiring Dreamers to wear clothing and deemphasizing the use of soap. Soapmakers were invested into their craft now, however, and opposed the new changes as they knew it would decrease their standard of living. The reformists accused the soapmakers of forcing the Dreamer population into a humiliating position, where they spent much of their time and money cleaning up after the Players, knowing that the Players could just as easily pollute the environment even more and thus force the Dreamers to scrub and clean themselves twice as much, all to the joy of the soapmakers. This led to accusations that the soapmakers themselves were cooperating with the Players to spread filth throughout Dreamland.

==Rise of pessimism==
Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only [[Baeba Swamp]], pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the [[Players]], but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

:''Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.''
Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

===Dreamers envy Players===
The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than 800,000 enrolled Players, more than Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself '''Hipsoft''' emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

===Comparative census of 4162===
By 4162, the Dreamer birthrate had increased, while the Player birthrate had fallen, and they had lost territory to the '''Tinks'''. Now, Dreamland's population was about double the Play population of 639,000.

====Census statistics====

{| class="wikitable"
|+ CENSUS OF 4162
|-
! Statistic
! Play
! Dreamland
! COMMENTS
|-
| Population
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 639,000
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 1,243,000
| Play population excludes '''Tata'''
|-
| Land area
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"|
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"|
|
|-
| Per capita GDP
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| Ξ3,832
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| > Ξ50,000
|
|-
| Fertility rate
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 4.74
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 3.58
|
|-
| Median age
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 12.7
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| ~24
|
|}

Although the fertility rates were not greatly different, the actual birth rate was much higher in Play territory because their adult population was primarily female (having fought many recent wars) whereas Dreamland's population consisted mostly of the Dreamers who had not been exposed to any recent wars.

===Other developments===
====Worries about defeat====
Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

===Dissolutionism===
Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

==Defeatist art and propaganda==
The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the [[Players]], as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.
===Depictions of the sun===
Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season. This meant that the entire planet experienced its summer season at the same time, and that even near the Equator, summer was much hotter than winter.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

====The Sun is Too Big====
Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but often riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

====Suntan vs sunburn====
Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, '''Pūpepas''', was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

===Linguistic issues===
The Dreamers were also ashamed of their languages, particularly the eastern ones.

====Phonology====
The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. Though both Dreamers and Players had learned to speak languages such as [[khulls|Leaper]] in the past, it required greater physical effort on their part to pronounce sounds like /k/ than it did for the native Leaper speakers, and therefore both the Dreamers and the Players had spoken languages with a similar acoustic sound for thousands of years. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

====Script====
Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

====Grammar====
Play was a ferociously complex language, with a grammar resembling [[khulls|Leaper]] but famously more difficult. For this reason, the '''Crystals''' and other groups such as the Leapers had an easier time mastering the Play language than did the Dreamers. This embarrassed the Dreamers doubly because the common perception was that Play would be an easy language for the Dreamers to learn because of its simple sound inventory. The Dreamers' inability to competently learn to speak Play had become deadly early in the Play occupation of Tata, as Play military leaders massacred Dreamer teachers for not quickly learning the language.

===Hunger===
Although the Dreamers were not short of food, even after losing the war, they spent more of their time and money on acquiring food than did the Players, who simply built their settlements around food sources so that they would never go hungry.

===Unhealable wounds===
====Hard and soft====
Even when conceding that the Dreamers were physically strong, the artists drew the Players as having square body shapes, whereas the Dreamers were depicted as being made of soft curves.

====Depiction of weapons====
A common stereotype was that Dreamers were physically delicate, but better able to handle weapons than were small, stoutly built tribes such as the Players. Some artists said that once the Dreamers lost their weapons, the Players' weakness would turn into a strength, as their poor ability to handle weapons would mean that every kill would be bloody rather than quick and clean. Meanwhile, other artists depicted the Players as fashioning better weapons, weapons that they could hold and the Dreamers could not.

====Depiction of other sharp objects====
The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The [[Crystals]] had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the [[Players]] and with the [[Soap Bubbles]] living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

====Metaphorical use====
The Dolphin Rider term for an unhealable wound was ''nu silika o pō okuleli'', which could be shortened to ''popōkuleli'' "unhealable". They saw that their people were inflicted with many such wounds, both physically and metaphorically, as they could not protect themselves from the local animal and plant life, but also could not regain territories lost to them by invasions in recent wars such as their war against the Players. Where other nations rose and fell, the Dreamers only grew around the hard barriers outsiders built for them.

The Dreamer propagandists reminded their people that the Players were only the most recent example of an army which had invaded Dreamland and come to permanently reside there. Earlier, the feminist '''Womb Justice''' army, fleeing from their homeland, took refuge in Dreamland but immediately demanded that all Dreamers move out so they could build a society run by women. The Dreamers did not fight these women, fearing that their own people would be unwilling to take up arms against such a society, but within a generation the Dreamers had grown tired of the Wombs and no longer believed that they needed to remain in Dreamland. Yet they were unable to push the Womb army out of Dreamland, and they conceded that they would remain in Dreamland for the indefinite future.

===Positive counterpoints===
For nearly a thousand years, outside cultures had stereotyped the Dreamers as being hypersexual and eager to engage in deviant sexual practices that made their men soft. This stereotype had been repeated by so many different foreign powers that the Dreamers had come to accept that it was true, but they made no plans to change their lifestyles. Instead, the Dreamers said that they were motivated by love, and that most of their enemies were motivated by hate and incapable of love. Rather than consider themselves immoral, the Dreamers said it was cultures such as the [[Players]] who were immoral, for instead of loving each other and their enemies, they sought to start a new war every year and took joy in their enemies' suffering.

==Debates over economics==
The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. [[STW]] mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of [[AlphaLeap]] in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

====Issues involving trade====
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

''this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.''

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly [[STW]], openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

===Arguments for capitalism===
The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising '''Teenprop''' corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, and then paying taxes in their own nations so that both the company and the citizens could benefit from the company's presence.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the '''Teenprop''' corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as the '''Anchor Empire''' (where STW sold most of its goods), and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

====Wealth creation theory====
The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as [[Kxesh]] that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

===Rise of pacifism===
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of [[Paba]], which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

====Secret diplomacy====
As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of '''capitalism''', the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

==Diplomatic outreach to Players==
In the mid-4160s, Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into [[Memnumu]] to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

The [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] also feared the Players and had suffered from their plagues. But when the Dreamers heard that the Players had broken up into four political parties, they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with at least one of them, and form an alliance between Dreamland and the most pro-Dreamer political party in the Play empire.

Because their main contact with the Players was through '''Tata''', the Dreamers understood little of the Players' internal struggles in Memnumu. The Dreamers knew that the original Play faction, the Milk Bottles, had been extremist, and that they had given way to the Pillows after a series of disasters mostly involving young children. They had heard of the rise of the Purses, but most Dreamers did not know that they were racists; they only knew that the Purses' positions on issues in general were more moderate than those of the Pillows, who were in turn more moderate than the Bottles. Therefore, the Dreamers believed that the Play nation as a whole was on a steady path towards more moderate politics, and could therefore become an ally of the Dreamers if they were able to continue along that path. The Dreamers were dismayed when they later learned that the Pillows had recovered their parliamentary majority, but figured that so long as the Purses were also represented in the Play parliament, the Dreamers still had an ally among the Players. (Most Dreamers still did not know, even years on, that the Purses considered Dreamers racially inferior, because the Purses had always focused on internal divisions among the Players in Memnumu.)

===Dreamers meet with Players===
The Dreamers had heard about the Players' new balance system, in which four parties would compete for power in the Parliament, and all four would be allowed to use game-like voting strategies, for example allowing people to vote outside their home districts, figuring that the resulting fierce competition would lead to better governance. They had been shown some anti-Dreamer literature known to have been written by the '''Milk Bottle''' faction of the Play party. With this, and other information they had learned about early happenings in the Play nation, Dreamland labeled the Milk Bottles as an extremist Play faction, and assumed that the other Play factions would thus be more friendly to Dreamland.

The Dreamers sent a team of tall, handsome male diplomats to meet with the female representatives of each of the four main Play parties, comparing and contrasting the Dolphin Riders' party platform with those of the women. The Players were feminists, but unlike the Moonshines, they respected foreign cultural norms, and therefore were accustomed to meeting with male diplomats. The Dreamers told the men to talk strictly about politics, but hoped that they could subliminally woo the women with their charms and return to Dreamland having signed a formal treaty of alliance with at least one, and perhaps more, of the new Play parties.

Four Dreamer men greeted the four Player women in the Play capital city of '''Pūpepas'''.
====Results of the meeting====
At the meeting, the Dreamer men realized that the Milk Bottles they had been calling Play extremists were in fact the most moderate of all the Play philosophies, and that the other three factions were even more hostile than that. Put another way, the Dreamers had assumed that the spectrum of Play political opinions ran the gamut from the fierce nationalism of the Milk Bottles to a cosmopolitan faction of unknown identity with whom they could form an alliance. But rather than ranging from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the Dreamers found out that the Players spanned from nationalism to racism.

Furthermore, even the racist Play faction, the '''Purses''', were nationalists, saying that the hated Eggs were still their allies in any conflict that involved a foreign power. Thus, even though the Purses had openly supported arresting the Eggs, they recognized the Eggs as fellow Players. Therefore none of the Play factions was willing to support Dreamland either militarily or economically.

The Dreamers were frustrated even by the name "balance system", confident that the Players had borrowed the idea of balance from the politics of Dreamland.

====Explanations to common people====
Dreamer diplomats had difficulty explaining to their own people why they had classified all four of Memnumu's Play parties as anti-Dreamer extremists, when the Dreamers had been expecting to find allies in the Play nation. Many Dreamers simply did not believe the diplomats' claims, arguing that at least the Eggs must be friendly towards Dreamland since they had been opposed by all of the other Play factions and had been attacked with no apparent provocation in a recent war led by the Firestones. But the Dreamers had diplomatic contacts with the wider Crystal party, who refused to accept any connection between the Dreamers and the Eggs, and still claimed that the reason the Crystals had abandoned the Eggs was because the required rescue mission would have been impossible.

====Dreamers embrace Tata====
When the Dreamers obtained a clearer understanding of the Play situation, they began to oppose the often talked about integration of Tata into a single unified Play nation, which had been proposed in 4151 but delayed over and over again for various reasons. The Dreamers believed that Tata's ruling '''Club''' party, though formally identical to the Pillows, was the only true moderate Play party, since they had legalized the Dreamer party in their own territory and did not take part in radical Play practices such as child labor and home invasions, even though they had never formally written these out of their party platform. The Dreamers considered all four of the Play parties in Memnumu's Milk Parliament to be extremists. They stated that the Purse ideology was moderate, but that because they were tribalists, the Dreamers could not ally with them after all, and therefore they were off the map of political discourse in Dreamland. The other three factions were also extremists, and most Dreamers considered them even worse than the Purses, since they all opposed Dreamland as well.

====Worries about population growth====
To the Dreamers, the greatest threat posed by the Players was their extremely high birthrate, which had for their first twenty years in power been so high that children under age thirteen comprised 3/4 of the Play population, and the population had doubled in this twenty-year period despite the many plagues, famines, and wars that the Players had endured and created. Meanwhile, though the Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had been youth-based, and had come to power with a high birthrate as well, theirs had never been nearly as high as the Players', and had been in decline for several generations, such that they had come to rely on '''Gold''' party arguments that the political power of a nation should not be related to the size of its population. By now, the Players had already outgrown the Dreamers despite having a much smaller land area, and it seemed inevitable to the Dreamers that the Players would grow even more. Since the Players had already won one major war against Dreamland, the Dreamers worried that their rapidly growing population would in the future lead them to win another.

The Players' birthrate had declined sharply around 4150 when they broke up into factions, however, and the Dreamers knew of this because of diplomatic contacts through Tata. The Dreamers stopped worrying so much about the Players' population expansion and began to focus on their problems at home. But then, when they heard that the Players were reviving the Milk Bottle party, they worried that Play women would once again have more children than they could care for, and that the children would grow up and start wars against Dreamland out of pure hunger, ignoring all common sense.

==Hipsoft war of 4183==
The immigrant '''Tipper''' party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent '''Hipsoft''' party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves '''Tippers''', disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant '''Hipsoft''' party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles
that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

===Moonshine's reaction===
Moonshine endorsed the Tippers' massacres, saying that the men were doing the right thing. Moonshine offered citizenship to all female Tippers, but stated that Tipper men would never be allowed into Moonshine territory, even though they had done a great favor for the Moonshines by killing many Dreamers. This was because Moonshine culture considered men's lives expendable, and that the best thing that men could do for Moonshine would be to stay at war and wear down the enemies of Moonshine without expecting any sort of reward other than the right to abuse the conquered people. Therefore Moonshine stated that if Tipper men wanted to marry women, they should take their wives from among the Dreamer population.

===Contact with the Matrix===
In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful [[Matrix]] army based in the nearby nation of '''Tata'''. Tata was on the north coast and was one of a chain of nations that had long been a buffer area between Dreamland and Moonshine, but had recently grown into a regional power in its own right.

The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland to focus their efforts on the city of [[Baeba Swamp]].

NOTE: The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.<ref>This is from a dream in which Russia did likewise.</ref>

==Newer economic developments==
Losing two wars had led to economic decline, and the increasing isolation of Dreamland drove up the cost of living. Furthermore, the rising cost of living made it difficult for the poorest Dreamers to afford food, and although the Dreamer states solved this problem with welfare payments, some of the western states were now encouraging people to desert their towns in order to live along the coast, much as the [[Players]] did, and obtain their food from the sea.

===Currency conversion===
Nearly three centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had opened stores in the [[Thunder Empire]], whose people owned Dreamer slaves and had little interest in friendly contacts with Dreamland. STW went further, declaring that slavery was not punishment enough, and declared war on [[Dreamland]] on its first official day of business. The result of this, over time, was that any economic growth for STW led to decline for Dreamland, and vice versa.

Dreamland had won its war with STW, even though STW was backed by the traditional military of the Thunder Empire, and nearly drove the corporation out of business despite the great physical distance between Dreamland and the primary STW stores. But in 4108, Dreamland lost control of its newly won territory, and STW returned to business holding a larger grudge against Dreamland than ever before. Dreamland continued to lose wars and cede economic supremacy for the next decades, and although STW was not a major driving force in this, STW reaped some benefit from it because their leaders were better able to take advantage of changing economic tides than were the politicians of the nations they did business with.
====The Ξ4 meal promise====
STW had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. The price of a meal was fixed at Ξ4, and STW's leaders promised that the price would never rise, regardless of what happened to the economies around them, including STW's non-restaurant stores, which did not accept the meal tokens. By tying the currency only to the price of food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and thus came to be used in international comparisons even by countries who had no interest in attracting business from STW.

The Dreamers disliked the so-called universal currency, since STW did not do business in Dreamland, and had always been hostile to Dreamland. The Dreamers stated the Ξ4 meal promise was humiliating because no Dreamers could expect to receive a meal for that price at any restaurant within Dreamland, and that STW had deliberately created an unfair setup that was only sustainable because they owned slaves and their restaurants served foods that had been obtained through slave labor and with minimal transportation and preparation costs.

====Economic restructuring====
Nonetheless, in comparing their economy to those of other nations, the Dreamers were forced to acknowledge STW's meal token currency rather than using their own. By this time, the an STW-like corporation had arisen in Dreamland, intent on solving the problems of Dreamland's economic isolation by producing goods locally and thus relieving the Dreamers' dependence on trade.

The annual per capita income of Dreamland as a whole had declined to about '''Ξ40,000''' by this time, even as the price of a meal in a typical restaurant had remained around Ξ80. The Dreamers were not bankrupted by their food prices because most Dreamers acquired some of their food themselves, cooking it at home during their free time or eating it raw if possible. Thus restaurants catered to travelers and to the wealthiest classes. On top of this, Dreamland's government encouraged its states to distribute welfare tickets to Dreamer families so that they could afford food, particularly in those areas where the natural supply of food was irregular. But Dreamland was a confederation, and could not tax its people directly, and therefore the disbursement of welfare was up to the states.

====Unskilled labor wages====
Dreamland practiced unregulated capitalism supported by welfare payments. There was no minimum wage, so it was common for young and unskilled laborers to receive just Ξ20 or Ξ25 for a day's work. Those who could not find stable employment would often work for even lower wages. Meanwhile, workers in some trades were paid only by selling things they produced and could go for months at a time without income. Therefore, Dreamland's lower class was materially poor even compared to the lower classes of poorer nations, but malnutrition was rare and usually of a sort that money would not have prevented.

===Distribution of necessities===
The charter of the ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party stated that the government must provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care for all citizens, even those Dreamers who chose to live in outlying areas where transportation costs were significant. Since transportation of food and essential goods was the responsibility of the government, the costs were socialized, and Dreamland's taxes were very high. However, the tax policies were the responsibilities of the states, and the Dolphin Riders' parliament could not enact a tax applying to a specific geographic area to force that area to improve its citizens' standard of living.

====Clothing====
Clothing was not defined as a basic human need in the Dolphin Rider platform, and on this they agreed with most of the minor Dreamer parties as well. Therefore, humans who needed protective clothes to work had to buy them on their own, disposable diapers were expensive, and people huddled together in blankets during Dreamland's rare cold winter nights.

The Dreamers and the Players had both often supported nudism, and largely for the same reasons, but opposition to nudism took different perspectives in the two empires. For the Players, opposition to nudism was entirely about hygiene, as the Players' child population had suffered from several plagues and spread these plagues outside their nation. However the Players were so tightly compacted into seaside habitats that they had early on exhausted their supply of plant fibers to weave new diapers, and the Play Parliament shut down the textile industry entirely so they could focus on fishing the sea. By contrast, the Dreamers' much lower fertility rate had kept them free of such problems. Rather, the Dreamers who supported wearing clothes were more concerned with secondary issues: since Dreamers often carried money with them, it was far more convenient for them to wear clothes to help carry the coins, and there were many trades that were much easier to perform while wearing protective clothes. The Dreamers mostly did wear clothes when it was convenient, and indeed their clothing production costs were lower than those in some poorer nations, but all clothes were distributed by private corporations who were free to charge any price they wished, even in areas where they had achieved a monopoly. Thus, many Dreamers spent much of their disposable income on clothing and could not afford to replace clothes that were worn out from daily use.

====Homes and furniture====
Likewise, Dreamland's climate was hot and sunny, and in some areas, people had traditionally lived on the beach, exposed to the elements, and not in any home at all. This extreme lifestyle was associated with the pre-Dreamer aboriginal population, numbering only a few thousand by this time, who lived in very specific locations such that the construction of a building to live in would make little difference. Nonetheless, most Dreamer homes were very simple, and the government promise as understood by the people was that Dreamers would have the right to a place to seek shelter from the rain, which might or might not be their everyday home.

===Typical prices===
The Dreamers embraced capitalism and therefore did not set standard prices on goods. Their government's role in providing for their people was limited to the welfare benefits described above, to medical care, and to providing shelter from nature. The average per capita GDP was around '''Ξ50,000'''. Note that this includes the entire population, not just those in work; the average salary of a worker was therefore significantly higher.

====Hygiene====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean. The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early. A full-body coat made from animal hides could cost around '''Ξ375'''.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living.

====Non-essential foods====
Palm wine and fruit juice averaged about the same price, about '''Ξ120''' per jug.

====Intangibles and services====
Because of the calm weather, travelers often slept outside, exposed to the elements. There was thus relatively little demands for inns, and most tended to be found in cities. A night's sleep in a room with many other travelers could cost around '''Ξ80''', and accomodations with more privacy were rare.

====Illegal transactions====
Slaves could be bought for around '''Ξ100,000''' to '''Ξ1 million''', a vastly higher price than the Ξ10,000 — Ξ50,000 that paid for their abduction and transportation from weakened nations such as Thaoa. The [[Players]] had contemplated selling people from their lower classes to foreign nations for even lower prices to relieve their population stress and also bring money into their economy, but such people were often profitable for the Players since they were little more than slaves already. Since slavery was illegal in Dreamland, such people could not be held openly, and therefore were typically prostitutes who remained in one place and were bound to a master. Male slaves nonetheless were sometimes used to row ships, where they were bound into place and released only when under the close watch of an armed guard.

===Private schools===
Dreamland's education system was privatized, and teachers charged families to enroll their pupils. This was unlike the [[Players|Play]] system, where education was free, and unlike [[STW]], which actually ''paid'' students to attend, albeit in a currency that could only be redeemed at STW.

There was no law requiring Dreamer adults to care for their aging parents, either financially or materially, since the elderly were covered under the same programs that covered disabled and sick people. (This is a relic of the '''Plume''' system that predated the Dolphin Riders.) Therefore parents had no guarantee that their children would portion off their future income to the parents, and no financial incentive to seek the best education for their children, nor to have large numbers of children, or even to have children at all.

Many Dreamer women remained at or near their homes during the daytime, and so teaching their children was simply part of their daily routine, and school systems tended to exist only in large cities. Nonetheless, tuition was affordable, averaging around '''Ξ4,000''' per student per year, much less than the average income of even the lowest class of Dreamers. This tuition covered the teachers' salaries only, and did not pay for the students' meals or their belongings, which often cost more than the tuition.

Dreamland's private schools worked both in competition and in cooperation with each other, as when two schools opened in the same city, typically each school would specialize in different subjects of study.

====Proposal for a public school system====
Nonetheless, the lack of free public education was a disincentive for couples planning to have children, and many Dreamer politicians wanted to start a tax-supported public school system based on a foreign model. But because they could not institute a tax on the entire Dreamer empire, each state would need to do this individually.

Opponents of this plan argued that a public school system would immediately turn into an unrestrained child labor operation, as the state-run school would have no authority above them and thus could not be shut down. As evidence they pointed to the school system of '''Moonshine''', which considered its students to be slaves, and to [[STW]], a private school system which had nonetheless functioned as an education monopoly for much of its existence and had relied on child labor (although with pay) to sustain itself.

The '''Play''' school system, however, did not force its students to work, or even to do schoolwork, and was a legally established government monopoly accountable to no outside authority. Supporters of the new plan claimed that the Play nation disproved all of their doubts. The opponents of the public school plan countered this argument by saying that the Players represented everything the Dreamers opposed, and that the Players in fact were the worst child abusers in the world, as they forced their children to find food for their parents with no salary at all.

==Impossible burdens==
In Dreamland, the middle class was the largest class, and therefore, in Dreamland's democratic elections, policies favoring the middle class tended to succeed. There was no welfare system, and many middle-class Dreamers believed that if they were to set up a welfare system for their poorest citizens, as some other nations had, Dreamland would become as poor as those other nations. Indeed, Dreamer economists had proven that having a state-supported welfare system correlated very well with a nation's overall poverty, though they could not prove causation. Their ancient rival across the sea, [[Oyster Empire|Kxesh]], had supported its lowest class with generous welfare benefits for thousands of years and had also been poorer than Dreamland for thousands of years.<ref>Note that welfare in Kxesh probably predates the Oyster takeover.</ref>

Thus the lowest class remained poor.

Some Dreamers wished that the lowest class would migrate to surrounding nations but there was no legal means of expelling a citizen, and the Dreamers realized that many emigrants would join the armies of Dreamland's enemies and could possibly lead an invasion against Dreamland in the future.

Because the lowest class made only about Ξ20 per day, and meals often cost more than this, these people could not afford their basic needs and had to steal food or turn to other crimes to make money. Many young women, including married women, worked as prostitutes, but because there were so many prostitutes, their earnings were meager and they were worse off than men who made a career from robbing people and stealing transported goods. (These people were called pirates in most languages, because this lifestyle was not confined to the sea.)

It was nearly impossible for a poor person to meet their needs for even a day in Dreamland without committing a crime. As above, they could not even legally use the bathroom without spending more than their entire income for a day, and strict hygiene rules prohibited them relieving themselves in nature as did the poorest inhabitants of all other nations. This meant that Dreamland's various police forces could arrest almost any poor person at any time and put them in prison. However, in general, the middle class preferred to have the lower class out on the streets, since they performed useful jobs for the rest of society, and although it was a common subject of debate, the majority of middle-class Dreamers felt that they would rather tolerate the crime than lose the services of their lower class.

==Matrix treaty of 4190==
By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of '''Memnumu''' once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny [[Matrix]] army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

==Slope treaty==

===General election of 4205===
The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in [[Memnumu]].<ref>It is possible that the descendants of the Hipsides, now adults, still practiced this lifestyle in some territory between Dreamland and Tāmta.</ref>

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

====Arrival of the Cupbearers====
Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of '''Cupbearer''' refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.<ref>This may or may not be the state of Senampattore. Where it is on the map is clear, but the borders may have changed.</ref>

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the [[Players]] in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:
#The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
#Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
#The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in [[Baeba Swamp]] as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
#The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves ''pavača'',<ref>This word is ''čava'' "long hair" spelled backwards inside the circumfix ''p-..-a'' "having (a)". This method of word formation was dying out in Play, but persisted in some groups who were influenced by Andanese, because even though Andanese itself did not use this, it was more convenient with pure CV words, as Andanese had, than with Play whose syllable structure was more diverse.</ref> just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

===Capture of Crystal slaves===
A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising '''Slope''' party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

==Postwar period==
After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

===General election of 4227===
Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The ''bopo'' philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the ''bopo'' supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The '''Cupbearers''' may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

===General election of 4238===
Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

===General election of 4254===
After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the [[Memnumu|Play army]] and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.
==Naval war==
In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the [[Players]], which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the [[Ghost Empire|Ghosts]], who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called '''Laba'''. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of [[Moonshine]], but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world.
But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the [[Players|Play]] population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

==Inversion of propaganda==
Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the [[Players]], but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the [[Matrix]] propaganda of a hundred years prior.

===Weather metaphors===
Though living right along the Equator, the people of Hipatal and Laba in general had the same variety of body types found elsewhere. Some outsiders believed that they were all dark-skinned people, but immigrants such as '''Sašuasa''' had been of the same Lenian body type as the stereotypical eastern Dreamers who had fallen into ruin.

==Naval war in the Play sea==
===General election of 4287===
As the Dreamer navy,<ref>this did not actually take twenty years, but there were no global elections in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty</ref>, '''Laba''', invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the '''Teenprop''' corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

''NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.''

===Antiwar movement in Dreamland===
===="The Real Dreamland"====
Just as Dreamland seemed likely to win its war, a group of pacifists declared themselves to be the only true Dreamers, and pledged allegiance to the '''Cupbearers''' without formally joining the Cupbearer party. They said that the earlier Dreamers' pessimism was correct, and that Dreamland should be a pacifist multinational empire trading economically with foreign nations but without military expansionist goals. They supported '''Moonshine''', and thus while committed to pacifism, assumed that they would soon be targets in the war, and perhaps could be such easy targets that they would distract the navy from their war against the Players. Thus these new pacifists felt they could help the Players whether they were successful in remaking Dreamland into an economic power, in which case the war would stall, or unsuccessful, in which case they would be slaughtered by the pirates but could hopefully still save the Players.

The pacifists' claim to be the only true Dreamers closely resembled the Players' contemporary claim that the Play navy was the only true Laba. They had made their declarations independently, however, as the Play diplomats were blocked from contacting the pacifists by the Ghosts over land and by the pirates at sea.

===General election of 4295===
The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became popular.

===General election of 4316===
After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.
===General election of 4321===
Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

===General election of 4327===
===General election of 4343===
Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

==Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)==
Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing ''bepolere'', which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The ''Pōbipōpu'' and ''Pōronopa'' distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

===Contacts with Moonshine===
The '''Habit''' party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the '''Hipsoft''' settlements to and including the '''Womb Justice''' settlements. The Habits were the sons and daughters of the Crystals who had been pushed into the underclass in Baeba Swamp when the Leapers took over. That is, they were a faction of Crystals who resisted the Leapers.

====Tribal identity====
The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

====Partition====
By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small '''Hipsoft''' migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the '''Womb Justice ''' party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name '''Dreamland''' was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

====Moonshine-Habit relations====
The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's '''Habit''' party (''Tăta'')<ref>Note that this is not a homonym of the state name '''Tàta''' because the tones are different, but that in languages such as Play, the two may have been merged.</ref> to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called '''Wagillàra''', the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

===Demographic shifts===
After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the [[Players]] had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

:''Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.''

===General election of 4351===
Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

===General election of 4390===
Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

===General election of 4402===
Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

===General election of 4412===
The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.
===General election of 4419===
Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

===General election of 4438===
Luxury goods came back into fashion.

====Tribal reform====
Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The '''Tipper''' population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the '''Hipatal''' immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

===General election of 4440===
Luxury goods fell out of fashion.
===General election of 4445===
Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

===General election of 4462===
Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.
===General election of 4468===
Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.
===General election of 4485===
Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.
===General election of 4492===
The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.
===General election of 4500===
Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.
===General election of 4511===
Little changed in this election.
===General election of 4529===
Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.
===General election of 4531===
Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.
===General election of 4538===
Luxury goods became popular.
===General election of 4540===
Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

===Humanitarian attempts at intervention===
The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier.<ref>But remember that this from a different timeline. The figure cannot be taken as an exact count.</ref> Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both [[Baeba Swamp]] and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

''Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.''

==Other developments==
*56 (4150)
*52 (4202)
*13 (4215)
*24 (4239)
*79 (4318)
*80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the [[Hipatal]] people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

=Dreamer-Doll relations=
:''See [[Dolls]].''
Note that there is no convenient way to represent the [[babakiam|Play]]-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with ''dream'' and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the [[Dolls|Bottom]] party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (''nuufa''), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Bottoms did not allow their members to even have protruding fingernails. The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: '''fubap''' describing something soft and thus flexible, and '''nuufa''' describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

===Scope===
It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the '''Hiboh''' Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

===Dedication to pacifism===
The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon [[ppot#upl|drafted a party platform]] denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling '''Hailstorm''' army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

=Dreamer-Play relations=
''Žayuvas'' got its name when the rebel '''Tink''' army invaded their ally, the [[Play party]], and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, [[Dreamland]], than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory ''Memnumu''.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling '''Police''' faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the [[Play party]]. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the [[alphaleap|Leapers]] had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the '''Magic Combs''') never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

===Scope of Žayuvas===
It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of '''Šasa Kaina''', located near and traditionally friendly towards [[Thaoa]], at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

===Fertility calculations===
On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

;Oct 10 2021
There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding '''Tata''', where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

===Apportionment of representatives===
Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

==Evolution from factions to parties==
The [[Play party|Play]] charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

==Party membership==
The '''Police''' party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

==Culturebound issues of the Play Empire==
:''See also [[Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues]]''.
True to its name, the [[Play party]] dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

===Children's issues===
====Education====
The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory [[Raspara]] army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

===Tribal conflicts (general) ===
:''This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.''
====Height and hair color====

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured [[Paba]]p tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were [[#feminism|taller than their men]], this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

====Background====
Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive [[Raspara]] party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious [[swamp Kids|Tink]] army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall [[Repilia]]n tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the '''Flower Bees''' and the '''Rusted Pearls'''. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

====Conflicting tribal definitions====
Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the [[Palli]]-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

=Diplomatic contacts between the empires=

=Later periods=
These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.
===Hiboh===
The '''Hiboh''' era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true '''Sleeperism'''.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the '''Cold Men''', until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

===RKE Wars===
The '''RKE''' movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used [[Matrix]]-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.

=Notes in boats=
==Notes==

Dolphin Riders

2025-06-20T00:23:41Z

Poswob Rare: /* Impossible burdens */

The '''MFZ''' Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the [[Cosmopolitan Age]]. The original Empire, ''Mayuvas'', was [[Dreamland]], which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the [[Gold party]], as the word for gold in [[babakiam|Play]] was ''mayu''. The other two empires, ''Fayuvas'' and ''Žayuvas'', were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, [[Baeba Swamp]], which at the time was run primarily by the '''Iron''' party, an offshoot of the much older [[Zenith]] party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel '''ū''', giving ''Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas'', but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like '''uv''' (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

==Background==

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with [[Baeba Swamp]] to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of [[Moonshine]] and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with '''Tata''', also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

==Structure of Parliament==
Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the [[ppot#DPR|Dolphin Riders]], who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient [[Gold party]]. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

==Recognition of new tribes==
Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the '''Tippers''' who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

==Language==
The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited [[Lenian languages#DPR|Dolphin Rider]] language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near [[Baeba Swamp]] came to speak [[Ogili_II|Ogili]], the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

==Growth of the Kapa corporation==
An umbrella corporation called '''Kapa''' (in full, ''Nobōbo Kapa'') arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The ''kapa'' part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like '''Teenprop'''. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like '''Teens for Tomorrow''', though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after [[STW]]; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing '''Bottom''' party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the '''Yukiese''' family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of [[Paba]]. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the '''Teenprop''' political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

==Development of new political parties==
===Two-party stage===
The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support '''feminism''', believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world. The Dolphin Riders realized that if feminism took hold even in Dreamland, there would be no more land in the world run by men; free men would only exist as nomadic minorities within female nations.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support '''sarabism''', the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

==Creation of new parties==
'''Gatotōl''' had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the '''Comb''' party (''Pōrupu Resini'') which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's<ref>A vague and tentative date</ref> the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the '''Hipsoft''' party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new '''Carriage''' party (''āliki'') was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new '''Pointer''' party (''Pēbobi Lisuelesi'') was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a ''pēbobi''.

The '''Permission''' party (''Lepusepu Lesinepu'') was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the '''Butterfly''' party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

====Minor parties====
The '''Frame''' party (''Pōrupu Uimeka'') also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term ''sepu'' (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet ''lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu'' is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

==Culturebound issues==
The [[Gold party]] did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the '''Wildfire''' party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the '''Treehouse''' army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the '''Tippers''' came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

===Hupodas===
There was a ''Hupodas'' ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be ''lepisese'' "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

===Family issues===
====Early years====
The founding '''Dolphin Riders''' planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.<ref>While this logic may seem counterintuitive from the point of view of Earth, it was well illustrated in feminist societies like Moonshine that women were eager to raise children because they would be able to remain at home, and not need to work, while their husbands provided the entire financial support for raising each child.</ref>

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

====Later years====
A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

===Ilhina===
This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.
===Sarabism===
Related to the carrying of weapons.

===Capitalism and communism===
These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

===Censorship and propaganda===
These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

===Feminism===
Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

===Pimuo bopi===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as '''pacifism''' but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive [[Matrix]] army.

''This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as '''bopo''' below.''

===Pasio===
A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

===Bepolere===
Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

===Bopo===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as '''pacifism'''; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

==Proclamation of Empire==
===Proclamation of Empire in 4108===
In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the [[Play party|Play]] parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population.

Yet, 1,300<ref>an exact figure</ref> Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, [[Baeba Swamp]] had become the center of world diplomacy.

===General election of 4111===
The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the '''Treehouse''' party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the '''Wildfire''' party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

==Conflicts over hygiene==

===Hygiene laws===
The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (This is separate from the Hupodas issue.) One reason for the strong attention to hygiene was that the Dolphin Riders were tolerant of nudism, an issue that Dreamers had often gone back and forth on in the past.

The Dreamer Parliament had the power to make laws that applied to the entire empire. Thus it became a crime in Dreamland for a teenager or adult to leave a mess in a public bathroom, or even in nature, without immediately cleaning it up. The Dreamers also had to prove that they were bathing everyday, washing their clothes, and keeping their belongings clean as well. But the Parliament did not have the power to enact a tax applying to the whole Empire; this power was reserved to the states.
====Soapmaking corporation====
Thus, the Dreamer Parliament was unable to subsidize the purchase of soap and other hygiene-related goods, and Dreamers had to rely on their monthly income to buy these products. This immediately led to the rise of a powerful soapmaking class, who founded a corporation, '''Nobōbo Pobo Mosesene''' (PBM), named after the founding Mosesene family. PBM's workers allied themselves with the factions of the Baywatch and Rider parties that favored strict hygiene laws, and pledged to cooperate with each other across state and party lines since they were united on a single issue.

PBM's prices were expensive. The government's bathroom police (''pusepo serakale'') signed a contract with PBM stating that they would ride along with PBM's soap distributors to ensure that citizens were buying the product and keeping their homes and belongings clean. Thus the PBM corporation had a strong ally in the government and assumed they would not be easily shut down.

====Use of currency exchanges====
Nearly two centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. By tying the value of the currency to food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and over time, nations came to use the Ξ tokens as a neutral currency so that they could more easily compare their economies without needing to factor in inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.

The Dreamers had no STW stores and had always been hostile to STW, just as STW had always been hostile to them and had periodically raided Dreamer territory in the past to procure goods to sell in their stores. Therefore the Dreamers did not like STW's Ξ meal token currency either. But they had conceded to use it when comparing their economy to other economies, as it showed that the cost of living in Dreamland was quite high compared to most other nations, and that their people were not living as comfortably as a measure of total economic output would make it seem.

Dreamland's people had an average annual income around '''Ξ70,000''', but much higher in the east, in '''Baywatch''' territory, where the banks and most major corporations were. In fact the average per capita income ranged from about Ξ200,000 in Baywatch territory to Ξ20,000 in the various states of the west.

====Prices of hygiene and associated services====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living. The bathroom guards were separate from the bathroom police, meaning that someone needing to use the bathroom would sometimes need to greet two people just to get in, pay for the experience, and then clean up any mess they had made. Meanwhile it was illegal to hide in nature instead of using the bathroom except when that area was on private property and the landowner took it upon themselves to clean the landscape; in such a case, they were in turn subject to police oversight.

The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early.

===General election of 4116===

===General election of 4125===

===General election of 4129===

==War against the Players==
In 4132, Dreamland's '''Baywatch''' and '''Dolphin Rider''' parties voted together for a war against the distant [[Players|Play]] empire, with the Baywatchers expected to shoulder most of the combat and therefore also reserve the most gains, both territorial and political, for themselves.

===General election of 4134===
===General election of 4140===
As the soldiers of the [[Players|Play]] army massacred Dreamers in the '''Baywatch''' theater of the war, and spread plagues beyond it, the Dreamers (all states) voted to disarm their civilian population to turn over their weapons to the Dreamer army, whom they hoped would keep the Players from spreading further west.

===General election of 4142===
As the [[Play party]] occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of '''Mipatatatatai''', the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

====Immigration====
The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: The sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

====Hipsofts====
Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. These were moved to a city near the middle of the Dolphin Riders' territory, far from Moonshine and also far from the Players. The Dolphin Riders hoped that these immigrants would align themselves with Dreamland or at least become apolitical.

The '''Hipsoft''' faction of the Dolphin Rider party appeared soon after the immigrants were settled. The Hipsofts lived in the area where the immigrants had moved to and opposed the resettlement program. The other Riders seemed to have little interest in the situation, saying that they had done a good deed by adopting refugees from a pacifist nation but also unwilling to spread the immigrants around the rest of Dreamland. At this time, the immigrants had no political party of their own, and the mainstream Riders hoped that the appearance of the Hipsofts would encourage the immigrants to become strongly supportive of the mainstream Riders.

==Reforms to hygiene laws==
The Dolphin Riders had come to power in 4108 with a permissive attitude towards nudism and a strict hygiene policy, requiring all Dreamers to bathe and be clean after using the bathroom. They were required to purchase soap and other hygiene supplies on their own. This was to prevent the spread of disease. The Dreamer parliament had the authority to require Dreamer citizens to purchase soap and other supplies, but not to enact a tax to pay for the hygiene supplies, or to subsidize them in any other way. Even though there was more than one soap company, the price of soap rose high as soapmakers knew the demand for their product would never cease.

====Claims of soapmakers' complicity====
But now, the Dreamers increasingly began to blame their hygiene problems on the [[Players]] to the east, whom they suspected were deliberately polluting the rivers which flowed into coastal areas of Dreamland. The new generation of Dreamers thus came to support laws requiring Dreamers to wear clothing and deemphasizing the use of soap. Soapmakers were invested into their craft now, however, and opposed the new changes as they knew it would decrease their standard of living. The reformists accused the soapmakers of forcing the Dreamer population into a humiliating position, where they spent much of their time and money cleaning up after the Players, knowing that the Players could just as easily pollute the environment even more and thus force the Dreamers to scrub and clean themselves twice as much, all to the joy of the soapmakers. This led to accusations that the soapmakers themselves were cooperating with the Players to spread filth throughout Dreamland.

==Rise of pessimism==
Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only [[Baeba Swamp]], pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the [[Players]], but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

:''Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.''
Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

===Dreamers envy Players===
The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than 800,000 enrolled Players, more than Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself '''Hipsoft''' emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

===Comparative census of 4162===
By 4162, the Dreamer birthrate had increased, while the Player birthrate had fallen, and they had lost territory to the '''Tinks'''. Now, Dreamland's population was about double the Play population of 639,000.

====Census statistics====

{| class="wikitable"
|+ CENSUS OF 4162
|-
! Statistic
! Play
! Dreamland
! COMMENTS
|-
| Population
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 639,000
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 1,243,000
| Play population excludes '''Tata'''
|-
| Land area
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"|
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"|
|
|-
| Per capita GDP
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| Ξ3,832
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| > Ξ50,000
|
|-
| Fertility rate
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 4.74
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 3.58
|
|-
| Median age
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 12.7
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| ~24
|
|}

Although the fertility rates were not greatly different, the actual birth rate was much higher in Play territory because their adult population was primarily female (having fought many recent wars) whereas Dreamland's population consisted mostly of the Dreamers who had not been exposed to any recent wars.

===Other developments===
====Worries about defeat====
Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

===Dissolutionism===
Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

==Defeatist art and propaganda==
The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the [[Players]], as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.
===Depictions of the sun===
Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season. This meant that the entire planet experienced its summer season at the same time, and that even near the Equator, summer was much hotter than winter.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

====The Sun is Too Big====
Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but often riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

====Suntan vs sunburn====
Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, '''Pūpepas''', was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

===Linguistic issues===
The Dreamers were also ashamed of their languages, particularly the eastern ones.

====Phonology====
The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. Though both Dreamers and Players had learned to speak languages such as [[khulls|Leaper]] in the past, it required greater physical effort on their part to pronounce sounds like /k/ than it did for the native Leaper speakers, and therefore both the Dreamers and the Players had spoken languages with a similar acoustic sound for thousands of years. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

====Script====
Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

====Grammar====
Play was a ferociously complex language, with a grammar resembling [[khulls|Leaper]] but famously more difficult. For this reason, the '''Crystals''' and other groups such as the Leapers had an easier time mastering the Play language than did the Dreamers. This embarrassed the Dreamers doubly because the common perception was that Play would be an easy language for the Dreamers to learn because of its simple sound inventory. The Dreamers' inability to competently learn to speak Play had become deadly early in the Play occupation of Tata, as Play military leaders massacred Dreamer teachers for not quickly learning the language.

===Hunger===
Although the Dreamers were not short of food, even after losing the war, they spent more of their time and money on acquiring food than did the Players, who simply built their settlements around food sources so that they would never go hungry.

===Unhealable wounds===
====Hard and soft====
Even when conceding that the Dreamers were physically strong, the artists drew the Players as having square body shapes, whereas the Dreamers were depicted as being made of soft curves.

====Depiction of weapons====
A common stereotype was that Dreamers were physically delicate, but better able to handle weapons than were small, stoutly built tribes such as the Players. Some artists said that once the Dreamers lost their weapons, the Players' weakness would turn into a strength, as their poor ability to handle weapons would mean that every kill would be bloody rather than quick and clean. Meanwhile, other artists depicted the Players as fashioning better weapons, weapons that they could hold and the Dreamers could not.

====Depiction of other sharp objects====
The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The [[Crystals]] had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the [[Players]] and with the [[Soap Bubbles]] living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

====Metaphorical use====
The Dolphin Rider term for an unhealable wound was ''nu silika o pō okuleli'', which could be shortened to ''popōkuleli'' "unhealable". They saw that their people were inflicted with many such wounds, both physically and metaphorically, as they could not protect themselves from the local animal and plant life, but also could not regain territories lost to them by invasions in recent wars such as their war against the Players. Where other nations rose and fell, the Dreamers only grew around the hard barriers outsiders built for them.

The Dreamer propagandists reminded their people that the Players were only the most recent example of an army which had invaded Dreamland and come to permanently reside there. Earlier, the feminist '''Womb Justice''' army, fleeing from their homeland, took refuge in Dreamland but immediately demanded that all Dreamers move out so they could build a society run by women. The Dreamers did not fight these women, fearing that their own people would be unwilling to take up arms against such a society, but within a generation the Dreamers had grown tired of the Wombs and no longer believed that they needed to remain in Dreamland. Yet they were unable to push the Womb army out of Dreamland, and they conceded that they would remain in Dreamland for the indefinite future.

===Positive counterpoints===
For nearly a thousand years, outside cultures had stereotyped the Dreamers as being hypersexual and eager to engage in deviant sexual practices that made their men soft. This stereotype had been repeated by so many different foreign powers that the Dreamers had come to accept that it was true, but they made no plans to change their lifestyles. Instead, the Dreamers said that they were motivated by love, and that most of their enemies were motivated by hate and incapable of love. Rather than consider themselves immoral, the Dreamers said it was cultures such as the [[Players]] who were immoral, for instead of loving each other and their enemies, they sought to start a new war every year and took joy in their enemies' suffering.

==Debates over economics==
The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. [[STW]] mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of [[AlphaLeap]] in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

====Issues involving trade====
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

''this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.''

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly [[STW]], openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

===Arguments for capitalism===
The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising '''Teenprop''' corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, and then paying taxes in their own nations so that both the company and the citizens could benefit from the company's presence.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the '''Teenprop''' corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as the '''Anchor Empire''' (where STW sold most of its goods), and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

====Wealth creation theory====
The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as [[Kxesh]] that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

===Rise of pacifism===
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of [[Paba]], which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

====Secret diplomacy====
As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of '''capitalism''', the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

==Diplomatic outreach to Players==
In the mid-4160s, Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into [[Memnumu]] to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

The [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] also feared the Players and had suffered from their plagues. But when the Dreamers heard that the Players had broken up into four political parties, they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with at least one of them, and form an alliance between Dreamland and the most pro-Dreamer political party in the Play empire.

Because their main contact with the Players was through '''Tata''', the Dreamers understood little of the Players' internal struggles in Memnumu. The Dreamers knew that the original Play faction, the Milk Bottles, had been extremist, and that they had given way to the Pillows after a series of disasters mostly involving young children. They had heard of the rise of the Purses, but most Dreamers did not know that they were racists; they only knew that the Purses' positions on issues in general were more moderate than those of the Pillows, who were in turn more moderate than the Bottles. Therefore, the Dreamers believed that the Play nation as a whole was on a steady path towards more moderate politics, and could therefore become an ally of the Dreamers if they were able to continue along that path. The Dreamers were dismayed when they later learned that the Pillows had recovered their parliamentary majority, but figured that so long as the Purses were also represented in the Play parliament, the Dreamers still had an ally among the Players. (Most Dreamers still did not know, even years on, that the Purses considered Dreamers racially inferior, because the Purses had always focused on internal divisions among the Players in Memnumu.)

===Dreamers meet with Players===
The Dreamers had heard about the Players' new balance system, in which four parties would compete for power in the Parliament, and all four would be allowed to use game-like voting strategies, for example allowing people to vote outside their home districts, figuring that the resulting fierce competition would lead to better governance. They had been shown some anti-Dreamer literature known to have been written by the '''Milk Bottle''' faction of the Play party. With this, and other information they had learned about early happenings in the Play nation, Dreamland labeled the Milk Bottles as an extremist Play faction, and assumed that the other Play factions would thus be more friendly to Dreamland.

The Dreamers sent a team of tall, handsome male diplomats to meet with the female representatives of each of the four main Play parties, comparing and contrasting the Dolphin Riders' party platform with those of the women. The Players were feminists, but unlike the Moonshines, they respected foreign cultural norms, and therefore were accustomed to meeting with male diplomats. The Dreamers told the men to talk strictly about politics, but hoped that they could subliminally woo the women with their charms and return to Dreamland having signed a formal treaty of alliance with at least one, and perhaps more, of the new Play parties.

Four Dreamer men greeted the four Player women in the Play capital city of '''Pūpepas'''.
====Results of the meeting====
At the meeting, the Dreamer men realized that the Milk Bottles they had been calling Play extremists were in fact the most moderate of all the Play philosophies, and that the other three factions were even more hostile than that. Put another way, the Dreamers had assumed that the spectrum of Play political opinions ran the gamut from the fierce nationalism of the Milk Bottles to a cosmopolitan faction of unknown identity with whom they could form an alliance. But rather than ranging from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the Dreamers found out that the Players spanned from nationalism to racism.

Furthermore, even the racist Play faction, the '''Purses''', were nationalists, saying that the hated Eggs were still their allies in any conflict that involved a foreign power. Thus, even though the Purses had openly supported arresting the Eggs, they recognized the Eggs as fellow Players. Therefore none of the Play factions was willing to support Dreamland either militarily or economically.

The Dreamers were frustrated even by the name "balance system", confident that the Players had borrowed the idea of balance from the politics of Dreamland.

====Explanations to common people====
Dreamer diplomats had difficulty explaining to their own people why they had classified all four of Memnumu's Play parties as anti-Dreamer extremists, when the Dreamers had been expecting to find allies in the Play nation. Many Dreamers simply did not believe the diplomats' claims, arguing that at least the Eggs must be friendly towards Dreamland since they had been opposed by all of the other Play factions and had been attacked with no apparent provocation in a recent war led by the Firestones. But the Dreamers had diplomatic contacts with the wider Crystal party, who refused to accept any connection between the Dreamers and the Eggs, and still claimed that the reason the Crystals had abandoned the Eggs was because the required rescue mission would have been impossible.

====Dreamers embrace Tata====
When the Dreamers obtained a clearer understanding of the Play situation, they began to oppose the often talked about integration of Tata into a single unified Play nation, which had been proposed in 4151 but delayed over and over again for various reasons. The Dreamers believed that Tata's ruling '''Club''' party, though formally identical to the Pillows, was the only true moderate Play party, since they had legalized the Dreamer party in their own territory and did not take part in radical Play practices such as child labor and home invasions, even though they had never formally written these out of their party platform. The Dreamers considered all four of the Play parties in Memnumu's Milk Parliament to be extremists. They stated that the Purse ideology was moderate, but that because they were tribalists, the Dreamers could not ally with them after all, and therefore they were off the map of political discourse in Dreamland. The other three factions were also extremists, and most Dreamers considered them even worse than the Purses, since they all opposed Dreamland as well.

====Worries about population growth====
To the Dreamers, the greatest threat posed by the Players was their extremely high birthrate, which had for their first twenty years in power been so high that children under age thirteen comprised 3/4 of the Play population, and the population had doubled in this twenty-year period despite the many plagues, famines, and wars that the Players had endured and created. Meanwhile, though the Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had been youth-based, and had come to power with a high birthrate as well, theirs had never been nearly as high as the Players', and had been in decline for several generations, such that they had come to rely on '''Gold''' party arguments that the political power of a nation should not be related to the size of its population. By now, the Players had already outgrown the Dreamers despite having a much smaller land area, and it seemed inevitable to the Dreamers that the Players would grow even more. Since the Players had already won one major war against Dreamland, the Dreamers worried that their rapidly growing population would in the future lead them to win another.

The Players' birthrate had declined sharply around 4150 when they broke up into factions, however, and the Dreamers knew of this because of diplomatic contacts through Tata. The Dreamers stopped worrying so much about the Players' population expansion and began to focus on their problems at home. But then, when they heard that the Players were reviving the Milk Bottle party, they worried that Play women would once again have more children than they could care for, and that the children would grow up and start wars against Dreamland out of pure hunger, ignoring all common sense.

==Hipsoft war of 4183==
The immigrant '''Tipper''' party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent '''Hipsoft''' party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves '''Tippers''', disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant '''Hipsoft''' party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles
that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

===Moonshine's reaction===
Moonshine endorsed the Tippers' massacres, saying that the men were doing the right thing. Moonshine offered citizenship to all female Tippers, but stated that Tipper men would never be allowed into Moonshine territory, even though they had done a great favor for the Moonshines by killing many Dreamers. This was because Moonshine culture considered men's lives expendable, and that the best thing that men could do for Moonshine would be to stay at war and wear down the enemies of Moonshine without expecting any sort of reward other than the right to abuse the conquered people. Therefore Moonshine stated that if Tipper men wanted to marry women, they should take their wives from among the Dreamer population.

===Contact with the Matrix===
In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful [[Matrix]] army based in the nearby nation of '''Tata'''. Tata was on the north coast and was one of a chain of nations that had long been a buffer area between Dreamland and Moonshine, but had recently grown into a regional power in its own right.

The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland to focus their efforts on the city of [[Baeba Swamp]].

NOTE: The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.<ref>This is from a dream in which Russia did likewise.</ref>

==Newer economic developments==
Losing two wars had led to economic decline, and the increasing isolation of Dreamland drove up the cost of living. Furthermore, the rising cost of living made it difficult for the poorest Dreamers to afford food, and although the Dreamer states solved this problem with welfare payments, some of the western states were now encouraging people to desert their towns in order to live along the coast, much as the [[Players]] did, and obtain their food from the sea.

===Currency conversion===
Nearly three centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had opened stores in the [[Thunder Empire]], whose people owned Dreamer slaves and had little interest in friendly contacts with Dreamland. STW went further, declaring that slavery was not punishment enough, and declared war on [[Dreamland]] on its first official day of business. The result of this, over time, was that any economic growth for STW led to decline for Dreamland, and vice versa.

Dreamland had won its war with STW, even though STW was backed by the traditional military of the Thunder Empire, and nearly drove the corporation out of business despite the great physical distance between Dreamland and the primary STW stores. But in 4108, Dreamland lost control of its newly won territory, and STW returned to business holding a larger grudge against Dreamland than ever before. Dreamland continued to lose wars and cede economic supremacy for the next decades, and although STW was not a major driving force in this, STW reaped some benefit from it because their leaders were better able to take advantage of changing economic tides than were the politicians of the nations they did business with.
====The Ξ4 meal promise====
STW had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. The price of a meal was fixed at Ξ4, and STW's leaders promised that the price would never rise, regardless of what happened to the economies around them, including STW's non-restaurant stores, which did not accept the meal tokens. By tying the currency only to the price of food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and thus came to be used in international comparisons even by countries who had no interest in attracting business from STW.

The Dreamers disliked the so-called universal currency, since STW did not do business in Dreamland, and had always been hostile to Dreamland. The Dreamers stated the Ξ4 meal promise was humiliating because no Dreamers could expect to receive a meal for that price at any restaurant within Dreamland, and that STW had deliberately created an unfair setup that was only sustainable because they owned slaves and their restaurants served foods that had been obtained through slave labor and with minimal transportation and preparation costs.

====Economic restructuring====
Nonetheless, in comparing their economy to those of other nations, the Dreamers were forced to acknowledge STW's meal token currency rather than using their own. By this time, the an STW-like corporation had arisen in Dreamland, intent on solving the problems of Dreamland's economic isolation by producing goods locally and thus relieving the Dreamers' dependence on trade.

The annual per capita income of Dreamland as a whole had declined to about '''Ξ40,000''' by this time, even as the price of a meal in a typical restaurant had remained around Ξ80. The Dreamers were not bankrupted by their food prices because most Dreamers acquired some of their food themselves, cooking it at home during their free time or eating it raw if possible. Thus restaurants catered to travelers and to the wealthiest classes. On top of this, Dreamland's government encouraged its states to distribute welfare tickets to Dreamer families so that they could afford food, particularly in those areas where the natural supply of food was irregular. But Dreamland was a confederation, and could not tax its people directly, and therefore the disbursement of welfare was up to the states.

====Unskilled labor wages====
Dreamland practiced unregulated capitalism supported by welfare payments. There was no minimum wage, so it was common for young and unskilled laborers to receive just Ξ20 or Ξ25 for a day's work. Those who could not find stable employment would often work for even lower wages. Meanwhile, workers in some trades were paid only by selling things they produced and could go for months at a time without income. Therefore, Dreamland's lower class was materially poor even compared to the lower classes of poorer nations, but malnutrition was rare and usually of a sort that money would not have prevented.

===Distribution of necessities===
The charter of the ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party stated that the government must provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care for all citizens, even those Dreamers who chose to live in outlying areas where transportation costs were significant. Since transportation of food and essential goods was the responsibility of the government, the costs were socialized, and Dreamland's taxes were very high. However, the tax policies were the responsibilities of the states, and the Dolphin Riders' parliament could not enact a tax applying to a specific geographic area to force that area to improve its citizens' standard of living.

====Clothing====
Clothing was not defined as a basic human need in the Dolphin Rider platform, and on this they agreed with most of the minor Dreamer parties as well. Therefore, humans who needed protective clothes to work had to buy them on their own, disposable diapers were expensive, and people huddled together in blankets during Dreamland's rare cold winter nights.

The Dreamers and the Players had both often supported nudism, and largely for the same reasons, but opposition to nudism took different perspectives in the two empires. For the Players, opposition to nudism was entirely about hygiene, as the Players' child population had suffered from several plagues and spread these plagues outside their nation. However the Players were so tightly compacted into seaside habitats that they had early on exhausted their supply of plant fibers to weave new diapers, and the Play Parliament shut down the textile industry entirely so they could focus on fishing the sea. By contrast, the Dreamers' much lower fertility rate had kept them free of such problems. Rather, the Dreamers who supported wearing clothes were more concerned with secondary issues: since Dreamers often carried money with them, it was far more convenient for them to wear clothes to help carry the coins, and there were many trades that were much easier to perform while wearing protective clothes. The Dreamers mostly did wear clothes when it was convenient, and indeed their clothing production costs were lower than those in some poorer nations, but all clothes were distributed by private corporations who were free to charge any price they wished, even in areas where they had achieved a monopoly. Thus, many Dreamers spent much of their disposable income on clothing and could not afford to replace clothes that were worn out from daily use.

====Homes and furniture====
Likewise, Dreamland's climate was hot and sunny, and in some areas, people had traditionally lived on the beach, exposed to the elements, and not in any home at all. This extreme lifestyle was associated with the pre-Dreamer aboriginal population, numbering only a few thousand by this time, who lived in very specific locations such that the construction of a building to live in would make little difference. Nonetheless, most Dreamer homes were very simple, and the government promise as understood by the people was that Dreamers would have the right to a place to seek shelter from the rain, which might or might not be their everyday home.

===Typical prices===
The Dreamers embraced capitalism and therefore did not set standard prices on goods. Their government's role in providing for their people was limited to the welfare benefits described above, to medical care, and to providing shelter from nature. The average per capita GDP was around '''Ξ50,000'''. Note that this includes the entire population, not just those in work; the average salary of a worker was therefore significantly higher.

====Hygiene====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean. The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early. A full-body coat made from animal hides could cost around '''Ξ375'''.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living.

====Non-essential foods====
Palm wine and fruit juice averaged about the same price, about '''Ξ120''' per jug.

====Intangibles and services====
Because of the calm weather, travelers often slept outside, exposed to the elements. There was thus relatively little demands for inns, and most tended to be found in cities. A night's sleep in a room with many other travelers could cost around '''Ξ80''', and accomodations with more privacy were rare.

====Illegal transactions====
Slaves could be bought for around '''Ξ100,000''' to '''Ξ1 million''', a vastly higher price than the Ξ10,000 — Ξ50,000 that paid for their abduction and transportation from weakened nations such as Thaoa. The [[Players]] had contemplated selling people from their lower classes to foreign nations for even lower prices to relieve their population stress and also bring money into their economy, but such people were often profitable for the Players since they were little more than slaves already. Since slavery was illegal in Dreamland, such people could not be held openly, and therefore were typically prostitutes who remained in one place and were bound to a master. Male slaves nonetheless were sometimes used to row ships, where they were bound into place and released only when under the close watch of an armed guard.

===Private schools===
Dreamland's education system was privatized, and teachers charged families to enroll their pupils. This was unlike the [[Players|Play]] system, where education was free, and unlike [[STW]], which actually ''paid'' students to attend, albeit in a currency that could only be redeemed at STW.

There was no law requiring Dreamer adults to care for their aging parents, either financially or materially, since the elderly were covered under the same programs that covered disabled and sick people. (This is a relic of the '''Plume''' system that predated the Dolphin Riders.) Therefore parents had no guarantee that their children would portion off their future income to the parents, and no financial incentive to seek the best education for their children, nor to have large numbers of children, or even to have children at all.

Many Dreamer women remained at or near their homes during the daytime, and so teaching their children was simply part of their daily routine, and school systems tended to exist only in large cities. Nonetheless, tuition was affordable, averaging around '''Ξ4,000''' per student per year, much less than the average income of even the lowest class of Dreamers. This tuition covered the teachers' salaries only, and did not pay for the students' meals or their belongings, which often cost more than the tuition.

Dreamland's private schools worked both in competition and in cooperation with each other, as when two schools opened in the same city, typically each school would specialize in different subjects of study.

====Proposal for a public school system====
Nonetheless, the lack of free public education was a disincentive for couples planning to have children, and many Dreamer politicians wanted to start a tax-supported public school system based on a foreign model. But because they could not institute a tax on the entire Dreamer empire, each state would need to do this individually.

Opponents of this plan argued that a public school system would immediately turn into an unrestrained child labor operation, as the state-run school would have no authority above them and thus could not be shut down. As evidence they pointed to the school system of '''Moonshine''', which considered its students to be slaves, and to [[STW]], a private school system which had nonetheless functioned as an education monopoly for much of its existence and had relied on child labor (although with pay) to sustain itself.

The '''Play''' school system, however, did not force its students to work, or even to do schoolwork, and was a legally established government monopoly accountable to no outside authority. Supporters of the new plan claimed that the Play nation disproved all of their doubts. The opponents of the public school plan countered this argument by saying that the Players represented everything the Dreamers opposed, and that the Players in fact were the worst child abusers in the world, as they forced their children to find food for their parents with no salary at all.

==Impossible burdens==
In Dreamland, the middle class was the largest class, and therefore, in Dreamland's democratic elections, policies favoring the middle class tended to succeed. There was no welfare system, and many middle-class Dreamers believed that if they were to set up a welfare system for their poorest citizens, as some other nations had, Dreamland would become as poor as those other nations. Indeed, Dreamer economists had proven that having a state-supported welfare system correlated very well with a nation's overall poverty, though they could not prove causation. Their ancient rival across the sea, [[Oyster Empire|Kxesh]], had supported its lowest class with generous welfare benefits for thousands of years and had also been poorer than Dreamland for thousands of years.<ref>Note that welfare in Kxesh probably predates the Oyster takeover.</ref>

Thus the lowest class remained poor.

Some Dreamers wished that the lowest class would migrate to surrounding nations but there was no legal means of expelling a citizen, and the Dreamers realized that many emigrants would join the armies of Dreamland's enemies and could possibly lead an invasion against Dreamland in the future.

Because the lowest class made only about Ξ20 per day, and meals often cost more than this, these people could not afford their basic needs and had to steal food or turn to other crimes to make money. Many young women, including married women, worked as prostitutes, but because there were so many prostitutes, their earnings were meager and they were worse off than men who made a career from robbing people and stealing transported goods. (These people were called pirates in most languages, because this lifestyle was not confined to the sea.)

It was nearly impossible for a poor person to meet their needs for even a day in Dreamland without committing a crime. As above, they could not even legally use the bathroom without spending more than their entire income for a day, let alone find food to eat. This meant that Dreamland's various police forces could arrest almost any poor person at any time and put them in prison. However, in general, the middle class preferred to have the lower class out on the streets, since they performed useful jobs for the rest of society, and although it was a common subject of debate, the majority of middle-class Dreamers felt that they would rather tolerate the crime than lose the services of their lower class.

==Matrix treaty of 4190==
By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of '''Memnumu''' once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny [[Matrix]] army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

==Slope treaty==

===General election of 4205===
The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in [[Memnumu]].<ref>It is possible that the descendants of the Hipsides, now adults, still practiced this lifestyle in some territory between Dreamland and Tāmta.</ref>

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

====Arrival of the Cupbearers====
Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of '''Cupbearer''' refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.<ref>This may or may not be the state of Senampattore. Where it is on the map is clear, but the borders may have changed.</ref>

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the [[Players]] in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:
#The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
#Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
#The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in [[Baeba Swamp]] as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
#The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves ''pavača'',<ref>This word is ''čava'' "long hair" spelled backwards inside the circumfix ''p-..-a'' "having (a)". This method of word formation was dying out in Play, but persisted in some groups who were influenced by Andanese, because even though Andanese itself did not use this, it was more convenient with pure CV words, as Andanese had, than with Play whose syllable structure was more diverse.</ref> just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

===Capture of Crystal slaves===
A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising '''Slope''' party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

==Postwar period==
After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

===General election of 4227===
Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The ''bopo'' philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the ''bopo'' supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The '''Cupbearers''' may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

===General election of 4238===
Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

===General election of 4254===
After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the [[Memnumu|Play army]] and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.
==Naval war==
In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the [[Players]], which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the [[Ghost Empire|Ghosts]], who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called '''Laba'''. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of [[Moonshine]], but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world.
But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the [[Players|Play]] population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

==Inversion of propaganda==
Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the [[Players]], but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the [[Matrix]] propaganda of a hundred years prior.

===Weather metaphors===
Though living right along the Equator, the people of Hipatal and Laba in general had the same variety of body types found elsewhere. Some outsiders believed that they were all dark-skinned people, but immigrants such as '''Sašuasa''' had been of the same Lenian body type as the stereotypical eastern Dreamers who had fallen into ruin.

==Naval war in the Play sea==
===General election of 4287===
As the Dreamer navy,<ref>this did not actually take twenty years, but there were no global elections in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty</ref>, '''Laba''', invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the '''Teenprop''' corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

''NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.''

===Antiwar movement in Dreamland===
===="The Real Dreamland"====
Just as Dreamland seemed likely to win its war, a group of pacifists declared themselves to be the only true Dreamers, and pledged allegiance to the '''Cupbearers''' without formally joining the Cupbearer party. They said that the earlier Dreamers' pessimism was correct, and that Dreamland should be a pacifist multinational empire trading economically with foreign nations but without military expansionist goals. They supported '''Moonshine''', and thus while committed to pacifism, assumed that they would soon be targets in the war, and perhaps could be such easy targets that they would distract the navy from their war against the Players. Thus these new pacifists felt they could help the Players whether they were successful in remaking Dreamland into an economic power, in which case the war would stall, or unsuccessful, in which case they would be slaughtered by the pirates but could hopefully still save the Players.

The pacifists' claim to be the only true Dreamers closely resembled the Players' contemporary claim that the Play navy was the only true Laba. They had made their declarations independently, however, as the Play diplomats were blocked from contacting the pacifists by the Ghosts over land and by the pirates at sea.

===General election of 4295===
The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became popular.

===General election of 4316===
After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.
===General election of 4321===
Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

===General election of 4327===
===General election of 4343===
Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

==Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)==
Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing ''bepolere'', which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The ''Pōbipōpu'' and ''Pōronopa'' distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

===Contacts with Moonshine===
The '''Habit''' party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the '''Hipsoft''' settlements to and including the '''Womb Justice''' settlements. The Habits were the sons and daughters of the Crystals who had been pushed into the underclass in Baeba Swamp when the Leapers took over. That is, they were a faction of Crystals who resisted the Leapers.

====Tribal identity====
The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

====Partition====
By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small '''Hipsoft''' migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the '''Womb Justice ''' party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name '''Dreamland''' was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

====Moonshine-Habit relations====
The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's '''Habit''' party (''Tăta'')<ref>Note that this is not a homonym of the state name '''Tàta''' because the tones are different, but that in languages such as Play, the two may have been merged.</ref> to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called '''Wagillàra''', the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

===Demographic shifts===
After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the [[Players]] had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

:''Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.''

===General election of 4351===
Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

===General election of 4390===
Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

===General election of 4402===
Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

===General election of 4412===
The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.
===General election of 4419===
Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

===General election of 4438===
Luxury goods came back into fashion.

====Tribal reform====
Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The '''Tipper''' population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the '''Hipatal''' immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

===General election of 4440===
Luxury goods fell out of fashion.
===General election of 4445===
Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

===General election of 4462===
Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.
===General election of 4468===
Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.
===General election of 4485===
Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.
===General election of 4492===
The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.
===General election of 4500===
Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.
===General election of 4511===
Little changed in this election.
===General election of 4529===
Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.
===General election of 4531===
Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.
===General election of 4538===
Luxury goods became popular.
===General election of 4540===
Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

===Humanitarian attempts at intervention===
The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier.<ref>But remember that this from a different timeline. The figure cannot be taken as an exact count.</ref> Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both [[Baeba Swamp]] and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

''Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.''

==Other developments==
*56 (4150)
*52 (4202)
*13 (4215)
*24 (4239)
*79 (4318)
*80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the [[Hipatal]] people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

=Dreamer-Doll relations=
:''See [[Dolls]].''
Note that there is no convenient way to represent the [[babakiam|Play]]-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with ''dream'' and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the [[Dolls|Bottom]] party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (''nuufa''), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Bottoms did not allow their members to even have protruding fingernails. The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: '''fubap''' describing something soft and thus flexible, and '''nuufa''' describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

===Scope===
It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the '''Hiboh''' Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

===Dedication to pacifism===
The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon [[ppot#upl|drafted a party platform]] denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling '''Hailstorm''' army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

=Dreamer-Play relations=
''Žayuvas'' got its name when the rebel '''Tink''' army invaded their ally, the [[Play party]], and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, [[Dreamland]], than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory ''Memnumu''.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling '''Police''' faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the [[Play party]]. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the [[alphaleap|Leapers]] had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the '''Magic Combs''') never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

===Scope of Žayuvas===
It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of '''Šasa Kaina''', located near and traditionally friendly towards [[Thaoa]], at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

===Fertility calculations===
On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

;Oct 10 2021
There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding '''Tata''', where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

===Apportionment of representatives===
Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

==Evolution from factions to parties==
The [[Play party|Play]] charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

==Party membership==
The '''Police''' party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

==Culturebound issues of the Play Empire==
:''See also [[Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues]]''.
True to its name, the [[Play party]] dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

===Children's issues===
====Education====
The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory [[Raspara]] army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

===Tribal conflicts (general) ===
:''This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.''
====Height and hair color====

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured [[Paba]]p tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were [[#feminism|taller than their men]], this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

====Background====
Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive [[Raspara]] party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious [[swamp Kids|Tink]] army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall [[Repilia]]n tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the '''Flower Bees''' and the '''Rusted Pearls'''. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

====Conflicting tribal definitions====
Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the [[Palli]]-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

=Diplomatic contacts between the empires=

=Later periods=
These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.
===Hiboh===
The '''Hiboh''' era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true '''Sleeperism'''.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the '''Cold Men''', until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

===RKE Wars===
The '''RKE''' movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used [[Matrix]]-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.

=Notes in boats=
==Notes==

Dolphin Riders

2025-06-20T00:22:54Z

Poswob Rare: /* Impossible burdens */

The '''MFZ''' Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the [[Cosmopolitan Age]]. The original Empire, ''Mayuvas'', was [[Dreamland]], which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the [[Gold party]], as the word for gold in [[babakiam|Play]] was ''mayu''. The other two empires, ''Fayuvas'' and ''Žayuvas'', were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, [[Baeba Swamp]], which at the time was run primarily by the '''Iron''' party, an offshoot of the much older [[Zenith]] party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel '''ū''', giving ''Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas'', but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like '''uv''' (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

==Background==

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with [[Baeba Swamp]] to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of [[Moonshine]] and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with '''Tata''', also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

==Structure of Parliament==
Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the [[ppot#DPR|Dolphin Riders]], who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient [[Gold party]]. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

==Recognition of new tribes==
Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the '''Tippers''' who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

==Language==
The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited [[Lenian languages#DPR|Dolphin Rider]] language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near [[Baeba Swamp]] came to speak [[Ogili_II|Ogili]], the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

==Growth of the Kapa corporation==
An umbrella corporation called '''Kapa''' (in full, ''Nobōbo Kapa'') arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The ''kapa'' part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like '''Teenprop'''. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like '''Teens for Tomorrow''', though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after [[STW]]; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing '''Bottom''' party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the '''Yukiese''' family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of [[Paba]]. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the '''Teenprop''' political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

==Development of new political parties==
===Two-party stage===
The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support '''feminism''', believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world. The Dolphin Riders realized that if feminism took hold even in Dreamland, there would be no more land in the world run by men; free men would only exist as nomadic minorities within female nations.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support '''sarabism''', the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

==Creation of new parties==
'''Gatotōl''' had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the '''Comb''' party (''Pōrupu Resini'') which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's<ref>A vague and tentative date</ref> the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the '''Hipsoft''' party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new '''Carriage''' party (''āliki'') was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new '''Pointer''' party (''Pēbobi Lisuelesi'') was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a ''pēbobi''.

The '''Permission''' party (''Lepusepu Lesinepu'') was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the '''Butterfly''' party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

====Minor parties====
The '''Frame''' party (''Pōrupu Uimeka'') also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term ''sepu'' (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet ''lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu'' is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

==Culturebound issues==
The [[Gold party]] did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the '''Wildfire''' party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the '''Treehouse''' army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the '''Tippers''' came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

===Hupodas===
There was a ''Hupodas'' ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be ''lepisese'' "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

===Family issues===
====Early years====
The founding '''Dolphin Riders''' planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.<ref>While this logic may seem counterintuitive from the point of view of Earth, it was well illustrated in feminist societies like Moonshine that women were eager to raise children because they would be able to remain at home, and not need to work, while their husbands provided the entire financial support for raising each child.</ref>

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

====Later years====
A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

===Ilhina===
This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.
===Sarabism===
Related to the carrying of weapons.

===Capitalism and communism===
These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

===Censorship and propaganda===
These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

===Feminism===
Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

===Pimuo bopi===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as '''pacifism''' but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive [[Matrix]] army.

''This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as '''bopo''' below.''

===Pasio===
A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

===Bepolere===
Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

===Bopo===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as '''pacifism'''; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

==Proclamation of Empire==
===Proclamation of Empire in 4108===
In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the [[Play party|Play]] parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population.

Yet, 1,300<ref>an exact figure</ref> Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, [[Baeba Swamp]] had become the center of world diplomacy.

===General election of 4111===
The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the '''Treehouse''' party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the '''Wildfire''' party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

==Conflicts over hygiene==

===Hygiene laws===
The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (This is separate from the Hupodas issue.) One reason for the strong attention to hygiene was that the Dolphin Riders were tolerant of nudism, an issue that Dreamers had often gone back and forth on in the past.

The Dreamer Parliament had the power to make laws that applied to the entire empire. Thus it became a crime in Dreamland for a teenager or adult to leave a mess in a public bathroom, or even in nature, without immediately cleaning it up. The Dreamers also had to prove that they were bathing everyday, washing their clothes, and keeping their belongings clean as well. But the Parliament did not have the power to enact a tax applying to the whole Empire; this power was reserved to the states.
====Soapmaking corporation====
Thus, the Dreamer Parliament was unable to subsidize the purchase of soap and other hygiene-related goods, and Dreamers had to rely on their monthly income to buy these products. This immediately led to the rise of a powerful soapmaking class, who founded a corporation, '''Nobōbo Pobo Mosesene''' (PBM), named after the founding Mosesene family. PBM's workers allied themselves with the factions of the Baywatch and Rider parties that favored strict hygiene laws, and pledged to cooperate with each other across state and party lines since they were united on a single issue.

PBM's prices were expensive. The government's bathroom police (''pusepo serakale'') signed a contract with PBM stating that they would ride along with PBM's soap distributors to ensure that citizens were buying the product and keeping their homes and belongings clean. Thus the PBM corporation had a strong ally in the government and assumed they would not be easily shut down.

====Use of currency exchanges====
Nearly two centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. By tying the value of the currency to food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and over time, nations came to use the Ξ tokens as a neutral currency so that they could more easily compare their economies without needing to factor in inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.

The Dreamers had no STW stores and had always been hostile to STW, just as STW had always been hostile to them and had periodically raided Dreamer territory in the past to procure goods to sell in their stores. Therefore the Dreamers did not like STW's Ξ meal token currency either. But they had conceded to use it when comparing their economy to other economies, as it showed that the cost of living in Dreamland was quite high compared to most other nations, and that their people were not living as comfortably as a measure of total economic output would make it seem.

Dreamland's people had an average annual income around '''Ξ70,000''', but much higher in the east, in '''Baywatch''' territory, where the banks and most major corporations were. In fact the average per capita income ranged from about Ξ200,000 in Baywatch territory to Ξ20,000 in the various states of the west.

====Prices of hygiene and associated services====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living. The bathroom guards were separate from the bathroom police, meaning that someone needing to use the bathroom would sometimes need to greet two people just to get in, pay for the experience, and then clean up any mess they had made. Meanwhile it was illegal to hide in nature instead of using the bathroom except when that area was on private property and the landowner took it upon themselves to clean the landscape; in such a case, they were in turn subject to police oversight.

The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early.

===General election of 4116===

===General election of 4125===

===General election of 4129===

==War against the Players==
In 4132, Dreamland's '''Baywatch''' and '''Dolphin Rider''' parties voted together for a war against the distant [[Players|Play]] empire, with the Baywatchers expected to shoulder most of the combat and therefore also reserve the most gains, both territorial and political, for themselves.

===General election of 4134===
===General election of 4140===
As the soldiers of the [[Players|Play]] army massacred Dreamers in the '''Baywatch''' theater of the war, and spread plagues beyond it, the Dreamers (all states) voted to disarm their civilian population to turn over their weapons to the Dreamer army, whom they hoped would keep the Players from spreading further west.

===General election of 4142===
As the [[Play party]] occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of '''Mipatatatatai''', the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

====Immigration====
The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: The sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

====Hipsofts====
Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. These were moved to a city near the middle of the Dolphin Riders' territory, far from Moonshine and also far from the Players. The Dolphin Riders hoped that these immigrants would align themselves with Dreamland or at least become apolitical.

The '''Hipsoft''' faction of the Dolphin Rider party appeared soon after the immigrants were settled. The Hipsofts lived in the area where the immigrants had moved to and opposed the resettlement program. The other Riders seemed to have little interest in the situation, saying that they had done a good deed by adopting refugees from a pacifist nation but also unwilling to spread the immigrants around the rest of Dreamland. At this time, the immigrants had no political party of their own, and the mainstream Riders hoped that the appearance of the Hipsofts would encourage the immigrants to become strongly supportive of the mainstream Riders.

==Reforms to hygiene laws==
The Dolphin Riders had come to power in 4108 with a permissive attitude towards nudism and a strict hygiene policy, requiring all Dreamers to bathe and be clean after using the bathroom. They were required to purchase soap and other hygiene supplies on their own. This was to prevent the spread of disease. The Dreamer parliament had the authority to require Dreamer citizens to purchase soap and other supplies, but not to enact a tax to pay for the hygiene supplies, or to subsidize them in any other way. Even though there was more than one soap company, the price of soap rose high as soapmakers knew the demand for their product would never cease.

====Claims of soapmakers' complicity====
But now, the Dreamers increasingly began to blame their hygiene problems on the [[Players]] to the east, whom they suspected were deliberately polluting the rivers which flowed into coastal areas of Dreamland. The new generation of Dreamers thus came to support laws requiring Dreamers to wear clothing and deemphasizing the use of soap. Soapmakers were invested into their craft now, however, and opposed the new changes as they knew it would decrease their standard of living. The reformists accused the soapmakers of forcing the Dreamer population into a humiliating position, where they spent much of their time and money cleaning up after the Players, knowing that the Players could just as easily pollute the environment even more and thus force the Dreamers to scrub and clean themselves twice as much, all to the joy of the soapmakers. This led to accusations that the soapmakers themselves were cooperating with the Players to spread filth throughout Dreamland.

==Rise of pessimism==
Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only [[Baeba Swamp]], pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the [[Players]], but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

:''Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.''
Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

===Dreamers envy Players===
The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than 800,000 enrolled Players, more than Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself '''Hipsoft''' emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

===Comparative census of 4162===
By 4162, the Dreamer birthrate had increased, while the Player birthrate had fallen, and they had lost territory to the '''Tinks'''. Now, Dreamland's population was about double the Play population of 639,000.

====Census statistics====

{| class="wikitable"
|+ CENSUS OF 4162
|-
! Statistic
! Play
! Dreamland
! COMMENTS
|-
| Population
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 639,000
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 1,243,000
| Play population excludes '''Tata'''
|-
| Land area
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"|
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"|
|
|-
| Per capita GDP
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| Ξ3,832
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| > Ξ50,000
|
|-
| Fertility rate
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 4.74
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 3.58
|
|-
| Median age
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 12.7
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| ~24
|
|}

Although the fertility rates were not greatly different, the actual birth rate was much higher in Play territory because their adult population was primarily female (having fought many recent wars) whereas Dreamland's population consisted mostly of the Dreamers who had not been exposed to any recent wars.

===Other developments===
====Worries about defeat====
Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

===Dissolutionism===
Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

==Defeatist art and propaganda==
The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the [[Players]], as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.
===Depictions of the sun===
Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season. This meant that the entire planet experienced its summer season at the same time, and that even near the Equator, summer was much hotter than winter.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

====The Sun is Too Big====
Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but often riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

====Suntan vs sunburn====
Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, '''Pūpepas''', was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

===Linguistic issues===
The Dreamers were also ashamed of their languages, particularly the eastern ones.

====Phonology====
The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. Though both Dreamers and Players had learned to speak languages such as [[khulls|Leaper]] in the past, it required greater physical effort on their part to pronounce sounds like /k/ than it did for the native Leaper speakers, and therefore both the Dreamers and the Players had spoken languages with a similar acoustic sound for thousands of years. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

====Script====
Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

====Grammar====
Play was a ferociously complex language, with a grammar resembling [[khulls|Leaper]] but famously more difficult. For this reason, the '''Crystals''' and other groups such as the Leapers had an easier time mastering the Play language than did the Dreamers. This embarrassed the Dreamers doubly because the common perception was that Play would be an easy language for the Dreamers to learn because of its simple sound inventory. The Dreamers' inability to competently learn to speak Play had become deadly early in the Play occupation of Tata, as Play military leaders massacred Dreamer teachers for not quickly learning the language.

===Hunger===
Although the Dreamers were not short of food, even after losing the war, they spent more of their time and money on acquiring food than did the Players, who simply built their settlements around food sources so that they would never go hungry.

===Unhealable wounds===
====Hard and soft====
Even when conceding that the Dreamers were physically strong, the artists drew the Players as having square body shapes, whereas the Dreamers were depicted as being made of soft curves.

====Depiction of weapons====
A common stereotype was that Dreamers were physically delicate, but better able to handle weapons than were small, stoutly built tribes such as the Players. Some artists said that once the Dreamers lost their weapons, the Players' weakness would turn into a strength, as their poor ability to handle weapons would mean that every kill would be bloody rather than quick and clean. Meanwhile, other artists depicted the Players as fashioning better weapons, weapons that they could hold and the Dreamers could not.

====Depiction of other sharp objects====
The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The [[Crystals]] had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the [[Players]] and with the [[Soap Bubbles]] living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

====Metaphorical use====
The Dolphin Rider term for an unhealable wound was ''nu silika o pō okuleli'', which could be shortened to ''popōkuleli'' "unhealable". They saw that their people were inflicted with many such wounds, both physically and metaphorically, as they could not protect themselves from the local animal and plant life, but also could not regain territories lost to them by invasions in recent wars such as their war against the Players. Where other nations rose and fell, the Dreamers only grew around the hard barriers outsiders built for them.

The Dreamer propagandists reminded their people that the Players were only the most recent example of an army which had invaded Dreamland and come to permanently reside there. Earlier, the feminist '''Womb Justice''' army, fleeing from their homeland, took refuge in Dreamland but immediately demanded that all Dreamers move out so they could build a society run by women. The Dreamers did not fight these women, fearing that their own people would be unwilling to take up arms against such a society, but within a generation the Dreamers had grown tired of the Wombs and no longer believed that they needed to remain in Dreamland. Yet they were unable to push the Womb army out of Dreamland, and they conceded that they would remain in Dreamland for the indefinite future.

===Positive counterpoints===
For nearly a thousand years, outside cultures had stereotyped the Dreamers as being hypersexual and eager to engage in deviant sexual practices that made their men soft. This stereotype had been repeated by so many different foreign powers that the Dreamers had come to accept that it was true, but they made no plans to change their lifestyles. Instead, the Dreamers said that they were motivated by love, and that most of their enemies were motivated by hate and incapable of love. Rather than consider themselves immoral, the Dreamers said it was cultures such as the [[Players]] who were immoral, for instead of loving each other and their enemies, they sought to start a new war every year and took joy in their enemies' suffering.

==Debates over economics==
The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. [[STW]] mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of [[AlphaLeap]] in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

====Issues involving trade====
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

''this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.''

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly [[STW]], openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

===Arguments for capitalism===
The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising '''Teenprop''' corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, and then paying taxes in their own nations so that both the company and the citizens could benefit from the company's presence.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the '''Teenprop''' corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as the '''Anchor Empire''' (where STW sold most of its goods), and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

====Wealth creation theory====
The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as [[Kxesh]] that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

===Rise of pacifism===
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of [[Paba]], which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

====Secret diplomacy====
As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of '''capitalism''', the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

==Diplomatic outreach to Players==
In the mid-4160s, Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into [[Memnumu]] to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

The [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] also feared the Players and had suffered from their plagues. But when the Dreamers heard that the Players had broken up into four political parties, they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with at least one of them, and form an alliance between Dreamland and the most pro-Dreamer political party in the Play empire.

Because their main contact with the Players was through '''Tata''', the Dreamers understood little of the Players' internal struggles in Memnumu. The Dreamers knew that the original Play faction, the Milk Bottles, had been extremist, and that they had given way to the Pillows after a series of disasters mostly involving young children. They had heard of the rise of the Purses, but most Dreamers did not know that they were racists; they only knew that the Purses' positions on issues in general were more moderate than those of the Pillows, who were in turn more moderate than the Bottles. Therefore, the Dreamers believed that the Play nation as a whole was on a steady path towards more moderate politics, and could therefore become an ally of the Dreamers if they were able to continue along that path. The Dreamers were dismayed when they later learned that the Pillows had recovered their parliamentary majority, but figured that so long as the Purses were also represented in the Play parliament, the Dreamers still had an ally among the Players. (Most Dreamers still did not know, even years on, that the Purses considered Dreamers racially inferior, because the Purses had always focused on internal divisions among the Players in Memnumu.)

===Dreamers meet with Players===
The Dreamers had heard about the Players' new balance system, in which four parties would compete for power in the Parliament, and all four would be allowed to use game-like voting strategies, for example allowing people to vote outside their home districts, figuring that the resulting fierce competition would lead to better governance. They had been shown some anti-Dreamer literature known to have been written by the '''Milk Bottle''' faction of the Play party. With this, and other information they had learned about early happenings in the Play nation, Dreamland labeled the Milk Bottles as an extremist Play faction, and assumed that the other Play factions would thus be more friendly to Dreamland.

The Dreamers sent a team of tall, handsome male diplomats to meet with the female representatives of each of the four main Play parties, comparing and contrasting the Dolphin Riders' party platform with those of the women. The Players were feminists, but unlike the Moonshines, they respected foreign cultural norms, and therefore were accustomed to meeting with male diplomats. The Dreamers told the men to talk strictly about politics, but hoped that they could subliminally woo the women with their charms and return to Dreamland having signed a formal treaty of alliance with at least one, and perhaps more, of the new Play parties.

Four Dreamer men greeted the four Player women in the Play capital city of '''Pūpepas'''.
====Results of the meeting====
At the meeting, the Dreamer men realized that the Milk Bottles they had been calling Play extremists were in fact the most moderate of all the Play philosophies, and that the other three factions were even more hostile than that. Put another way, the Dreamers had assumed that the spectrum of Play political opinions ran the gamut from the fierce nationalism of the Milk Bottles to a cosmopolitan faction of unknown identity with whom they could form an alliance. But rather than ranging from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the Dreamers found out that the Players spanned from nationalism to racism.

Furthermore, even the racist Play faction, the '''Purses''', were nationalists, saying that the hated Eggs were still their allies in any conflict that involved a foreign power. Thus, even though the Purses had openly supported arresting the Eggs, they recognized the Eggs as fellow Players. Therefore none of the Play factions was willing to support Dreamland either militarily or economically.

The Dreamers were frustrated even by the name "balance system", confident that the Players had borrowed the idea of balance from the politics of Dreamland.

====Explanations to common people====
Dreamer diplomats had difficulty explaining to their own people why they had classified all four of Memnumu's Play parties as anti-Dreamer extremists, when the Dreamers had been expecting to find allies in the Play nation. Many Dreamers simply did not believe the diplomats' claims, arguing that at least the Eggs must be friendly towards Dreamland since they had been opposed by all of the other Play factions and had been attacked with no apparent provocation in a recent war led by the Firestones. But the Dreamers had diplomatic contacts with the wider Crystal party, who refused to accept any connection between the Dreamers and the Eggs, and still claimed that the reason the Crystals had abandoned the Eggs was because the required rescue mission would have been impossible.

====Dreamers embrace Tata====
When the Dreamers obtained a clearer understanding of the Play situation, they began to oppose the often talked about integration of Tata into a single unified Play nation, which had been proposed in 4151 but delayed over and over again for various reasons. The Dreamers believed that Tata's ruling '''Club''' party, though formally identical to the Pillows, was the only true moderate Play party, since they had legalized the Dreamer party in their own territory and did not take part in radical Play practices such as child labor and home invasions, even though they had never formally written these out of their party platform. The Dreamers considered all four of the Play parties in Memnumu's Milk Parliament to be extremists. They stated that the Purse ideology was moderate, but that because they were tribalists, the Dreamers could not ally with them after all, and therefore they were off the map of political discourse in Dreamland. The other three factions were also extremists, and most Dreamers considered them even worse than the Purses, since they all opposed Dreamland as well.

====Worries about population growth====
To the Dreamers, the greatest threat posed by the Players was their extremely high birthrate, which had for their first twenty years in power been so high that children under age thirteen comprised 3/4 of the Play population, and the population had doubled in this twenty-year period despite the many plagues, famines, and wars that the Players had endured and created. Meanwhile, though the Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had been youth-based, and had come to power with a high birthrate as well, theirs had never been nearly as high as the Players', and had been in decline for several generations, such that they had come to rely on '''Gold''' party arguments that the political power of a nation should not be related to the size of its population. By now, the Players had already outgrown the Dreamers despite having a much smaller land area, and it seemed inevitable to the Dreamers that the Players would grow even more. Since the Players had already won one major war against Dreamland, the Dreamers worried that their rapidly growing population would in the future lead them to win another.

The Players' birthrate had declined sharply around 4150 when they broke up into factions, however, and the Dreamers knew of this because of diplomatic contacts through Tata. The Dreamers stopped worrying so much about the Players' population expansion and began to focus on their problems at home. But then, when they heard that the Players were reviving the Milk Bottle party, they worried that Play women would once again have more children than they could care for, and that the children would grow up and start wars against Dreamland out of pure hunger, ignoring all common sense.

==Hipsoft war of 4183==
The immigrant '''Tipper''' party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent '''Hipsoft''' party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves '''Tippers''', disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant '''Hipsoft''' party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles
that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

===Moonshine's reaction===
Moonshine endorsed the Tippers' massacres, saying that the men were doing the right thing. Moonshine offered citizenship to all female Tippers, but stated that Tipper men would never be allowed into Moonshine territory, even though they had done a great favor for the Moonshines by killing many Dreamers. This was because Moonshine culture considered men's lives expendable, and that the best thing that men could do for Moonshine would be to stay at war and wear down the enemies of Moonshine without expecting any sort of reward other than the right to abuse the conquered people. Therefore Moonshine stated that if Tipper men wanted to marry women, they should take their wives from among the Dreamer population.

===Contact with the Matrix===
In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful [[Matrix]] army based in the nearby nation of '''Tata'''. Tata was on the north coast and was one of a chain of nations that had long been a buffer area between Dreamland and Moonshine, but had recently grown into a regional power in its own right.

The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland to focus their efforts on the city of [[Baeba Swamp]].

NOTE: The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.<ref>This is from a dream in which Russia did likewise.</ref>

==Newer economic developments==
Losing two wars had led to economic decline, and the increasing isolation of Dreamland drove up the cost of living. Furthermore, the rising cost of living made it difficult for the poorest Dreamers to afford food, and although the Dreamer states solved this problem with welfare payments, some of the western states were now encouraging people to desert their towns in order to live along the coast, much as the [[Players]] did, and obtain their food from the sea.

===Currency conversion===
Nearly three centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had opened stores in the [[Thunder Empire]], whose people owned Dreamer slaves and had little interest in friendly contacts with Dreamland. STW went further, declaring that slavery was not punishment enough, and declared war on [[Dreamland]] on its first official day of business. The result of this, over time, was that any economic growth for STW led to decline for Dreamland, and vice versa.

Dreamland had won its war with STW, even though STW was backed by the traditional military of the Thunder Empire, and nearly drove the corporation out of business despite the great physical distance between Dreamland and the primary STW stores. But in 4108, Dreamland lost control of its newly won territory, and STW returned to business holding a larger grudge against Dreamland than ever before. Dreamland continued to lose wars and cede economic supremacy for the next decades, and although STW was not a major driving force in this, STW reaped some benefit from it because their leaders were better able to take advantage of changing economic tides than were the politicians of the nations they did business with.
====The Ξ4 meal promise====
STW had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. The price of a meal was fixed at Ξ4, and STW's leaders promised that the price would never rise, regardless of what happened to the economies around them, including STW's non-restaurant stores, which did not accept the meal tokens. By tying the currency only to the price of food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and thus came to be used in international comparisons even by countries who had no interest in attracting business from STW.

The Dreamers disliked the so-called universal currency, since STW did not do business in Dreamland, and had always been hostile to Dreamland. The Dreamers stated the Ξ4 meal promise was humiliating because no Dreamers could expect to receive a meal for that price at any restaurant within Dreamland, and that STW had deliberately created an unfair setup that was only sustainable because they owned slaves and their restaurants served foods that had been obtained through slave labor and with minimal transportation and preparation costs.

====Economic restructuring====
Nonetheless, in comparing their economy to those of other nations, the Dreamers were forced to acknowledge STW's meal token currency rather than using their own. By this time, the an STW-like corporation had arisen in Dreamland, intent on solving the problems of Dreamland's economic isolation by producing goods locally and thus relieving the Dreamers' dependence on trade.

The annual per capita income of Dreamland as a whole had declined to about '''Ξ40,000''' by this time, even as the price of a meal in a typical restaurant had remained around Ξ80. The Dreamers were not bankrupted by their food prices because most Dreamers acquired some of their food themselves, cooking it at home during their free time or eating it raw if possible. Thus restaurants catered to travelers and to the wealthiest classes. On top of this, Dreamland's government encouraged its states to distribute welfare tickets to Dreamer families so that they could afford food, particularly in those areas where the natural supply of food was irregular. But Dreamland was a confederation, and could not tax its people directly, and therefore the disbursement of welfare was up to the states.

====Unskilled labor wages====
Dreamland practiced unregulated capitalism supported by welfare payments. There was no minimum wage, so it was common for young and unskilled laborers to receive just Ξ20 or Ξ25 for a day's work. Those who could not find stable employment would often work for even lower wages. Meanwhile, workers in some trades were paid only by selling things they produced and could go for months at a time without income. Therefore, Dreamland's lower class was materially poor even compared to the lower classes of poorer nations, but malnutrition was rare and usually of a sort that money would not have prevented.

===Distribution of necessities===
The charter of the ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party stated that the government must provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care for all citizens, even those Dreamers who chose to live in outlying areas where transportation costs were significant. Since transportation of food and essential goods was the responsibility of the government, the costs were socialized, and Dreamland's taxes were very high. However, the tax policies were the responsibilities of the states, and the Dolphin Riders' parliament could not enact a tax applying to a specific geographic area to force that area to improve its citizens' standard of living.

====Clothing====
Clothing was not defined as a basic human need in the Dolphin Rider platform, and on this they agreed with most of the minor Dreamer parties as well. Therefore, humans who needed protective clothes to work had to buy them on their own, disposable diapers were expensive, and people huddled together in blankets during Dreamland's rare cold winter nights.

The Dreamers and the Players had both often supported nudism, and largely for the same reasons, but opposition to nudism took different perspectives in the two empires. For the Players, opposition to nudism was entirely about hygiene, as the Players' child population had suffered from several plagues and spread these plagues outside their nation. However the Players were so tightly compacted into seaside habitats that they had early on exhausted their supply of plant fibers to weave new diapers, and the Play Parliament shut down the textile industry entirely so they could focus on fishing the sea. By contrast, the Dreamers' much lower fertility rate had kept them free of such problems. Rather, the Dreamers who supported wearing clothes were more concerned with secondary issues: since Dreamers often carried money with them, it was far more convenient for them to wear clothes to help carry the coins, and there were many trades that were much easier to perform while wearing protective clothes. The Dreamers mostly did wear clothes when it was convenient, and indeed their clothing production costs were lower than those in some poorer nations, but all clothes were distributed by private corporations who were free to charge any price they wished, even in areas where they had achieved a monopoly. Thus, many Dreamers spent much of their disposable income on clothing and could not afford to replace clothes that were worn out from daily use.

====Homes and furniture====
Likewise, Dreamland's climate was hot and sunny, and in some areas, people had traditionally lived on the beach, exposed to the elements, and not in any home at all. This extreme lifestyle was associated with the pre-Dreamer aboriginal population, numbering only a few thousand by this time, who lived in very specific locations such that the construction of a building to live in would make little difference. Nonetheless, most Dreamer homes were very simple, and the government promise as understood by the people was that Dreamers would have the right to a place to seek shelter from the rain, which might or might not be their everyday home.

===Typical prices===
The Dreamers embraced capitalism and therefore did not set standard prices on goods. Their government's role in providing for their people was limited to the welfare benefits described above, to medical care, and to providing shelter from nature. The average per capita GDP was around '''Ξ50,000'''. Note that this includes the entire population, not just those in work; the average salary of a worker was therefore significantly higher.

====Hygiene====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean. The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early. A full-body coat made from animal hides could cost around '''Ξ375'''.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living.

====Non-essential foods====
Palm wine and fruit juice averaged about the same price, about '''Ξ120''' per jug.

====Intangibles and services====
Because of the calm weather, travelers often slept outside, exposed to the elements. There was thus relatively little demands for inns, and most tended to be found in cities. A night's sleep in a room with many other travelers could cost around '''Ξ80''', and accomodations with more privacy were rare.

====Illegal transactions====
Slaves could be bought for around '''Ξ100,000''' to '''Ξ1 million''', a vastly higher price than the Ξ10,000 — Ξ50,000 that paid for their abduction and transportation from weakened nations such as Thaoa. The [[Players]] had contemplated selling people from their lower classes to foreign nations for even lower prices to relieve their population stress and also bring money into their economy, but such people were often profitable for the Players since they were little more than slaves already. Since slavery was illegal in Dreamland, such people could not be held openly, and therefore were typically prostitutes who remained in one place and were bound to a master. Male slaves nonetheless were sometimes used to row ships, where they were bound into place and released only when under the close watch of an armed guard.

===Private schools===
Dreamland's education system was privatized, and teachers charged families to enroll their pupils. This was unlike the [[Players|Play]] system, where education was free, and unlike [[STW]], which actually ''paid'' students to attend, albeit in a currency that could only be redeemed at STW.

There was no law requiring Dreamer adults to care for their aging parents, either financially or materially, since the elderly were covered under the same programs that covered disabled and sick people. (This is a relic of the '''Plume''' system that predated the Dolphin Riders.) Therefore parents had no guarantee that their children would portion off their future income to the parents, and no financial incentive to seek the best education for their children, nor to have large numbers of children, or even to have children at all.

Many Dreamer women remained at or near their homes during the daytime, and so teaching their children was simply part of their daily routine, and school systems tended to exist only in large cities. Nonetheless, tuition was affordable, averaging around '''Ξ4,000''' per student per year, much less than the average income of even the lowest class of Dreamers. This tuition covered the teachers' salaries only, and did not pay for the students' meals or their belongings, which often cost more than the tuition.

Dreamland's private schools worked both in competition and in cooperation with each other, as when two schools opened in the same city, typically each school would specialize in different subjects of study.

====Proposal for a public school system====
Nonetheless, the lack of free public education was a disincentive for couples planning to have children, and many Dreamer politicians wanted to start a tax-supported public school system based on a foreign model. But because they could not institute a tax on the entire Dreamer empire, each state would need to do this individually.

Opponents of this plan argued that a public school system would immediately turn into an unrestrained child labor operation, as the state-run school would have no authority above them and thus could not be shut down. As evidence they pointed to the school system of '''Moonshine''', which considered its students to be slaves, and to [[STW]], a private school system which had nonetheless functioned as an education monopoly for much of its existence and had relied on child labor (although with pay) to sustain itself.

The '''Play''' school system, however, did not force its students to work, or even to do schoolwork, and was a legally established government monopoly accountable to no outside authority. Supporters of the new plan claimed that the Play nation disproved all of their doubts. The opponents of the public school plan countered this argument by saying that the Players represented everything the Dreamers opposed, and that the Players in fact were the worst child abusers in the world, as they forced their children to find food for their parents with no salary at all.

==Impossible burdens==
In Dreamland, the middle class was the largest class, and therefore, in Dreamland's democratic elections, policies favoring the middle class tended to succeed. There was no welfare system, and many middle-class Dreamers believed that if they were to set up a welfare system for their poorest citizens, as some other nations had, Dreamland would become as poor as those other nations. Indeed, Dreamer economists had proven that having a state-supported welfare system correlated very well with a nation's overall poverty, though they could not prove causation. Their ancient rival across the sea, '''Kxesh''', had supported its lowest class with generous welfare benefits for thousands of years and had also been poorer than Dreamland for thousands of years.

Thus the lowest class remained poor.

Some Dreamers wished that the lowest class would migrate to surrounding nations but there was no legal means of expelling a citizen, and the Dreamers realized that many emigrants would join the armies of Dreamland's enemies and could possibly lead an invasion against Dreamland in the future.

Because the lowest class made only about Ξ20 per day, and meals often cost more than this, these people could not afford their basic needs and had to steal food or turn to other crimes to make money. Many young women, including married women, worked as prostitutes, but because there were so many prostitutes, their earnings were meager and they were worse off than men who made a career from robbing people and stealing transported goods. (These people were called pirates in most languages, because this lifestyle was not confined to the sea.)

It was nearly impossible for a poor person to meet their needs for even a day in Dreamland without committing a crime. As above, they could not even legally use the bathroom without spending more than their entire income for a day, let alone find food to eat. This meant that Dreamland's various police forces could arrest almost any poor person at any time and put them in prison. However, in general, the middle class preferred to have the lower class out on the streets, since they performed useful jobs for the rest of society, and although it was a common subject of debate, the majority of middle-class Dreamers felt that they would rather tolerate the crime than lose the services of their lower class.

==Matrix treaty of 4190==
By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of '''Memnumu''' once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny [[Matrix]] army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

==Slope treaty==

===General election of 4205===
The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in [[Memnumu]].<ref>It is possible that the descendants of the Hipsides, now adults, still practiced this lifestyle in some territory between Dreamland and Tāmta.</ref>

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

====Arrival of the Cupbearers====
Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of '''Cupbearer''' refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.<ref>This may or may not be the state of Senampattore. Where it is on the map is clear, but the borders may have changed.</ref>

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the [[Players]] in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:
#The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
#Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
#The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in [[Baeba Swamp]] as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
#The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves ''pavača'',<ref>This word is ''čava'' "long hair" spelled backwards inside the circumfix ''p-..-a'' "having (a)". This method of word formation was dying out in Play, but persisted in some groups who were influenced by Andanese, because even though Andanese itself did not use this, it was more convenient with pure CV words, as Andanese had, than with Play whose syllable structure was more diverse.</ref> just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

===Capture of Crystal slaves===
A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising '''Slope''' party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

==Postwar period==
After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

===General election of 4227===
Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The ''bopo'' philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the ''bopo'' supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The '''Cupbearers''' may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

===General election of 4238===
Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

===General election of 4254===
After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the [[Memnumu|Play army]] and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.
==Naval war==
In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the [[Players]], which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the [[Ghost Empire|Ghosts]], who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called '''Laba'''. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of [[Moonshine]], but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world.
But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the [[Players|Play]] population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

==Inversion of propaganda==
Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the [[Players]], but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the [[Matrix]] propaganda of a hundred years prior.

===Weather metaphors===
Though living right along the Equator, the people of Hipatal and Laba in general had the same variety of body types found elsewhere. Some outsiders believed that they were all dark-skinned people, but immigrants such as '''Sašuasa''' had been of the same Lenian body type as the stereotypical eastern Dreamers who had fallen into ruin.

==Naval war in the Play sea==
===General election of 4287===
As the Dreamer navy,<ref>this did not actually take twenty years, but there were no global elections in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty</ref>, '''Laba''', invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the '''Teenprop''' corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

''NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.''

===Antiwar movement in Dreamland===
===="The Real Dreamland"====
Just as Dreamland seemed likely to win its war, a group of pacifists declared themselves to be the only true Dreamers, and pledged allegiance to the '''Cupbearers''' without formally joining the Cupbearer party. They said that the earlier Dreamers' pessimism was correct, and that Dreamland should be a pacifist multinational empire trading economically with foreign nations but without military expansionist goals. They supported '''Moonshine''', and thus while committed to pacifism, assumed that they would soon be targets in the war, and perhaps could be such easy targets that they would distract the navy from their war against the Players. Thus these new pacifists felt they could help the Players whether they were successful in remaking Dreamland into an economic power, in which case the war would stall, or unsuccessful, in which case they would be slaughtered by the pirates but could hopefully still save the Players.

The pacifists' claim to be the only true Dreamers closely resembled the Players' contemporary claim that the Play navy was the only true Laba. They had made their declarations independently, however, as the Play diplomats were blocked from contacting the pacifists by the Ghosts over land and by the pirates at sea.

===General election of 4295===
The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became popular.

===General election of 4316===
After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.
===General election of 4321===
Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

===General election of 4327===
===General election of 4343===
Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

==Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)==
Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing ''bepolere'', which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The ''Pōbipōpu'' and ''Pōronopa'' distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

===Contacts with Moonshine===
The '''Habit''' party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the '''Hipsoft''' settlements to and including the '''Womb Justice''' settlements. The Habits were the sons and daughters of the Crystals who had been pushed into the underclass in Baeba Swamp when the Leapers took over. That is, they were a faction of Crystals who resisted the Leapers.

====Tribal identity====
The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

====Partition====
By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small '''Hipsoft''' migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the '''Womb Justice ''' party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name '''Dreamland''' was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

====Moonshine-Habit relations====
The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's '''Habit''' party (''Tăta'')<ref>Note that this is not a homonym of the state name '''Tàta''' because the tones are different, but that in languages such as Play, the two may have been merged.</ref> to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called '''Wagillàra''', the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

===Demographic shifts===
After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the [[Players]] had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

:''Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.''

===General election of 4351===
Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

===General election of 4390===
Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

===General election of 4402===
Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

===General election of 4412===
The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.
===General election of 4419===
Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

===General election of 4438===
Luxury goods came back into fashion.

====Tribal reform====
Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The '''Tipper''' population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the '''Hipatal''' immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

===General election of 4440===
Luxury goods fell out of fashion.
===General election of 4445===
Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

===General election of 4462===
Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.
===General election of 4468===
Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.
===General election of 4485===
Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.
===General election of 4492===
The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.
===General election of 4500===
Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.
===General election of 4511===
Little changed in this election.
===General election of 4529===
Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.
===General election of 4531===
Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.
===General election of 4538===
Luxury goods became popular.
===General election of 4540===
Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

===Humanitarian attempts at intervention===
The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier.<ref>But remember that this from a different timeline. The figure cannot be taken as an exact count.</ref> Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both [[Baeba Swamp]] and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

''Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.''

==Other developments==
*56 (4150)
*52 (4202)
*13 (4215)
*24 (4239)
*79 (4318)
*80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the [[Hipatal]] people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

=Dreamer-Doll relations=
:''See [[Dolls]].''
Note that there is no convenient way to represent the [[babakiam|Play]]-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with ''dream'' and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the [[Dolls|Bottom]] party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (''nuufa''), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Bottoms did not allow their members to even have protruding fingernails. The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: '''fubap''' describing something soft and thus flexible, and '''nuufa''' describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

===Scope===
It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the '''Hiboh''' Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

===Dedication to pacifism===
The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon [[ppot#upl|drafted a party platform]] denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling '''Hailstorm''' army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

=Dreamer-Play relations=
''Žayuvas'' got its name when the rebel '''Tink''' army invaded their ally, the [[Play party]], and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, [[Dreamland]], than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory ''Memnumu''.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling '''Police''' faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the [[Play party]]. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the [[alphaleap|Leapers]] had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the '''Magic Combs''') never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

===Scope of Žayuvas===
It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of '''Šasa Kaina''', located near and traditionally friendly towards [[Thaoa]], at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

===Fertility calculations===
On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

;Oct 10 2021
There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding '''Tata''', where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

===Apportionment of representatives===
Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

==Evolution from factions to parties==
The [[Play party|Play]] charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

==Party membership==
The '''Police''' party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

==Culturebound issues of the Play Empire==
:''See also [[Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues]]''.
True to its name, the [[Play party]] dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

===Children's issues===
====Education====
The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory [[Raspara]] army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

===Tribal conflicts (general) ===
:''This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.''
====Height and hair color====

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured [[Paba]]p tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were [[#feminism|taller than their men]], this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

====Background====
Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive [[Raspara]] party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious [[swamp Kids|Tink]] army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall [[Repilia]]n tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the '''Flower Bees''' and the '''Rusted Pearls'''. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

====Conflicting tribal definitions====
Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the [[Palli]]-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

=Diplomatic contacts between the empires=

=Later periods=
These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.
===Hiboh===
The '''Hiboh''' era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true '''Sleeperism'''.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the '''Cold Men''', until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

===RKE Wars===
The '''RKE''' movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used [[Matrix]]-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.

=Notes in boats=
==Notes==

Dolphin Riders

2025-06-20T00:20:39Z

Poswob Rare: /* Impossible burdens */

The '''MFZ''' Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the [[Cosmopolitan Age]]. The original Empire, ''Mayuvas'', was [[Dreamland]], which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the [[Gold party]], as the word for gold in [[babakiam|Play]] was ''mayu''. The other two empires, ''Fayuvas'' and ''Žayuvas'', were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, [[Baeba Swamp]], which at the time was run primarily by the '''Iron''' party, an offshoot of the much older [[Zenith]] party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel '''ū''', giving ''Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas'', but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like '''uv''' (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

==Background==

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with [[Baeba Swamp]] to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of [[Moonshine]] and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with '''Tata''', also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

==Structure of Parliament==
Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the [[ppot#DPR|Dolphin Riders]], who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient [[Gold party]]. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

==Recognition of new tribes==
Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the '''Tippers''' who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

==Language==
The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited [[Lenian languages#DPR|Dolphin Rider]] language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near [[Baeba Swamp]] came to speak [[Ogili_II|Ogili]], the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

==Growth of the Kapa corporation==
An umbrella corporation called '''Kapa''' (in full, ''Nobōbo Kapa'') arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The ''kapa'' part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like '''Teenprop'''. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like '''Teens for Tomorrow''', though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after [[STW]]; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing '''Bottom''' party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the '''Yukiese''' family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of [[Paba]]. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the '''Teenprop''' political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

==Development of new political parties==
===Two-party stage===
The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support '''feminism''', believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world. The Dolphin Riders realized that if feminism took hold even in Dreamland, there would be no more land in the world run by men; free men would only exist as nomadic minorities within female nations.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support '''sarabism''', the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

==Creation of new parties==
'''Gatotōl''' had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the '''Comb''' party (''Pōrupu Resini'') which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's<ref>A vague and tentative date</ref> the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the '''Hipsoft''' party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new '''Carriage''' party (''āliki'') was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new '''Pointer''' party (''Pēbobi Lisuelesi'') was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a ''pēbobi''.

The '''Permission''' party (''Lepusepu Lesinepu'') was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the '''Butterfly''' party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

====Minor parties====
The '''Frame''' party (''Pōrupu Uimeka'') also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term ''sepu'' (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet ''lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu'' is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

==Culturebound issues==
The [[Gold party]] did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the '''Wildfire''' party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the '''Treehouse''' army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the '''Tippers''' came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

===Hupodas===
There was a ''Hupodas'' ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be ''lepisese'' "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

===Family issues===
====Early years====
The founding '''Dolphin Riders''' planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.<ref>While this logic may seem counterintuitive from the point of view of Earth, it was well illustrated in feminist societies like Moonshine that women were eager to raise children because they would be able to remain at home, and not need to work, while their husbands provided the entire financial support for raising each child.</ref>

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

====Later years====
A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

===Ilhina===
This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.
===Sarabism===
Related to the carrying of weapons.

===Capitalism and communism===
These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

===Censorship and propaganda===
These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

===Feminism===
Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

===Pimuo bopi===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as '''pacifism''' but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive [[Matrix]] army.

''This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as '''bopo''' below.''

===Pasio===
A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

===Bepolere===
Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

===Bopo===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as '''pacifism'''; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

==Proclamation of Empire==
===Proclamation of Empire in 4108===
In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the [[Play party|Play]] parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population.

Yet, 1,300<ref>an exact figure</ref> Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, [[Baeba Swamp]] had become the center of world diplomacy.

===General election of 4111===
The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the '''Treehouse''' party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the '''Wildfire''' party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

==Conflicts over hygiene==

===Hygiene laws===
The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (This is separate from the Hupodas issue.) One reason for the strong attention to hygiene was that the Dolphin Riders were tolerant of nudism, an issue that Dreamers had often gone back and forth on in the past.

The Dreamer Parliament had the power to make laws that applied to the entire empire. Thus it became a crime in Dreamland for a teenager or adult to leave a mess in a public bathroom, or even in nature, without immediately cleaning it up. The Dreamers also had to prove that they were bathing everyday, washing their clothes, and keeping their belongings clean as well. But the Parliament did not have the power to enact a tax applying to the whole Empire; this power was reserved to the states.
====Soapmaking corporation====
Thus, the Dreamer Parliament was unable to subsidize the purchase of soap and other hygiene-related goods, and Dreamers had to rely on their monthly income to buy these products. This immediately led to the rise of a powerful soapmaking class, who founded a corporation, '''Nobōbo Pobo Mosesene''' (PBM), named after the founding Mosesene family. PBM's workers allied themselves with the factions of the Baywatch and Rider parties that favored strict hygiene laws, and pledged to cooperate with each other across state and party lines since they were united on a single issue.

PBM's prices were expensive. The government's bathroom police (''pusepo serakale'') signed a contract with PBM stating that they would ride along with PBM's soap distributors to ensure that citizens were buying the product and keeping their homes and belongings clean. Thus the PBM corporation had a strong ally in the government and assumed they would not be easily shut down.

====Use of currency exchanges====
Nearly two centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. By tying the value of the currency to food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and over time, nations came to use the Ξ tokens as a neutral currency so that they could more easily compare their economies without needing to factor in inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.

The Dreamers had no STW stores and had always been hostile to STW, just as STW had always been hostile to them and had periodically raided Dreamer territory in the past to procure goods to sell in their stores. Therefore the Dreamers did not like STW's Ξ meal token currency either. But they had conceded to use it when comparing their economy to other economies, as it showed that the cost of living in Dreamland was quite high compared to most other nations, and that their people were not living as comfortably as a measure of total economic output would make it seem.

Dreamland's people had an average annual income around '''Ξ70,000''', but much higher in the east, in '''Baywatch''' territory, where the banks and most major corporations were. In fact the average per capita income ranged from about Ξ200,000 in Baywatch territory to Ξ20,000 in the various states of the west.

====Prices of hygiene and associated services====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living. The bathroom guards were separate from the bathroom police, meaning that someone needing to use the bathroom would sometimes need to greet two people just to get in, pay for the experience, and then clean up any mess they had made. Meanwhile it was illegal to hide in nature instead of using the bathroom except when that area was on private property and the landowner took it upon themselves to clean the landscape; in such a case, they were in turn subject to police oversight.

The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early.

===General election of 4116===

===General election of 4125===

===General election of 4129===

==War against the Players==
In 4132, Dreamland's '''Baywatch''' and '''Dolphin Rider''' parties voted together for a war against the distant [[Players|Play]] empire, with the Baywatchers expected to shoulder most of the combat and therefore also reserve the most gains, both territorial and political, for themselves.

===General election of 4134===
===General election of 4140===
As the soldiers of the [[Players|Play]] army massacred Dreamers in the '''Baywatch''' theater of the war, and spread plagues beyond it, the Dreamers (all states) voted to disarm their civilian population to turn over their weapons to the Dreamer army, whom they hoped would keep the Players from spreading further west.

===General election of 4142===
As the [[Play party]] occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of '''Mipatatatatai''', the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

====Immigration====
The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: The sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

====Hipsofts====
Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. These were moved to a city near the middle of the Dolphin Riders' territory, far from Moonshine and also far from the Players. The Dolphin Riders hoped that these immigrants would align themselves with Dreamland or at least become apolitical.

The '''Hipsoft''' faction of the Dolphin Rider party appeared soon after the immigrants were settled. The Hipsofts lived in the area where the immigrants had moved to and opposed the resettlement program. The other Riders seemed to have little interest in the situation, saying that they had done a good deed by adopting refugees from a pacifist nation but also unwilling to spread the immigrants around the rest of Dreamland. At this time, the immigrants had no political party of their own, and the mainstream Riders hoped that the appearance of the Hipsofts would encourage the immigrants to become strongly supportive of the mainstream Riders.

==Reforms to hygiene laws==
The Dolphin Riders had come to power in 4108 with a permissive attitude towards nudism and a strict hygiene policy, requiring all Dreamers to bathe and be clean after using the bathroom. They were required to purchase soap and other hygiene supplies on their own. This was to prevent the spread of disease. The Dreamer parliament had the authority to require Dreamer citizens to purchase soap and other supplies, but not to enact a tax to pay for the hygiene supplies, or to subsidize them in any other way. Even though there was more than one soap company, the price of soap rose high as soapmakers knew the demand for their product would never cease.

====Claims of soapmakers' complicity====
But now, the Dreamers increasingly began to blame their hygiene problems on the [[Players]] to the east, whom they suspected were deliberately polluting the rivers which flowed into coastal areas of Dreamland. The new generation of Dreamers thus came to support laws requiring Dreamers to wear clothing and deemphasizing the use of soap. Soapmakers were invested into their craft now, however, and opposed the new changes as they knew it would decrease their standard of living. The reformists accused the soapmakers of forcing the Dreamer population into a humiliating position, where they spent much of their time and money cleaning up after the Players, knowing that the Players could just as easily pollute the environment even more and thus force the Dreamers to scrub and clean themselves twice as much, all to the joy of the soapmakers. This led to accusations that the soapmakers themselves were cooperating with the Players to spread filth throughout Dreamland.

==Rise of pessimism==
Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only [[Baeba Swamp]], pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the [[Players]], but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

:''Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.''
Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

===Dreamers envy Players===
The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than 800,000 enrolled Players, more than Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself '''Hipsoft''' emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

===Comparative census of 4162===
By 4162, the Dreamer birthrate had increased, while the Player birthrate had fallen, and they had lost territory to the '''Tinks'''. Now, Dreamland's population was about double the Play population of 639,000.

====Census statistics====

{| class="wikitable"
|+ CENSUS OF 4162
|-
! Statistic
! Play
! Dreamland
! COMMENTS
|-
| Population
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 639,000
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 1,243,000
| Play population excludes '''Tata'''
|-
| Land area
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"|
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"|
|
|-
| Per capita GDP
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| Ξ3,832
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| > Ξ50,000
|
|-
| Fertility rate
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 4.74
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 3.58
|
|-
| Median age
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 12.7
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| ~24
|
|}

Although the fertility rates were not greatly different, the actual birth rate was much higher in Play territory because their adult population was primarily female (having fought many recent wars) whereas Dreamland's population consisted mostly of the Dreamers who had not been exposed to any recent wars.

===Other developments===
====Worries about defeat====
Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

===Dissolutionism===
Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

==Defeatist art and propaganda==
The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the [[Players]], as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.
===Depictions of the sun===
Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season. This meant that the entire planet experienced its summer season at the same time, and that even near the Equator, summer was much hotter than winter.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

====The Sun is Too Big====
Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but often riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

====Suntan vs sunburn====
Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, '''Pūpepas''', was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

===Linguistic issues===
The Dreamers were also ashamed of their languages, particularly the eastern ones.

====Phonology====
The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. Though both Dreamers and Players had learned to speak languages such as [[khulls|Leaper]] in the past, it required greater physical effort on their part to pronounce sounds like /k/ than it did for the native Leaper speakers, and therefore both the Dreamers and the Players had spoken languages with a similar acoustic sound for thousands of years. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

====Script====
Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

====Grammar====
Play was a ferociously complex language, with a grammar resembling [[khulls|Leaper]] but famously more difficult. For this reason, the '''Crystals''' and other groups such as the Leapers had an easier time mastering the Play language than did the Dreamers. This embarrassed the Dreamers doubly because the common perception was that Play would be an easy language for the Dreamers to learn because of its simple sound inventory. The Dreamers' inability to competently learn to speak Play had become deadly early in the Play occupation of Tata, as Play military leaders massacred Dreamer teachers for not quickly learning the language.

===Hunger===
Although the Dreamers were not short of food, even after losing the war, they spent more of their time and money on acquiring food than did the Players, who simply built their settlements around food sources so that they would never go hungry.

===Unhealable wounds===
====Hard and soft====
Even when conceding that the Dreamers were physically strong, the artists drew the Players as having square body shapes, whereas the Dreamers were depicted as being made of soft curves.

====Depiction of weapons====
A common stereotype was that Dreamers were physically delicate, but better able to handle weapons than were small, stoutly built tribes such as the Players. Some artists said that once the Dreamers lost their weapons, the Players' weakness would turn into a strength, as their poor ability to handle weapons would mean that every kill would be bloody rather than quick and clean. Meanwhile, other artists depicted the Players as fashioning better weapons, weapons that they could hold and the Dreamers could not.

====Depiction of other sharp objects====
The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The [[Crystals]] had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the [[Players]] and with the [[Soap Bubbles]] living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

====Metaphorical use====
The Dolphin Rider term for an unhealable wound was ''nu silika o pō okuleli'', which could be shortened to ''popōkuleli'' "unhealable". They saw that their people were inflicted with many such wounds, both physically and metaphorically, as they could not protect themselves from the local animal and plant life, but also could not regain territories lost to them by invasions in recent wars such as their war against the Players. Where other nations rose and fell, the Dreamers only grew around the hard barriers outsiders built for them.

The Dreamer propagandists reminded their people that the Players were only the most recent example of an army which had invaded Dreamland and come to permanently reside there. Earlier, the feminist '''Womb Justice''' army, fleeing from their homeland, took refuge in Dreamland but immediately demanded that all Dreamers move out so they could build a society run by women. The Dreamers did not fight these women, fearing that their own people would be unwilling to take up arms against such a society, but within a generation the Dreamers had grown tired of the Wombs and no longer believed that they needed to remain in Dreamland. Yet they were unable to push the Womb army out of Dreamland, and they conceded that they would remain in Dreamland for the indefinite future.

===Positive counterpoints===
For nearly a thousand years, outside cultures had stereotyped the Dreamers as being hypersexual and eager to engage in deviant sexual practices that made their men soft. This stereotype had been repeated by so many different foreign powers that the Dreamers had come to accept that it was true, but they made no plans to change their lifestyles. Instead, the Dreamers said that they were motivated by love, and that most of their enemies were motivated by hate and incapable of love. Rather than consider themselves immoral, the Dreamers said it was cultures such as the [[Players]] who were immoral, for instead of loving each other and their enemies, they sought to start a new war every year and took joy in their enemies' suffering.

==Debates over economics==
The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. [[STW]] mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of [[AlphaLeap]] in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

====Issues involving trade====
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

''this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.''

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly [[STW]], openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

===Arguments for capitalism===
The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising '''Teenprop''' corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, and then paying taxes in their own nations so that both the company and the citizens could benefit from the company's presence.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the '''Teenprop''' corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as the '''Anchor Empire''' (where STW sold most of its goods), and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

====Wealth creation theory====
The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as [[Kxesh]] that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

===Rise of pacifism===
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of [[Paba]], which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

====Secret diplomacy====
As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of '''capitalism''', the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

==Diplomatic outreach to Players==
In the mid-4160s, Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into [[Memnumu]] to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

The [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] also feared the Players and had suffered from their plagues. But when the Dreamers heard that the Players had broken up into four political parties, they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with at least one of them, and form an alliance between Dreamland and the most pro-Dreamer political party in the Play empire.

Because their main contact with the Players was through '''Tata''', the Dreamers understood little of the Players' internal struggles in Memnumu. The Dreamers knew that the original Play faction, the Milk Bottles, had been extremist, and that they had given way to the Pillows after a series of disasters mostly involving young children. They had heard of the rise of the Purses, but most Dreamers did not know that they were racists; they only knew that the Purses' positions on issues in general were more moderate than those of the Pillows, who were in turn more moderate than the Bottles. Therefore, the Dreamers believed that the Play nation as a whole was on a steady path towards more moderate politics, and could therefore become an ally of the Dreamers if they were able to continue along that path. The Dreamers were dismayed when they later learned that the Pillows had recovered their parliamentary majority, but figured that so long as the Purses were also represented in the Play parliament, the Dreamers still had an ally among the Players. (Most Dreamers still did not know, even years on, that the Purses considered Dreamers racially inferior, because the Purses had always focused on internal divisions among the Players in Memnumu.)

===Dreamers meet with Players===
The Dreamers had heard about the Players' new balance system, in which four parties would compete for power in the Parliament, and all four would be allowed to use game-like voting strategies, for example allowing people to vote outside their home districts, figuring that the resulting fierce competition would lead to better governance. They had been shown some anti-Dreamer literature known to have been written by the '''Milk Bottle''' faction of the Play party. With this, and other information they had learned about early happenings in the Play nation, Dreamland labeled the Milk Bottles as an extremist Play faction, and assumed that the other Play factions would thus be more friendly to Dreamland.

The Dreamers sent a team of tall, handsome male diplomats to meet with the female representatives of each of the four main Play parties, comparing and contrasting the Dolphin Riders' party platform with those of the women. The Players were feminists, but unlike the Moonshines, they respected foreign cultural norms, and therefore were accustomed to meeting with male diplomats. The Dreamers told the men to talk strictly about politics, but hoped that they could subliminally woo the women with their charms and return to Dreamland having signed a formal treaty of alliance with at least one, and perhaps more, of the new Play parties.

Four Dreamer men greeted the four Player women in the Play capital city of '''Pūpepas'''.
====Results of the meeting====
At the meeting, the Dreamer men realized that the Milk Bottles they had been calling Play extremists were in fact the most moderate of all the Play philosophies, and that the other three factions were even more hostile than that. Put another way, the Dreamers had assumed that the spectrum of Play political opinions ran the gamut from the fierce nationalism of the Milk Bottles to a cosmopolitan faction of unknown identity with whom they could form an alliance. But rather than ranging from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the Dreamers found out that the Players spanned from nationalism to racism.

Furthermore, even the racist Play faction, the '''Purses''', were nationalists, saying that the hated Eggs were still their allies in any conflict that involved a foreign power. Thus, even though the Purses had openly supported arresting the Eggs, they recognized the Eggs as fellow Players. Therefore none of the Play factions was willing to support Dreamland either militarily or economically.

The Dreamers were frustrated even by the name "balance system", confident that the Players had borrowed the idea of balance from the politics of Dreamland.

====Explanations to common people====
Dreamer diplomats had difficulty explaining to their own people why they had classified all four of Memnumu's Play parties as anti-Dreamer extremists, when the Dreamers had been expecting to find allies in the Play nation. Many Dreamers simply did not believe the diplomats' claims, arguing that at least the Eggs must be friendly towards Dreamland since they had been opposed by all of the other Play factions and had been attacked with no apparent provocation in a recent war led by the Firestones. But the Dreamers had diplomatic contacts with the wider Crystal party, who refused to accept any connection between the Dreamers and the Eggs, and still claimed that the reason the Crystals had abandoned the Eggs was because the required rescue mission would have been impossible.

====Dreamers embrace Tata====
When the Dreamers obtained a clearer understanding of the Play situation, they began to oppose the often talked about integration of Tata into a single unified Play nation, which had been proposed in 4151 but delayed over and over again for various reasons. The Dreamers believed that Tata's ruling '''Club''' party, though formally identical to the Pillows, was the only true moderate Play party, since they had legalized the Dreamer party in their own territory and did not take part in radical Play practices such as child labor and home invasions, even though they had never formally written these out of their party platform. The Dreamers considered all four of the Play parties in Memnumu's Milk Parliament to be extremists. They stated that the Purse ideology was moderate, but that because they were tribalists, the Dreamers could not ally with them after all, and therefore they were off the map of political discourse in Dreamland. The other three factions were also extremists, and most Dreamers considered them even worse than the Purses, since they all opposed Dreamland as well.

====Worries about population growth====
To the Dreamers, the greatest threat posed by the Players was their extremely high birthrate, which had for their first twenty years in power been so high that children under age thirteen comprised 3/4 of the Play population, and the population had doubled in this twenty-year period despite the many plagues, famines, and wars that the Players had endured and created. Meanwhile, though the Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had been youth-based, and had come to power with a high birthrate as well, theirs had never been nearly as high as the Players', and had been in decline for several generations, such that they had come to rely on '''Gold''' party arguments that the political power of a nation should not be related to the size of its population. By now, the Players had already outgrown the Dreamers despite having a much smaller land area, and it seemed inevitable to the Dreamers that the Players would grow even more. Since the Players had already won one major war against Dreamland, the Dreamers worried that their rapidly growing population would in the future lead them to win another.

The Players' birthrate had declined sharply around 4150 when they broke up into factions, however, and the Dreamers knew of this because of diplomatic contacts through Tata. The Dreamers stopped worrying so much about the Players' population expansion and began to focus on their problems at home. But then, when they heard that the Players were reviving the Milk Bottle party, they worried that Play women would once again have more children than they could care for, and that the children would grow up and start wars against Dreamland out of pure hunger, ignoring all common sense.

==Hipsoft war of 4183==
The immigrant '''Tipper''' party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent '''Hipsoft''' party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves '''Tippers''', disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant '''Hipsoft''' party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles
that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

===Moonshine's reaction===
Moonshine endorsed the Tippers' massacres, saying that the men were doing the right thing. Moonshine offered citizenship to all female Tippers, but stated that Tipper men would never be allowed into Moonshine territory, even though they had done a great favor for the Moonshines by killing many Dreamers. This was because Moonshine culture considered men's lives expendable, and that the best thing that men could do for Moonshine would be to stay at war and wear down the enemies of Moonshine without expecting any sort of reward other than the right to abuse the conquered people. Therefore Moonshine stated that if Tipper men wanted to marry women, they should take their wives from among the Dreamer population.

===Contact with the Matrix===
In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful [[Matrix]] army based in the nearby nation of '''Tata'''. Tata was on the north coast and was one of a chain of nations that had long been a buffer area between Dreamland and Moonshine, but had recently grown into a regional power in its own right.

The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland to focus their efforts on the city of [[Baeba Swamp]].

NOTE: The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.<ref>This is from a dream in which Russia did likewise.</ref>

==Newer economic developments==
Losing two wars had led to economic decline, and the increasing isolation of Dreamland drove up the cost of living. Furthermore, the rising cost of living made it difficult for the poorest Dreamers to afford food, and although the Dreamer states solved this problem with welfare payments, some of the western states were now encouraging people to desert their towns in order to live along the coast, much as the [[Players]] did, and obtain their food from the sea.

===Currency conversion===
Nearly three centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had opened stores in the [[Thunder Empire]], whose people owned Dreamer slaves and had little interest in friendly contacts with Dreamland. STW went further, declaring that slavery was not punishment enough, and declared war on [[Dreamland]] on its first official day of business. The result of this, over time, was that any economic growth for STW led to decline for Dreamland, and vice versa.

Dreamland had won its war with STW, even though STW was backed by the traditional military of the Thunder Empire, and nearly drove the corporation out of business despite the great physical distance between Dreamland and the primary STW stores. But in 4108, Dreamland lost control of its newly won territory, and STW returned to business holding a larger grudge against Dreamland than ever before. Dreamland continued to lose wars and cede economic supremacy for the next decades, and although STW was not a major driving force in this, STW reaped some benefit from it because their leaders were better able to take advantage of changing economic tides than were the politicians of the nations they did business with.
====The Ξ4 meal promise====
STW had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. The price of a meal was fixed at Ξ4, and STW's leaders promised that the price would never rise, regardless of what happened to the economies around them, including STW's non-restaurant stores, which did not accept the meal tokens. By tying the currency only to the price of food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and thus came to be used in international comparisons even by countries who had no interest in attracting business from STW.

The Dreamers disliked the so-called universal currency, since STW did not do business in Dreamland, and had always been hostile to Dreamland. The Dreamers stated the Ξ4 meal promise was humiliating because no Dreamers could expect to receive a meal for that price at any restaurant within Dreamland, and that STW had deliberately created an unfair setup that was only sustainable because they owned slaves and their restaurants served foods that had been obtained through slave labor and with minimal transportation and preparation costs.

====Economic restructuring====
Nonetheless, in comparing their economy to those of other nations, the Dreamers were forced to acknowledge STW's meal token currency rather than using their own. By this time, the an STW-like corporation had arisen in Dreamland, intent on solving the problems of Dreamland's economic isolation by producing goods locally and thus relieving the Dreamers' dependence on trade.

The annual per capita income of Dreamland as a whole had declined to about '''Ξ40,000''' by this time, even as the price of a meal in a typical restaurant had remained around Ξ80. The Dreamers were not bankrupted by their food prices because most Dreamers acquired some of their food themselves, cooking it at home during their free time or eating it raw if possible. Thus restaurants catered to travelers and to the wealthiest classes. On top of this, Dreamland's government encouraged its states to distribute welfare tickets to Dreamer families so that they could afford food, particularly in those areas where the natural supply of food was irregular. But Dreamland was a confederation, and could not tax its people directly, and therefore the disbursement of welfare was up to the states.

====Unskilled labor wages====
Dreamland practiced unregulated capitalism supported by welfare payments. There was no minimum wage, so it was common for young and unskilled laborers to receive just Ξ20 or Ξ25 for a day's work. Those who could not find stable employment would often work for even lower wages. Meanwhile, workers in some trades were paid only by selling things they produced and could go for months at a time without income. Therefore, Dreamland's lower class was materially poor even compared to the lower classes of poorer nations, but malnutrition was rare and usually of a sort that money would not have prevented.

===Distribution of necessities===
The charter of the ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party stated that the government must provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care for all citizens, even those Dreamers who chose to live in outlying areas where transportation costs were significant. Since transportation of food and essential goods was the responsibility of the government, the costs were socialized, and Dreamland's taxes were very high. However, the tax policies were the responsibilities of the states, and the Dolphin Riders' parliament could not enact a tax applying to a specific geographic area to force that area to improve its citizens' standard of living.

====Clothing====
Clothing was not defined as a basic human need in the Dolphin Rider platform, and on this they agreed with most of the minor Dreamer parties as well. Therefore, humans who needed protective clothes to work had to buy them on their own, disposable diapers were expensive, and people huddled together in blankets during Dreamland's rare cold winter nights.

The Dreamers and the Players had both often supported nudism, and largely for the same reasons, but opposition to nudism took different perspectives in the two empires. For the Players, opposition to nudism was entirely about hygiene, as the Players' child population had suffered from several plagues and spread these plagues outside their nation. However the Players were so tightly compacted into seaside habitats that they had early on exhausted their supply of plant fibers to weave new diapers, and the Play Parliament shut down the textile industry entirely so they could focus on fishing the sea. By contrast, the Dreamers' much lower fertility rate had kept them free of such problems. Rather, the Dreamers who supported wearing clothes were more concerned with secondary issues: since Dreamers often carried money with them, it was far more convenient for them to wear clothes to help carry the coins, and there were many trades that were much easier to perform while wearing protective clothes. The Dreamers mostly did wear clothes when it was convenient, and indeed their clothing production costs were lower than those in some poorer nations, but all clothes were distributed by private corporations who were free to charge any price they wished, even in areas where they had achieved a monopoly. Thus, many Dreamers spent much of their disposable income on clothing and could not afford to replace clothes that were worn out from daily use.

====Homes and furniture====
Likewise, Dreamland's climate was hot and sunny, and in some areas, people had traditionally lived on the beach, exposed to the elements, and not in any home at all. This extreme lifestyle was associated with the pre-Dreamer aboriginal population, numbering only a few thousand by this time, who lived in very specific locations such that the construction of a building to live in would make little difference. Nonetheless, most Dreamer homes were very simple, and the government promise as understood by the people was that Dreamers would have the right to a place to seek shelter from the rain, which might or might not be their everyday home.

===Typical prices===
The Dreamers embraced capitalism and therefore did not set standard prices on goods. Their government's role in providing for their people was limited to the welfare benefits described above, to medical care, and to providing shelter from nature. The average per capita GDP was around '''Ξ50,000'''. Note that this includes the entire population, not just those in work; the average salary of a worker was therefore significantly higher.

====Hygiene====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean. The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early. A full-body coat made from animal hides could cost around '''Ξ375'''.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living.

====Non-essential foods====
Palm wine and fruit juice averaged about the same price, about '''Ξ120''' per jug.

====Intangibles and services====
Because of the calm weather, travelers often slept outside, exposed to the elements. There was thus relatively little demands for inns, and most tended to be found in cities. A night's sleep in a room with many other travelers could cost around '''Ξ80''', and accomodations with more privacy were rare.

====Illegal transactions====
Slaves could be bought for around '''Ξ100,000''' to '''Ξ1 million''', a vastly higher price than the Ξ10,000 — Ξ50,000 that paid for their abduction and transportation from weakened nations such as Thaoa. The [[Players]] had contemplated selling people from their lower classes to foreign nations for even lower prices to relieve their population stress and also bring money into their economy, but such people were often profitable for the Players since they were little more than slaves already. Since slavery was illegal in Dreamland, such people could not be held openly, and therefore were typically prostitutes who remained in one place and were bound to a master. Male slaves nonetheless were sometimes used to row ships, where they were bound into place and released only when under the close watch of an armed guard.

===Private schools===
Dreamland's education system was privatized, and teachers charged families to enroll their pupils. This was unlike the [[Players|Play]] system, where education was free, and unlike [[STW]], which actually ''paid'' students to attend, albeit in a currency that could only be redeemed at STW.

There was no law requiring Dreamer adults to care for their aging parents, either financially or materially, since the elderly were covered under the same programs that covered disabled and sick people. (This is a relic of the '''Plume''' system that predated the Dolphin Riders.) Therefore parents had no guarantee that their children would portion off their future income to the parents, and no financial incentive to seek the best education for their children, nor to have large numbers of children, or even to have children at all.

Many Dreamer women remained at or near their homes during the daytime, and so teaching their children was simply part of their daily routine, and school systems tended to exist only in large cities. Nonetheless, tuition was affordable, averaging around '''Ξ4,000''' per student per year, much less than the average income of even the lowest class of Dreamers. This tuition covered the teachers' salaries only, and did not pay for the students' meals or their belongings, which often cost more than the tuition.

Dreamland's private schools worked both in competition and in cooperation with each other, as when two schools opened in the same city, typically each school would specialize in different subjects of study.

====Proposal for a public school system====
Nonetheless, the lack of free public education was a disincentive for couples planning to have children, and many Dreamer politicians wanted to start a tax-supported public school system based on a foreign model. But because they could not institute a tax on the entire Dreamer empire, each state would need to do this individually.

Opponents of this plan argued that a public school system would immediately turn into an unrestrained child labor operation, as the state-run school would have no authority above them and thus could not be shut down. As evidence they pointed to the school system of '''Moonshine''', which considered its students to be slaves, and to [[STW]], a private school system which had nonetheless functioned as an education monopoly for much of its existence and had relied on child labor (although with pay) to sustain itself.

The '''Play''' school system, however, did not force its students to work, or even to do schoolwork, and was a legally established government monopoly accountable to no outside authority. Supporters of the new plan claimed that the Play nation disproved all of their doubts. The opponents of the public school plan countered this argument by saying that the Players represented everything the Dreamers opposed, and that the Players in fact were the worst child abusers in the world, as they forced their children to find food for their parents with no salary at all.

==Impossible burdens==
In Dreamland, the middle class was the largest class, and therefore, in Dreamland's democratic elections, policies favoring the middle class tended to succeed. There was no welfare system, and many middle-class Dreamers believed that if they were to set up a welfare system for their poorest citizens, as some other nations had, Dreamland would become as poor as those other nations. Thus the lowest class remained poor. Some Dreamers wished that the lowest class would migrate to surrounding nations but there was no legal means of expelling a citizen, and the Dreamers realized that many emigrants would join the armies of Dreamland's enemies and could possibly lead an invasion against Dreamland in the future.

Because the lowest class made only about Ξ20 per day, and meals often cost more than this, these people could not afford their basic needs and had to steal food or turn to other crimes to make money. Many young women, including married women, worked as prostitutes, but because there were so many prostitutes, their earnings were meager and they were worse off than men who made a career from robbing people and stealing transported goods. (These people were called pirates in most languages, because this lifestyle was not confined to the sea.)

It was nearly impossible for a poor person to meet their needs for even a day in Dreamland without committing a crime. As above, they could not even legally use the bathroom without spending more than their entire income for a day, let alone find food to eat. This meant that Dreamland's various police forces could arrest almost any poor person at any time and put them in prison. However, in general, the middle class preferred to have the lower class out on the streets, since they performed useful jobs for the rest of society, and although it was a common subject of debate, the majority of middle-class Dreamers felt that they would rather tolerate the crime than lose the services of their lower class.

==Matrix treaty of 4190==
By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of '''Memnumu''' once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny [[Matrix]] army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

==Slope treaty==

===General election of 4205===
The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in [[Memnumu]].<ref>It is possible that the descendants of the Hipsides, now adults, still practiced this lifestyle in some territory between Dreamland and Tāmta.</ref>

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

====Arrival of the Cupbearers====
Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of '''Cupbearer''' refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.<ref>This may or may not be the state of Senampattore. Where it is on the map is clear, but the borders may have changed.</ref>

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the [[Players]] in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:
#The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
#Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
#The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in [[Baeba Swamp]] as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
#The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves ''pavača'',<ref>This word is ''čava'' "long hair" spelled backwards inside the circumfix ''p-..-a'' "having (a)". This method of word formation was dying out in Play, but persisted in some groups who were influenced by Andanese, because even though Andanese itself did not use this, it was more convenient with pure CV words, as Andanese had, than with Play whose syllable structure was more diverse.</ref> just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

===Capture of Crystal slaves===
A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising '''Slope''' party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

==Postwar period==
After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

===General election of 4227===
Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The ''bopo'' philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the ''bopo'' supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The '''Cupbearers''' may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

===General election of 4238===
Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

===General election of 4254===
After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the [[Memnumu|Play army]] and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.
==Naval war==
In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the [[Players]], which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the [[Ghost Empire|Ghosts]], who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called '''Laba'''. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of [[Moonshine]], but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world.
But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the [[Players|Play]] population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

==Inversion of propaganda==
Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the [[Players]], but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the [[Matrix]] propaganda of a hundred years prior.

===Weather metaphors===
Though living right along the Equator, the people of Hipatal and Laba in general had the same variety of body types found elsewhere. Some outsiders believed that they were all dark-skinned people, but immigrants such as '''Sašuasa''' had been of the same Lenian body type as the stereotypical eastern Dreamers who had fallen into ruin.

==Naval war in the Play sea==
===General election of 4287===
As the Dreamer navy,<ref>this did not actually take twenty years, but there were no global elections in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty</ref>, '''Laba''', invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the '''Teenprop''' corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

''NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.''

===Antiwar movement in Dreamland===
===="The Real Dreamland"====
Just as Dreamland seemed likely to win its war, a group of pacifists declared themselves to be the only true Dreamers, and pledged allegiance to the '''Cupbearers''' without formally joining the Cupbearer party. They said that the earlier Dreamers' pessimism was correct, and that Dreamland should be a pacifist multinational empire trading economically with foreign nations but without military expansionist goals. They supported '''Moonshine''', and thus while committed to pacifism, assumed that they would soon be targets in the war, and perhaps could be such easy targets that they would distract the navy from their war against the Players. Thus these new pacifists felt they could help the Players whether they were successful in remaking Dreamland into an economic power, in which case the war would stall, or unsuccessful, in which case they would be slaughtered by the pirates but could hopefully still save the Players.

The pacifists' claim to be the only true Dreamers closely resembled the Players' contemporary claim that the Play navy was the only true Laba. They had made their declarations independently, however, as the Play diplomats were blocked from contacting the pacifists by the Ghosts over land and by the pirates at sea.

===General election of 4295===
The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became popular.

===General election of 4316===
After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.
===General election of 4321===
Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

===General election of 4327===
===General election of 4343===
Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

==Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)==
Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing ''bepolere'', which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The ''Pōbipōpu'' and ''Pōronopa'' distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

===Contacts with Moonshine===
The '''Habit''' party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the '''Hipsoft''' settlements to and including the '''Womb Justice''' settlements. The Habits were the sons and daughters of the Crystals who had been pushed into the underclass in Baeba Swamp when the Leapers took over. That is, they were a faction of Crystals who resisted the Leapers.

====Tribal identity====
The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

====Partition====
By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small '''Hipsoft''' migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the '''Womb Justice ''' party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name '''Dreamland''' was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

====Moonshine-Habit relations====
The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's '''Habit''' party (''Tăta'')<ref>Note that this is not a homonym of the state name '''Tàta''' because the tones are different, but that in languages such as Play, the two may have been merged.</ref> to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called '''Wagillàra''', the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

===Demographic shifts===
After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the [[Players]] had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

:''Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.''

===General election of 4351===
Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

===General election of 4390===
Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

===General election of 4402===
Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

===General election of 4412===
The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.
===General election of 4419===
Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

===General election of 4438===
Luxury goods came back into fashion.

====Tribal reform====
Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The '''Tipper''' population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the '''Hipatal''' immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

===General election of 4440===
Luxury goods fell out of fashion.
===General election of 4445===
Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

===General election of 4462===
Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.
===General election of 4468===
Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.
===General election of 4485===
Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.
===General election of 4492===
The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.
===General election of 4500===
Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.
===General election of 4511===
Little changed in this election.
===General election of 4529===
Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.
===General election of 4531===
Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.
===General election of 4538===
Luxury goods became popular.
===General election of 4540===
Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

===Humanitarian attempts at intervention===
The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier.<ref>But remember that this from a different timeline. The figure cannot be taken as an exact count.</ref> Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both [[Baeba Swamp]] and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

''Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.''

==Other developments==
*56 (4150)
*52 (4202)
*13 (4215)
*24 (4239)
*79 (4318)
*80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the [[Hipatal]] people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

=Dreamer-Doll relations=
:''See [[Dolls]].''
Note that there is no convenient way to represent the [[babakiam|Play]]-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with ''dream'' and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the [[Dolls|Bottom]] party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (''nuufa''), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Bottoms did not allow their members to even have protruding fingernails. The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: '''fubap''' describing something soft and thus flexible, and '''nuufa''' describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

===Scope===
It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the '''Hiboh''' Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

===Dedication to pacifism===
The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon [[ppot#upl|drafted a party platform]] denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling '''Hailstorm''' army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

=Dreamer-Play relations=
''Žayuvas'' got its name when the rebel '''Tink''' army invaded their ally, the [[Play party]], and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, [[Dreamland]], than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory ''Memnumu''.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling '''Police''' faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the [[Play party]]. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the [[alphaleap|Leapers]] had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the '''Magic Combs''') never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

===Scope of Žayuvas===
It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of '''Šasa Kaina''', located near and traditionally friendly towards [[Thaoa]], at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

===Fertility calculations===
On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

;Oct 10 2021
There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding '''Tata''', where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

===Apportionment of representatives===
Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

==Evolution from factions to parties==
The [[Play party|Play]] charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

==Party membership==
The '''Police''' party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

==Culturebound issues of the Play Empire==
:''See also [[Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues]]''.
True to its name, the [[Play party]] dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

===Children's issues===
====Education====
The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory [[Raspara]] army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

===Tribal conflicts (general) ===
:''This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.''
====Height and hair color====

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured [[Paba]]p tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were [[#feminism|taller than their men]], this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

====Background====
Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive [[Raspara]] party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious [[swamp Kids|Tink]] army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall [[Repilia]]n tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the '''Flower Bees''' and the '''Rusted Pearls'''. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

====Conflicting tribal definitions====
Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the [[Palli]]-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

=Diplomatic contacts between the empires=

=Later periods=
These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.
===Hiboh===
The '''Hiboh''' era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true '''Sleeperism'''.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the '''Cold Men''', until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

===RKE Wars===
The '''RKE''' movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used [[Matrix]]-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.

=Notes in boats=
==Notes==

Dolphin Riders

2025-06-20T00:19:25Z

Poswob Rare: /* Impossible burdens */

The '''MFZ''' Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the [[Cosmopolitan Age]]. The original Empire, ''Mayuvas'', was [[Dreamland]], which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the [[Gold party]], as the word for gold in [[babakiam|Play]] was ''mayu''. The other two empires, ''Fayuvas'' and ''Žayuvas'', were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, [[Baeba Swamp]], which at the time was run primarily by the '''Iron''' party, an offshoot of the much older [[Zenith]] party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel '''ū''', giving ''Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas'', but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like '''uv''' (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

==Background==

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with [[Baeba Swamp]] to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of [[Moonshine]] and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with '''Tata''', also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

==Structure of Parliament==
Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the [[ppot#DPR|Dolphin Riders]], who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient [[Gold party]]. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

==Recognition of new tribes==
Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the '''Tippers''' who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

==Language==
The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited [[Lenian languages#DPR|Dolphin Rider]] language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near [[Baeba Swamp]] came to speak [[Ogili_II|Ogili]], the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

==Growth of the Kapa corporation==
An umbrella corporation called '''Kapa''' (in full, ''Nobōbo Kapa'') arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The ''kapa'' part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like '''Teenprop'''. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like '''Teens for Tomorrow''', though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after [[STW]]; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing '''Bottom''' party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the '''Yukiese''' family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of [[Paba]]. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the '''Teenprop''' political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

==Development of new political parties==
===Two-party stage===
The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support '''feminism''', believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world. The Dolphin Riders realized that if feminism took hold even in Dreamland, there would be no more land in the world run by men; free men would only exist as nomadic minorities within female nations.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support '''sarabism''', the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

==Creation of new parties==
'''Gatotōl''' had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the '''Comb''' party (''Pōrupu Resini'') which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's<ref>A vague and tentative date</ref> the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the '''Hipsoft''' party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new '''Carriage''' party (''āliki'') was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new '''Pointer''' party (''Pēbobi Lisuelesi'') was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a ''pēbobi''.

The '''Permission''' party (''Lepusepu Lesinepu'') was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the '''Butterfly''' party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

====Minor parties====
The '''Frame''' party (''Pōrupu Uimeka'') also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term ''sepu'' (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet ''lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu'' is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

==Culturebound issues==
The [[Gold party]] did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the '''Wildfire''' party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the '''Treehouse''' army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the '''Tippers''' came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

===Hupodas===
There was a ''Hupodas'' ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be ''lepisese'' "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

===Family issues===
====Early years====
The founding '''Dolphin Riders''' planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.<ref>While this logic may seem counterintuitive from the point of view of Earth, it was well illustrated in feminist societies like Moonshine that women were eager to raise children because they would be able to remain at home, and not need to work, while their husbands provided the entire financial support for raising each child.</ref>

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

====Later years====
A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

===Ilhina===
This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.
===Sarabism===
Related to the carrying of weapons.

===Capitalism and communism===
These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

===Censorship and propaganda===
These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

===Feminism===
Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

===Pimuo bopi===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as '''pacifism''' but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive [[Matrix]] army.

''This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as '''bopo''' below.''

===Pasio===
A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

===Bepolere===
Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

===Bopo===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as '''pacifism'''; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

==Proclamation of Empire==
===Proclamation of Empire in 4108===
In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the [[Play party|Play]] parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population.

Yet, 1,300<ref>an exact figure</ref> Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, [[Baeba Swamp]] had become the center of world diplomacy.

===General election of 4111===
The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the '''Treehouse''' party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the '''Wildfire''' party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

==Conflicts over hygiene==

===Hygiene laws===
The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (This is separate from the Hupodas issue.) One reason for the strong attention to hygiene was that the Dolphin Riders were tolerant of nudism, an issue that Dreamers had often gone back and forth on in the past.

The Dreamer Parliament had the power to make laws that applied to the entire empire. Thus it became a crime in Dreamland for a teenager or adult to leave a mess in a public bathroom, or even in nature, without immediately cleaning it up. The Dreamers also had to prove that they were bathing everyday, washing their clothes, and keeping their belongings clean as well. But the Parliament did not have the power to enact a tax applying to the whole Empire; this power was reserved to the states.
====Soapmaking corporation====
Thus, the Dreamer Parliament was unable to subsidize the purchase of soap and other hygiene-related goods, and Dreamers had to rely on their monthly income to buy these products. This immediately led to the rise of a powerful soapmaking class, who founded a corporation, '''Nobōbo Pobo Mosesene''' (PBM), named after the founding Mosesene family. PBM's workers allied themselves with the factions of the Baywatch and Rider parties that favored strict hygiene laws, and pledged to cooperate with each other across state and party lines since they were united on a single issue.

PBM's prices were expensive. The government's bathroom police (''pusepo serakale'') signed a contract with PBM stating that they would ride along with PBM's soap distributors to ensure that citizens were buying the product and keeping their homes and belongings clean. Thus the PBM corporation had a strong ally in the government and assumed they would not be easily shut down.

====Use of currency exchanges====
Nearly two centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. By tying the value of the currency to food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and over time, nations came to use the Ξ tokens as a neutral currency so that they could more easily compare their economies without needing to factor in inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.

The Dreamers had no STW stores and had always been hostile to STW, just as STW had always been hostile to them and had periodically raided Dreamer territory in the past to procure goods to sell in their stores. Therefore the Dreamers did not like STW's Ξ meal token currency either. But they had conceded to use it when comparing their economy to other economies, as it showed that the cost of living in Dreamland was quite high compared to most other nations, and that their people were not living as comfortably as a measure of total economic output would make it seem.

Dreamland's people had an average annual income around '''Ξ70,000''', but much higher in the east, in '''Baywatch''' territory, where the banks and most major corporations were. In fact the average per capita income ranged from about Ξ200,000 in Baywatch territory to Ξ20,000 in the various states of the west.

====Prices of hygiene and associated services====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living. The bathroom guards were separate from the bathroom police, meaning that someone needing to use the bathroom would sometimes need to greet two people just to get in, pay for the experience, and then clean up any mess they had made. Meanwhile it was illegal to hide in nature instead of using the bathroom except when that area was on private property and the landowner took it upon themselves to clean the landscape; in such a case, they were in turn subject to police oversight.

The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early.

===General election of 4116===

===General election of 4125===

===General election of 4129===

==War against the Players==
In 4132, Dreamland's '''Baywatch''' and '''Dolphin Rider''' parties voted together for a war against the distant [[Players|Play]] empire, with the Baywatchers expected to shoulder most of the combat and therefore also reserve the most gains, both territorial and political, for themselves.

===General election of 4134===
===General election of 4140===
As the soldiers of the [[Players|Play]] army massacred Dreamers in the '''Baywatch''' theater of the war, and spread plagues beyond it, the Dreamers (all states) voted to disarm their civilian population to turn over their weapons to the Dreamer army, whom they hoped would keep the Players from spreading further west.

===General election of 4142===
As the [[Play party]] occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of '''Mipatatatatai''', the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

====Immigration====
The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: The sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

====Hipsofts====
Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. These were moved to a city near the middle of the Dolphin Riders' territory, far from Moonshine and also far from the Players. The Dolphin Riders hoped that these immigrants would align themselves with Dreamland or at least become apolitical.

The '''Hipsoft''' faction of the Dolphin Rider party appeared soon after the immigrants were settled. The Hipsofts lived in the area where the immigrants had moved to and opposed the resettlement program. The other Riders seemed to have little interest in the situation, saying that they had done a good deed by adopting refugees from a pacifist nation but also unwilling to spread the immigrants around the rest of Dreamland. At this time, the immigrants had no political party of their own, and the mainstream Riders hoped that the appearance of the Hipsofts would encourage the immigrants to become strongly supportive of the mainstream Riders.

==Reforms to hygiene laws==
The Dolphin Riders had come to power in 4108 with a permissive attitude towards nudism and a strict hygiene policy, requiring all Dreamers to bathe and be clean after using the bathroom. They were required to purchase soap and other hygiene supplies on their own. This was to prevent the spread of disease. The Dreamer parliament had the authority to require Dreamer citizens to purchase soap and other supplies, but not to enact a tax to pay for the hygiene supplies, or to subsidize them in any other way. Even though there was more than one soap company, the price of soap rose high as soapmakers knew the demand for their product would never cease.

====Claims of soapmakers' complicity====
But now, the Dreamers increasingly began to blame their hygiene problems on the [[Players]] to the east, whom they suspected were deliberately polluting the rivers which flowed into coastal areas of Dreamland. The new generation of Dreamers thus came to support laws requiring Dreamers to wear clothing and deemphasizing the use of soap. Soapmakers were invested into their craft now, however, and opposed the new changes as they knew it would decrease their standard of living. The reformists accused the soapmakers of forcing the Dreamer population into a humiliating position, where they spent much of their time and money cleaning up after the Players, knowing that the Players could just as easily pollute the environment even more and thus force the Dreamers to scrub and clean themselves twice as much, all to the joy of the soapmakers. This led to accusations that the soapmakers themselves were cooperating with the Players to spread filth throughout Dreamland.

==Rise of pessimism==
Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only [[Baeba Swamp]], pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the [[Players]], but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

:''Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.''
Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

===Dreamers envy Players===
The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than 800,000 enrolled Players, more than Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself '''Hipsoft''' emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

===Comparative census of 4162===
By 4162, the Dreamer birthrate had increased, while the Player birthrate had fallen, and they had lost territory to the '''Tinks'''. Now, Dreamland's population was about double the Play population of 639,000.

====Census statistics====

{| class="wikitable"
|+ CENSUS OF 4162
|-
! Statistic
! Play
! Dreamland
! COMMENTS
|-
| Population
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 639,000
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 1,243,000
| Play population excludes '''Tata'''
|-
| Land area
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"|
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"|
|
|-
| Per capita GDP
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| Ξ3,832
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| > Ξ50,000
|
|-
| Fertility rate
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 4.74
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 3.58
|
|-
| Median age
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 12.7
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| ~24
|
|}

Although the fertility rates were not greatly different, the actual birth rate was much higher in Play territory because their adult population was primarily female (having fought many recent wars) whereas Dreamland's population consisted mostly of the Dreamers who had not been exposed to any recent wars.

===Other developments===
====Worries about defeat====
Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

===Dissolutionism===
Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

==Defeatist art and propaganda==
The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the [[Players]], as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.
===Depictions of the sun===
Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season. This meant that the entire planet experienced its summer season at the same time, and that even near the Equator, summer was much hotter than winter.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

====The Sun is Too Big====
Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but often riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

====Suntan vs sunburn====
Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, '''Pūpepas''', was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

===Linguistic issues===
The Dreamers were also ashamed of their languages, particularly the eastern ones.

====Phonology====
The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. Though both Dreamers and Players had learned to speak languages such as [[khulls|Leaper]] in the past, it required greater physical effort on their part to pronounce sounds like /k/ than it did for the native Leaper speakers, and therefore both the Dreamers and the Players had spoken languages with a similar acoustic sound for thousands of years. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

====Script====
Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

====Grammar====
Play was a ferociously complex language, with a grammar resembling [[khulls|Leaper]] but famously more difficult. For this reason, the '''Crystals''' and other groups such as the Leapers had an easier time mastering the Play language than did the Dreamers. This embarrassed the Dreamers doubly because the common perception was that Play would be an easy language for the Dreamers to learn because of its simple sound inventory. The Dreamers' inability to competently learn to speak Play had become deadly early in the Play occupation of Tata, as Play military leaders massacred Dreamer teachers for not quickly learning the language.

===Hunger===
Although the Dreamers were not short of food, even after losing the war, they spent more of their time and money on acquiring food than did the Players, who simply built their settlements around food sources so that they would never go hungry.

===Unhealable wounds===
====Hard and soft====
Even when conceding that the Dreamers were physically strong, the artists drew the Players as having square body shapes, whereas the Dreamers were depicted as being made of soft curves.

====Depiction of weapons====
A common stereotype was that Dreamers were physically delicate, but better able to handle weapons than were small, stoutly built tribes such as the Players. Some artists said that once the Dreamers lost their weapons, the Players' weakness would turn into a strength, as their poor ability to handle weapons would mean that every kill would be bloody rather than quick and clean. Meanwhile, other artists depicted the Players as fashioning better weapons, weapons that they could hold and the Dreamers could not.

====Depiction of other sharp objects====
The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The [[Crystals]] had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the [[Players]] and with the [[Soap Bubbles]] living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

====Metaphorical use====
The Dolphin Rider term for an unhealable wound was ''nu silika o pō okuleli'', which could be shortened to ''popōkuleli'' "unhealable". They saw that their people were inflicted with many such wounds, both physically and metaphorically, as they could not protect themselves from the local animal and plant life, but also could not regain territories lost to them by invasions in recent wars such as their war against the Players. Where other nations rose and fell, the Dreamers only grew around the hard barriers outsiders built for them.

The Dreamer propagandists reminded their people that the Players were only the most recent example of an army which had invaded Dreamland and come to permanently reside there. Earlier, the feminist '''Womb Justice''' army, fleeing from their homeland, took refuge in Dreamland but immediately demanded that all Dreamers move out so they could build a society run by women. The Dreamers did not fight these women, fearing that their own people would be unwilling to take up arms against such a society, but within a generation the Dreamers had grown tired of the Wombs and no longer believed that they needed to remain in Dreamland. Yet they were unable to push the Womb army out of Dreamland, and they conceded that they would remain in Dreamland for the indefinite future.

===Positive counterpoints===
For nearly a thousand years, outside cultures had stereotyped the Dreamers as being hypersexual and eager to engage in deviant sexual practices that made their men soft. This stereotype had been repeated by so many different foreign powers that the Dreamers had come to accept that it was true, but they made no plans to change their lifestyles. Instead, the Dreamers said that they were motivated by love, and that most of their enemies were motivated by hate and incapable of love. Rather than consider themselves immoral, the Dreamers said it was cultures such as the [[Players]] who were immoral, for instead of loving each other and their enemies, they sought to start a new war every year and took joy in their enemies' suffering.

==Debates over economics==
The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. [[STW]] mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of [[AlphaLeap]] in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

====Issues involving trade====
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

''this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.''

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly [[STW]], openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

===Arguments for capitalism===
The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising '''Teenprop''' corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, and then paying taxes in their own nations so that both the company and the citizens could benefit from the company's presence.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the '''Teenprop''' corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as the '''Anchor Empire''' (where STW sold most of its goods), and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

====Wealth creation theory====
The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as [[Kxesh]] that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

===Rise of pacifism===
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of [[Paba]], which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

====Secret diplomacy====
As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of '''capitalism''', the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

==Diplomatic outreach to Players==
In the mid-4160s, Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into [[Memnumu]] to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

The [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] also feared the Players and had suffered from their plagues. But when the Dreamers heard that the Players had broken up into four political parties, they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with at least one of them, and form an alliance between Dreamland and the most pro-Dreamer political party in the Play empire.

Because their main contact with the Players was through '''Tata''', the Dreamers understood little of the Players' internal struggles in Memnumu. The Dreamers knew that the original Play faction, the Milk Bottles, had been extremist, and that they had given way to the Pillows after a series of disasters mostly involving young children. They had heard of the rise of the Purses, but most Dreamers did not know that they were racists; they only knew that the Purses' positions on issues in general were more moderate than those of the Pillows, who were in turn more moderate than the Bottles. Therefore, the Dreamers believed that the Play nation as a whole was on a steady path towards more moderate politics, and could therefore become an ally of the Dreamers if they were able to continue along that path. The Dreamers were dismayed when they later learned that the Pillows had recovered their parliamentary majority, but figured that so long as the Purses were also represented in the Play parliament, the Dreamers still had an ally among the Players. (Most Dreamers still did not know, even years on, that the Purses considered Dreamers racially inferior, because the Purses had always focused on internal divisions among the Players in Memnumu.)

===Dreamers meet with Players===
The Dreamers had heard about the Players' new balance system, in which four parties would compete for power in the Parliament, and all four would be allowed to use game-like voting strategies, for example allowing people to vote outside their home districts, figuring that the resulting fierce competition would lead to better governance. They had been shown some anti-Dreamer literature known to have been written by the '''Milk Bottle''' faction of the Play party. With this, and other information they had learned about early happenings in the Play nation, Dreamland labeled the Milk Bottles as an extremist Play faction, and assumed that the other Play factions would thus be more friendly to Dreamland.

The Dreamers sent a team of tall, handsome male diplomats to meet with the female representatives of each of the four main Play parties, comparing and contrasting the Dolphin Riders' party platform with those of the women. The Players were feminists, but unlike the Moonshines, they respected foreign cultural norms, and therefore were accustomed to meeting with male diplomats. The Dreamers told the men to talk strictly about politics, but hoped that they could subliminally woo the women with their charms and return to Dreamland having signed a formal treaty of alliance with at least one, and perhaps more, of the new Play parties.

Four Dreamer men greeted the four Player women in the Play capital city of '''Pūpepas'''.
====Results of the meeting====
At the meeting, the Dreamer men realized that the Milk Bottles they had been calling Play extremists were in fact the most moderate of all the Play philosophies, and that the other three factions were even more hostile than that. Put another way, the Dreamers had assumed that the spectrum of Play political opinions ran the gamut from the fierce nationalism of the Milk Bottles to a cosmopolitan faction of unknown identity with whom they could form an alliance. But rather than ranging from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the Dreamers found out that the Players spanned from nationalism to racism.

Furthermore, even the racist Play faction, the '''Purses''', were nationalists, saying that the hated Eggs were still their allies in any conflict that involved a foreign power. Thus, even though the Purses had openly supported arresting the Eggs, they recognized the Eggs as fellow Players. Therefore none of the Play factions was willing to support Dreamland either militarily or economically.

The Dreamers were frustrated even by the name "balance system", confident that the Players had borrowed the idea of balance from the politics of Dreamland.

====Explanations to common people====
Dreamer diplomats had difficulty explaining to their own people why they had classified all four of Memnumu's Play parties as anti-Dreamer extremists, when the Dreamers had been expecting to find allies in the Play nation. Many Dreamers simply did not believe the diplomats' claims, arguing that at least the Eggs must be friendly towards Dreamland since they had been opposed by all of the other Play factions and had been attacked with no apparent provocation in a recent war led by the Firestones. But the Dreamers had diplomatic contacts with the wider Crystal party, who refused to accept any connection between the Dreamers and the Eggs, and still claimed that the reason the Crystals had abandoned the Eggs was because the required rescue mission would have been impossible.

====Dreamers embrace Tata====
When the Dreamers obtained a clearer understanding of the Play situation, they began to oppose the often talked about integration of Tata into a single unified Play nation, which had been proposed in 4151 but delayed over and over again for various reasons. The Dreamers believed that Tata's ruling '''Club''' party, though formally identical to the Pillows, was the only true moderate Play party, since they had legalized the Dreamer party in their own territory and did not take part in radical Play practices such as child labor and home invasions, even though they had never formally written these out of their party platform. The Dreamers considered all four of the Play parties in Memnumu's Milk Parliament to be extremists. They stated that the Purse ideology was moderate, but that because they were tribalists, the Dreamers could not ally with them after all, and therefore they were off the map of political discourse in Dreamland. The other three factions were also extremists, and most Dreamers considered them even worse than the Purses, since they all opposed Dreamland as well.

====Worries about population growth====
To the Dreamers, the greatest threat posed by the Players was their extremely high birthrate, which had for their first twenty years in power been so high that children under age thirteen comprised 3/4 of the Play population, and the population had doubled in this twenty-year period despite the many plagues, famines, and wars that the Players had endured and created. Meanwhile, though the Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had been youth-based, and had come to power with a high birthrate as well, theirs had never been nearly as high as the Players', and had been in decline for several generations, such that they had come to rely on '''Gold''' party arguments that the political power of a nation should not be related to the size of its population. By now, the Players had already outgrown the Dreamers despite having a much smaller land area, and it seemed inevitable to the Dreamers that the Players would grow even more. Since the Players had already won one major war against Dreamland, the Dreamers worried that their rapidly growing population would in the future lead them to win another.

The Players' birthrate had declined sharply around 4150 when they broke up into factions, however, and the Dreamers knew of this because of diplomatic contacts through Tata. The Dreamers stopped worrying so much about the Players' population expansion and began to focus on their problems at home. But then, when they heard that the Players were reviving the Milk Bottle party, they worried that Play women would once again have more children than they could care for, and that the children would grow up and start wars against Dreamland out of pure hunger, ignoring all common sense.

==Hipsoft war of 4183==
The immigrant '''Tipper''' party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent '''Hipsoft''' party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves '''Tippers''', disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant '''Hipsoft''' party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles
that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

===Moonshine's reaction===
Moonshine endorsed the Tippers' massacres, saying that the men were doing the right thing. Moonshine offered citizenship to all female Tippers, but stated that Tipper men would never be allowed into Moonshine territory, even though they had done a great favor for the Moonshines by killing many Dreamers. This was because Moonshine culture considered men's lives expendable, and that the best thing that men could do for Moonshine would be to stay at war and wear down the enemies of Moonshine without expecting any sort of reward other than the right to abuse the conquered people. Therefore Moonshine stated that if Tipper men wanted to marry women, they should take their wives from among the Dreamer population.

===Contact with the Matrix===
In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful [[Matrix]] army based in the nearby nation of '''Tata'''. Tata was on the north coast and was one of a chain of nations that had long been a buffer area between Dreamland and Moonshine, but had recently grown into a regional power in its own right.

The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland to focus their efforts on the city of [[Baeba Swamp]].

NOTE: The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.<ref>This is from a dream in which Russia did likewise.</ref>

==Newer economic developments==
Losing two wars had led to economic decline, and the increasing isolation of Dreamland drove up the cost of living. Furthermore, the rising cost of living made it difficult for the poorest Dreamers to afford food, and although the Dreamer states solved this problem with welfare payments, some of the western states were now encouraging people to desert their towns in order to live along the coast, much as the [[Players]] did, and obtain their food from the sea.

===Currency conversion===
Nearly three centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had opened stores in the [[Thunder Empire]], whose people owned Dreamer slaves and had little interest in friendly contacts with Dreamland. STW went further, declaring that slavery was not punishment enough, and declared war on [[Dreamland]] on its first official day of business. The result of this, over time, was that any economic growth for STW led to decline for Dreamland, and vice versa.

Dreamland had won its war with STW, even though STW was backed by the traditional military of the Thunder Empire, and nearly drove the corporation out of business despite the great physical distance between Dreamland and the primary STW stores. But in 4108, Dreamland lost control of its newly won territory, and STW returned to business holding a larger grudge against Dreamland than ever before. Dreamland continued to lose wars and cede economic supremacy for the next decades, and although STW was not a major driving force in this, STW reaped some benefit from it because their leaders were better able to take advantage of changing economic tides than were the politicians of the nations they did business with.
====The Ξ4 meal promise====
STW had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. The price of a meal was fixed at Ξ4, and STW's leaders promised that the price would never rise, regardless of what happened to the economies around them, including STW's non-restaurant stores, which did not accept the meal tokens. By tying the currency only to the price of food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and thus came to be used in international comparisons even by countries who had no interest in attracting business from STW.

The Dreamers disliked the so-called universal currency, since STW did not do business in Dreamland, and had always been hostile to Dreamland. The Dreamers stated the Ξ4 meal promise was humiliating because no Dreamers could expect to receive a meal for that price at any restaurant within Dreamland, and that STW had deliberately created an unfair setup that was only sustainable because they owned slaves and their restaurants served foods that had been obtained through slave labor and with minimal transportation and preparation costs.

====Economic restructuring====
Nonetheless, in comparing their economy to those of other nations, the Dreamers were forced to acknowledge STW's meal token currency rather than using their own. By this time, the an STW-like corporation had arisen in Dreamland, intent on solving the problems of Dreamland's economic isolation by producing goods locally and thus relieving the Dreamers' dependence on trade.

The annual per capita income of Dreamland as a whole had declined to about '''Ξ40,000''' by this time, even as the price of a meal in a typical restaurant had remained around Ξ80. The Dreamers were not bankrupted by their food prices because most Dreamers acquired some of their food themselves, cooking it at home during their free time or eating it raw if possible. Thus restaurants catered to travelers and to the wealthiest classes. On top of this, Dreamland's government encouraged its states to distribute welfare tickets to Dreamer families so that they could afford food, particularly in those areas where the natural supply of food was irregular. But Dreamland was a confederation, and could not tax its people directly, and therefore the disbursement of welfare was up to the states.

====Unskilled labor wages====
Dreamland practiced unregulated capitalism supported by welfare payments. There was no minimum wage, so it was common for young and unskilled laborers to receive just Ξ20 or Ξ25 for a day's work. Those who could not find stable employment would often work for even lower wages. Meanwhile, workers in some trades were paid only by selling things they produced and could go for months at a time without income. Therefore, Dreamland's lower class was materially poor even compared to the lower classes of poorer nations, but malnutrition was rare and usually of a sort that money would not have prevented.

===Distribution of necessities===
The charter of the ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party stated that the government must provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care for all citizens, even those Dreamers who chose to live in outlying areas where transportation costs were significant. Since transportation of food and essential goods was the responsibility of the government, the costs were socialized, and Dreamland's taxes were very high. However, the tax policies were the responsibilities of the states, and the Dolphin Riders' parliament could not enact a tax applying to a specific geographic area to force that area to improve its citizens' standard of living.

====Clothing====
Clothing was not defined as a basic human need in the Dolphin Rider platform, and on this they agreed with most of the minor Dreamer parties as well. Therefore, humans who needed protective clothes to work had to buy them on their own, disposable diapers were expensive, and people huddled together in blankets during Dreamland's rare cold winter nights.

The Dreamers and the Players had both often supported nudism, and largely for the same reasons, but opposition to nudism took different perspectives in the two empires. For the Players, opposition to nudism was entirely about hygiene, as the Players' child population had suffered from several plagues and spread these plagues outside their nation. However the Players were so tightly compacted into seaside habitats that they had early on exhausted their supply of plant fibers to weave new diapers, and the Play Parliament shut down the textile industry entirely so they could focus on fishing the sea. By contrast, the Dreamers' much lower fertility rate had kept them free of such problems. Rather, the Dreamers who supported wearing clothes were more concerned with secondary issues: since Dreamers often carried money with them, it was far more convenient for them to wear clothes to help carry the coins, and there were many trades that were much easier to perform while wearing protective clothes. The Dreamers mostly did wear clothes when it was convenient, and indeed their clothing production costs were lower than those in some poorer nations, but all clothes were distributed by private corporations who were free to charge any price they wished, even in areas where they had achieved a monopoly. Thus, many Dreamers spent much of their disposable income on clothing and could not afford to replace clothes that were worn out from daily use.

====Homes and furniture====
Likewise, Dreamland's climate was hot and sunny, and in some areas, people had traditionally lived on the beach, exposed to the elements, and not in any home at all. This extreme lifestyle was associated with the pre-Dreamer aboriginal population, numbering only a few thousand by this time, who lived in very specific locations such that the construction of a building to live in would make little difference. Nonetheless, most Dreamer homes were very simple, and the government promise as understood by the people was that Dreamers would have the right to a place to seek shelter from the rain, which might or might not be their everyday home.

===Typical prices===
The Dreamers embraced capitalism and therefore did not set standard prices on goods. Their government's role in providing for their people was limited to the welfare benefits described above, to medical care, and to providing shelter from nature. The average per capita GDP was around '''Ξ50,000'''. Note that this includes the entire population, not just those in work; the average salary of a worker was therefore significantly higher.

====Hygiene====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean. The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early. A full-body coat made from animal hides could cost around '''Ξ375'''.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living.

====Non-essential foods====
Palm wine and fruit juice averaged about the same price, about '''Ξ120''' per jug.

====Intangibles and services====
Because of the calm weather, travelers often slept outside, exposed to the elements. There was thus relatively little demands for inns, and most tended to be found in cities. A night's sleep in a room with many other travelers could cost around '''Ξ80''', and accomodations with more privacy were rare.

====Illegal transactions====
Slaves could be bought for around '''Ξ100,000''' to '''Ξ1 million''', a vastly higher price than the Ξ10,000 — Ξ50,000 that paid for their abduction and transportation from weakened nations such as Thaoa. The [[Players]] had contemplated selling people from their lower classes to foreign nations for even lower prices to relieve their population stress and also bring money into their economy, but such people were often profitable for the Players since they were little more than slaves already. Since slavery was illegal in Dreamland, such people could not be held openly, and therefore were typically prostitutes who remained in one place and were bound to a master. Male slaves nonetheless were sometimes used to row ships, where they were bound into place and released only when under the close watch of an armed guard.

===Private schools===
Dreamland's education system was privatized, and teachers charged families to enroll their pupils. This was unlike the [[Players|Play]] system, where education was free, and unlike [[STW]], which actually ''paid'' students to attend, albeit in a currency that could only be redeemed at STW.

There was no law requiring Dreamer adults to care for their aging parents, either financially or materially, since the elderly were covered under the same programs that covered disabled and sick people. (This is a relic of the '''Plume''' system that predated the Dolphin Riders.) Therefore parents had no guarantee that their children would portion off their future income to the parents, and no financial incentive to seek the best education for their children, nor to have large numbers of children, or even to have children at all.

Many Dreamer women remained at or near their homes during the daytime, and so teaching their children was simply part of their daily routine, and school systems tended to exist only in large cities. Nonetheless, tuition was affordable, averaging around '''Ξ4,000''' per student per year, much less than the average income of even the lowest class of Dreamers. This tuition covered the teachers' salaries only, and did not pay for the students' meals or their belongings, which often cost more than the tuition.

Dreamland's private schools worked both in competition and in cooperation with each other, as when two schools opened in the same city, typically each school would specialize in different subjects of study.

====Proposal for a public school system====
Nonetheless, the lack of free public education was a disincentive for couples planning to have children, and many Dreamer politicians wanted to start a tax-supported public school system based on a foreign model. But because they could not institute a tax on the entire Dreamer empire, each state would need to do this individually.

Opponents of this plan argued that a public school system would immediately turn into an unrestrained child labor operation, as the state-run school would have no authority above them and thus could not be shut down. As evidence they pointed to the school system of '''Moonshine''', which considered its students to be slaves, and to [[STW]], a private school system which had nonetheless functioned as an education monopoly for much of its existence and had relied on child labor (although with pay) to sustain itself.

The '''Play''' school system, however, did not force its students to work, or even to do schoolwork, and was a legally established government monopoly accountable to no outside authority. Supporters of the new plan claimed that the Play nation disproved all of their doubts. The opponents of the public school plan countered this argument by saying that the Players represented everything the Dreamers opposed, and that the Players in fact were the worst child abusers in the world, as they forced their children to find food for their parents with no salary at all.

==Impossible burdens==
In Dreamland, the middle class was the largest class, and therefore, in Dreamland's democratic elections, policies favoring the middle class tended to succeed. There was no welfare system, and many middle-class Dreamers believed that if they were to set up a welfare system for their poorest citizens, as some other nations had, Dreamland would become as poor as those other nations. Thus the lowest class remained poor. Some Dreamers wished that the lowest class would migrate to surrounding nations but there was no legal means of doing this.

Because the lowest class made only about Ξ20 per day, and meals often cost more than this, these people could not afford their basic needs and had to steal food or turn to other crimes to make money. Many young women, including married women, worked as prostitutes, but because there were so many prostitutes, their earnings were meager and they were worse off than men who made a career from robbing people and stealing transported goods. (These people were called pirates in most languages, because this lifestyle was not confined to the sea.)

It was nearly impossible for a poor person to meet their needs for even a day in Dreamland without committing a crime. As above, they could not even legally use the bathroom without spending more than their entire income for a day, let alone find food to eat. This meant that Dreamland's various police forces could arrest almost any poor person at any time and put them in prison. However, in general, the middle class preferred to have the lower class out on the streets, since they performed useful jobs for the rest of society, and although it was a common subject of debate, the majority of middle-class Dreamers felt that they would rather tolerate the crime than lose the services of their lower class.

==Matrix treaty of 4190==
By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of '''Memnumu''' once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny [[Matrix]] army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

==Slope treaty==

===General election of 4205===
The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in [[Memnumu]].<ref>It is possible that the descendants of the Hipsides, now adults, still practiced this lifestyle in some territory between Dreamland and Tāmta.</ref>

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

====Arrival of the Cupbearers====
Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of '''Cupbearer''' refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.<ref>This may or may not be the state of Senampattore. Where it is on the map is clear, but the borders may have changed.</ref>

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the [[Players]] in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:
#The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
#Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
#The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in [[Baeba Swamp]] as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
#The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves ''pavača'',<ref>This word is ''čava'' "long hair" spelled backwards inside the circumfix ''p-..-a'' "having (a)". This method of word formation was dying out in Play, but persisted in some groups who were influenced by Andanese, because even though Andanese itself did not use this, it was more convenient with pure CV words, as Andanese had, than with Play whose syllable structure was more diverse.</ref> just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

===Capture of Crystal slaves===
A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising '''Slope''' party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

==Postwar period==
After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

===General election of 4227===
Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The ''bopo'' philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the ''bopo'' supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The '''Cupbearers''' may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

===General election of 4238===
Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

===General election of 4254===
After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the [[Memnumu|Play army]] and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.
==Naval war==
In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the [[Players]], which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the [[Ghost Empire|Ghosts]], who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called '''Laba'''. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of [[Moonshine]], but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world.
But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the [[Players|Play]] population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

==Inversion of propaganda==
Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the [[Players]], but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the [[Matrix]] propaganda of a hundred years prior.

===Weather metaphors===
Though living right along the Equator, the people of Hipatal and Laba in general had the same variety of body types found elsewhere. Some outsiders believed that they were all dark-skinned people, but immigrants such as '''Sašuasa''' had been of the same Lenian body type as the stereotypical eastern Dreamers who had fallen into ruin.

==Naval war in the Play sea==
===General election of 4287===
As the Dreamer navy,<ref>this did not actually take twenty years, but there were no global elections in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty</ref>, '''Laba''', invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the '''Teenprop''' corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

''NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.''

===Antiwar movement in Dreamland===
===="The Real Dreamland"====
Just as Dreamland seemed likely to win its war, a group of pacifists declared themselves to be the only true Dreamers, and pledged allegiance to the '''Cupbearers''' without formally joining the Cupbearer party. They said that the earlier Dreamers' pessimism was correct, and that Dreamland should be a pacifist multinational empire trading economically with foreign nations but without military expansionist goals. They supported '''Moonshine''', and thus while committed to pacifism, assumed that they would soon be targets in the war, and perhaps could be such easy targets that they would distract the navy from their war against the Players. Thus these new pacifists felt they could help the Players whether they were successful in remaking Dreamland into an economic power, in which case the war would stall, or unsuccessful, in which case they would be slaughtered by the pirates but could hopefully still save the Players.

The pacifists' claim to be the only true Dreamers closely resembled the Players' contemporary claim that the Play navy was the only true Laba. They had made their declarations independently, however, as the Play diplomats were blocked from contacting the pacifists by the Ghosts over land and by the pirates at sea.

===General election of 4295===
The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became popular.

===General election of 4316===
After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.
===General election of 4321===
Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

===General election of 4327===
===General election of 4343===
Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

==Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)==
Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing ''bepolere'', which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The ''Pōbipōpu'' and ''Pōronopa'' distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

===Contacts with Moonshine===
The '''Habit''' party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the '''Hipsoft''' settlements to and including the '''Womb Justice''' settlements. The Habits were the sons and daughters of the Crystals who had been pushed into the underclass in Baeba Swamp when the Leapers took over. That is, they were a faction of Crystals who resisted the Leapers.

====Tribal identity====
The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

====Partition====
By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small '''Hipsoft''' migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the '''Womb Justice ''' party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name '''Dreamland''' was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

====Moonshine-Habit relations====
The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's '''Habit''' party (''Tăta'')<ref>Note that this is not a homonym of the state name '''Tàta''' because the tones are different, but that in languages such as Play, the two may have been merged.</ref> to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called '''Wagillàra''', the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

===Demographic shifts===
After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the [[Players]] had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

:''Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.''

===General election of 4351===
Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

===General election of 4390===
Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

===General election of 4402===
Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

===General election of 4412===
The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.
===General election of 4419===
Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

===General election of 4438===
Luxury goods came back into fashion.

====Tribal reform====
Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The '''Tipper''' population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the '''Hipatal''' immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

===General election of 4440===
Luxury goods fell out of fashion.
===General election of 4445===
Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

===General election of 4462===
Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.
===General election of 4468===
Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.
===General election of 4485===
Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.
===General election of 4492===
The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.
===General election of 4500===
Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.
===General election of 4511===
Little changed in this election.
===General election of 4529===
Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.
===General election of 4531===
Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.
===General election of 4538===
Luxury goods became popular.
===General election of 4540===
Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

===Humanitarian attempts at intervention===
The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier.<ref>But remember that this from a different timeline. The figure cannot be taken as an exact count.</ref> Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both [[Baeba Swamp]] and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

''Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.''

==Other developments==
*56 (4150)
*52 (4202)
*13 (4215)
*24 (4239)
*79 (4318)
*80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the [[Hipatal]] people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

=Dreamer-Doll relations=
:''See [[Dolls]].''
Note that there is no convenient way to represent the [[babakiam|Play]]-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with ''dream'' and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the [[Dolls|Bottom]] party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (''nuufa''), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Bottoms did not allow their members to even have protruding fingernails. The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: '''fubap''' describing something soft and thus flexible, and '''nuufa''' describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

===Scope===
It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the '''Hiboh''' Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

===Dedication to pacifism===
The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon [[ppot#upl|drafted a party platform]] denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling '''Hailstorm''' army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

=Dreamer-Play relations=
''Žayuvas'' got its name when the rebel '''Tink''' army invaded their ally, the [[Play party]], and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, [[Dreamland]], than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory ''Memnumu''.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling '''Police''' faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the [[Play party]]. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the [[alphaleap|Leapers]] had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the '''Magic Combs''') never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

===Scope of Žayuvas===
It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of '''Šasa Kaina''', located near and traditionally friendly towards [[Thaoa]], at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

===Fertility calculations===
On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

;Oct 10 2021
There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding '''Tata''', where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

===Apportionment of representatives===
Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

==Evolution from factions to parties==
The [[Play party|Play]] charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

==Party membership==
The '''Police''' party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

==Culturebound issues of the Play Empire==
:''See also [[Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues]]''.
True to its name, the [[Play party]] dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

===Children's issues===
====Education====
The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory [[Raspara]] army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

===Tribal conflicts (general) ===
:''This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.''
====Height and hair color====

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured [[Paba]]p tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were [[#feminism|taller than their men]], this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

====Background====
Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive [[Raspara]] party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious [[swamp Kids|Tink]] army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall [[Repilia]]n tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the '''Flower Bees''' and the '''Rusted Pearls'''. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

====Conflicting tribal definitions====
Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the [[Palli]]-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

=Diplomatic contacts between the empires=

=Later periods=
These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.
===Hiboh===
The '''Hiboh''' era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true '''Sleeperism'''.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the '''Cold Men''', until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

===RKE Wars===
The '''RKE''' movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used [[Matrix]]-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.

=Notes in boats=
==Notes==

Dolphin Riders

2025-06-20T00:18:52Z

Poswob Rare: /* Impossible burdens */

The '''MFZ''' Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the [[Cosmopolitan Age]]. The original Empire, ''Mayuvas'', was [[Dreamland]], which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the [[Gold party]], as the word for gold in [[babakiam|Play]] was ''mayu''. The other two empires, ''Fayuvas'' and ''Žayuvas'', were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, [[Baeba Swamp]], which at the time was run primarily by the '''Iron''' party, an offshoot of the much older [[Zenith]] party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel '''ū''', giving ''Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas'', but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like '''uv''' (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

==Background==

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with [[Baeba Swamp]] to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of [[Moonshine]] and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with '''Tata''', also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

==Structure of Parliament==
Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the [[ppot#DPR|Dolphin Riders]], who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient [[Gold party]]. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

==Recognition of new tribes==
Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the '''Tippers''' who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

==Language==
The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited [[Lenian languages#DPR|Dolphin Rider]] language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near [[Baeba Swamp]] came to speak [[Ogili_II|Ogili]], the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

==Growth of the Kapa corporation==
An umbrella corporation called '''Kapa''' (in full, ''Nobōbo Kapa'') arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The ''kapa'' part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like '''Teenprop'''. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like '''Teens for Tomorrow''', though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after [[STW]]; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing '''Bottom''' party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the '''Yukiese''' family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of [[Paba]]. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the '''Teenprop''' political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

==Development of new political parties==
===Two-party stage===
The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support '''feminism''', believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world. The Dolphin Riders realized that if feminism took hold even in Dreamland, there would be no more land in the world run by men; free men would only exist as nomadic minorities within female nations.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support '''sarabism''', the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

==Creation of new parties==
'''Gatotōl''' had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the '''Comb''' party (''Pōrupu Resini'') which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's<ref>A vague and tentative date</ref> the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the '''Hipsoft''' party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new '''Carriage''' party (''āliki'') was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new '''Pointer''' party (''Pēbobi Lisuelesi'') was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a ''pēbobi''.

The '''Permission''' party (''Lepusepu Lesinepu'') was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the '''Butterfly''' party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

====Minor parties====
The '''Frame''' party (''Pōrupu Uimeka'') also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term ''sepu'' (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet ''lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu'' is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

==Culturebound issues==
The [[Gold party]] did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the '''Wildfire''' party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the '''Treehouse''' army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the '''Tippers''' came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

===Hupodas===
There was a ''Hupodas'' ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be ''lepisese'' "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

===Family issues===
====Early years====
The founding '''Dolphin Riders''' planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.<ref>While this logic may seem counterintuitive from the point of view of Earth, it was well illustrated in feminist societies like Moonshine that women were eager to raise children because they would be able to remain at home, and not need to work, while their husbands provided the entire financial support for raising each child.</ref>

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

====Later years====
A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

===Ilhina===
This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.
===Sarabism===
Related to the carrying of weapons.

===Capitalism and communism===
These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

===Censorship and propaganda===
These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

===Feminism===
Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

===Pimuo bopi===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as '''pacifism''' but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive [[Matrix]] army.

''This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as '''bopo''' below.''

===Pasio===
A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

===Bepolere===
Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

===Bopo===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as '''pacifism'''; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

==Proclamation of Empire==
===Proclamation of Empire in 4108===
In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the [[Play party|Play]] parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population.

Yet, 1,300<ref>an exact figure</ref> Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, [[Baeba Swamp]] had become the center of world diplomacy.

===General election of 4111===
The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the '''Treehouse''' party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the '''Wildfire''' party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

==Conflicts over hygiene==

===Hygiene laws===
The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (This is separate from the Hupodas issue.) One reason for the strong attention to hygiene was that the Dolphin Riders were tolerant of nudism, an issue that Dreamers had often gone back and forth on in the past.

The Dreamer Parliament had the power to make laws that applied to the entire empire. Thus it became a crime in Dreamland for a teenager or adult to leave a mess in a public bathroom, or even in nature, without immediately cleaning it up. The Dreamers also had to prove that they were bathing everyday, washing their clothes, and keeping their belongings clean as well. But the Parliament did not have the power to enact a tax applying to the whole Empire; this power was reserved to the states.
====Soapmaking corporation====
Thus, the Dreamer Parliament was unable to subsidize the purchase of soap and other hygiene-related goods, and Dreamers had to rely on their monthly income to buy these products. This immediately led to the rise of a powerful soapmaking class, who founded a corporation, '''Nobōbo Pobo Mosesene''' (PBM), named after the founding Mosesene family. PBM's workers allied themselves with the factions of the Baywatch and Rider parties that favored strict hygiene laws, and pledged to cooperate with each other across state and party lines since they were united on a single issue.

PBM's prices were expensive. The government's bathroom police (''pusepo serakale'') signed a contract with PBM stating that they would ride along with PBM's soap distributors to ensure that citizens were buying the product and keeping their homes and belongings clean. Thus the PBM corporation had a strong ally in the government and assumed they would not be easily shut down.

====Use of currency exchanges====
Nearly two centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. By tying the value of the currency to food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and over time, nations came to use the Ξ tokens as a neutral currency so that they could more easily compare their economies without needing to factor in inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.

The Dreamers had no STW stores and had always been hostile to STW, just as STW had always been hostile to them and had periodically raided Dreamer territory in the past to procure goods to sell in their stores. Therefore the Dreamers did not like STW's Ξ meal token currency either. But they had conceded to use it when comparing their economy to other economies, as it showed that the cost of living in Dreamland was quite high compared to most other nations, and that their people were not living as comfortably as a measure of total economic output would make it seem.

Dreamland's people had an average annual income around '''Ξ70,000''', but much higher in the east, in '''Baywatch''' territory, where the banks and most major corporations were. In fact the average per capita income ranged from about Ξ200,000 in Baywatch territory to Ξ20,000 in the various states of the west.

====Prices of hygiene and associated services====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living. The bathroom guards were separate from the bathroom police, meaning that someone needing to use the bathroom would sometimes need to greet two people just to get in, pay for the experience, and then clean up any mess they had made. Meanwhile it was illegal to hide in nature instead of using the bathroom except when that area was on private property and the landowner took it upon themselves to clean the landscape; in such a case, they were in turn subject to police oversight.

The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early.

===General election of 4116===

===General election of 4125===

===General election of 4129===

==War against the Players==
In 4132, Dreamland's '''Baywatch''' and '''Dolphin Rider''' parties voted together for a war against the distant [[Players|Play]] empire, with the Baywatchers expected to shoulder most of the combat and therefore also reserve the most gains, both territorial and political, for themselves.

===General election of 4134===
===General election of 4140===
As the soldiers of the [[Players|Play]] army massacred Dreamers in the '''Baywatch''' theater of the war, and spread plagues beyond it, the Dreamers (all states) voted to disarm their civilian population to turn over their weapons to the Dreamer army, whom they hoped would keep the Players from spreading further west.

===General election of 4142===
As the [[Play party]] occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of '''Mipatatatatai''', the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

====Immigration====
The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: The sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

====Hipsofts====
Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. These were moved to a city near the middle of the Dolphin Riders' territory, far from Moonshine and also far from the Players. The Dolphin Riders hoped that these immigrants would align themselves with Dreamland or at least become apolitical.

The '''Hipsoft''' faction of the Dolphin Rider party appeared soon after the immigrants were settled. The Hipsofts lived in the area where the immigrants had moved to and opposed the resettlement program. The other Riders seemed to have little interest in the situation, saying that they had done a good deed by adopting refugees from a pacifist nation but also unwilling to spread the immigrants around the rest of Dreamland. At this time, the immigrants had no political party of their own, and the mainstream Riders hoped that the appearance of the Hipsofts would encourage the immigrants to become strongly supportive of the mainstream Riders.

==Reforms to hygiene laws==
The Dolphin Riders had come to power in 4108 with a permissive attitude towards nudism and a strict hygiene policy, requiring all Dreamers to bathe and be clean after using the bathroom. They were required to purchase soap and other hygiene supplies on their own. This was to prevent the spread of disease. The Dreamer parliament had the authority to require Dreamer citizens to purchase soap and other supplies, but not to enact a tax to pay for the hygiene supplies, or to subsidize them in any other way. Even though there was more than one soap company, the price of soap rose high as soapmakers knew the demand for their product would never cease.

====Claims of soapmakers' complicity====
But now, the Dreamers increasingly began to blame their hygiene problems on the [[Players]] to the east, whom they suspected were deliberately polluting the rivers which flowed into coastal areas of Dreamland. The new generation of Dreamers thus came to support laws requiring Dreamers to wear clothing and deemphasizing the use of soap. Soapmakers were invested into their craft now, however, and opposed the new changes as they knew it would decrease their standard of living. The reformists accused the soapmakers of forcing the Dreamer population into a humiliating position, where they spent much of their time and money cleaning up after the Players, knowing that the Players could just as easily pollute the environment even more and thus force the Dreamers to scrub and clean themselves twice as much, all to the joy of the soapmakers. This led to accusations that the soapmakers themselves were cooperating with the Players to spread filth throughout Dreamland.

==Rise of pessimism==
Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only [[Baeba Swamp]], pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the [[Players]], but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

:''Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.''
Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

===Dreamers envy Players===
The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than 800,000 enrolled Players, more than Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself '''Hipsoft''' emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

===Comparative census of 4162===
By 4162, the Dreamer birthrate had increased, while the Player birthrate had fallen, and they had lost territory to the '''Tinks'''. Now, Dreamland's population was about double the Play population of 639,000.

====Census statistics====

{| class="wikitable"
|+ CENSUS OF 4162
|-
! Statistic
! Play
! Dreamland
! COMMENTS
|-
| Population
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 639,000
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 1,243,000
| Play population excludes '''Tata'''
|-
| Land area
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"|
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"|
|
|-
| Per capita GDP
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| Ξ3,832
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| > Ξ50,000
|
|-
| Fertility rate
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 4.74
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 3.58
|
|-
| Median age
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 12.7
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| ~24
|
|}

Although the fertility rates were not greatly different, the actual birth rate was much higher in Play territory because their adult population was primarily female (having fought many recent wars) whereas Dreamland's population consisted mostly of the Dreamers who had not been exposed to any recent wars.

===Other developments===
====Worries about defeat====
Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

===Dissolutionism===
Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

==Defeatist art and propaganda==
The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the [[Players]], as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.
===Depictions of the sun===
Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season. This meant that the entire planet experienced its summer season at the same time, and that even near the Equator, summer was much hotter than winter.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

====The Sun is Too Big====
Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but often riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

====Suntan vs sunburn====
Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, '''Pūpepas''', was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

===Linguistic issues===
The Dreamers were also ashamed of their languages, particularly the eastern ones.

====Phonology====
The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. Though both Dreamers and Players had learned to speak languages such as [[khulls|Leaper]] in the past, it required greater physical effort on their part to pronounce sounds like /k/ than it did for the native Leaper speakers, and therefore both the Dreamers and the Players had spoken languages with a similar acoustic sound for thousands of years. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

====Script====
Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

====Grammar====
Play was a ferociously complex language, with a grammar resembling [[khulls|Leaper]] but famously more difficult. For this reason, the '''Crystals''' and other groups such as the Leapers had an easier time mastering the Play language than did the Dreamers. This embarrassed the Dreamers doubly because the common perception was that Play would be an easy language for the Dreamers to learn because of its simple sound inventory. The Dreamers' inability to competently learn to speak Play had become deadly early in the Play occupation of Tata, as Play military leaders massacred Dreamer teachers for not quickly learning the language.

===Hunger===
Although the Dreamers were not short of food, even after losing the war, they spent more of their time and money on acquiring food than did the Players, who simply built their settlements around food sources so that they would never go hungry.

===Unhealable wounds===
====Hard and soft====
Even when conceding that the Dreamers were physically strong, the artists drew the Players as having square body shapes, whereas the Dreamers were depicted as being made of soft curves.

====Depiction of weapons====
A common stereotype was that Dreamers were physically delicate, but better able to handle weapons than were small, stoutly built tribes such as the Players. Some artists said that once the Dreamers lost their weapons, the Players' weakness would turn into a strength, as their poor ability to handle weapons would mean that every kill would be bloody rather than quick and clean. Meanwhile, other artists depicted the Players as fashioning better weapons, weapons that they could hold and the Dreamers could not.

====Depiction of other sharp objects====
The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The [[Crystals]] had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the [[Players]] and with the [[Soap Bubbles]] living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

====Metaphorical use====
The Dolphin Rider term for an unhealable wound was ''nu silika o pō okuleli'', which could be shortened to ''popōkuleli'' "unhealable". They saw that their people were inflicted with many such wounds, both physically and metaphorically, as they could not protect themselves from the local animal and plant life, but also could not regain territories lost to them by invasions in recent wars such as their war against the Players. Where other nations rose and fell, the Dreamers only grew around the hard barriers outsiders built for them.

The Dreamer propagandists reminded their people that the Players were only the most recent example of an army which had invaded Dreamland and come to permanently reside there. Earlier, the feminist '''Womb Justice''' army, fleeing from their homeland, took refuge in Dreamland but immediately demanded that all Dreamers move out so they could build a society run by women. The Dreamers did not fight these women, fearing that their own people would be unwilling to take up arms against such a society, but within a generation the Dreamers had grown tired of the Wombs and no longer believed that they needed to remain in Dreamland. Yet they were unable to push the Womb army out of Dreamland, and they conceded that they would remain in Dreamland for the indefinite future.

===Positive counterpoints===
For nearly a thousand years, outside cultures had stereotyped the Dreamers as being hypersexual and eager to engage in deviant sexual practices that made their men soft. This stereotype had been repeated by so many different foreign powers that the Dreamers had come to accept that it was true, but they made no plans to change their lifestyles. Instead, the Dreamers said that they were motivated by love, and that most of their enemies were motivated by hate and incapable of love. Rather than consider themselves immoral, the Dreamers said it was cultures such as the [[Players]] who were immoral, for instead of loving each other and their enemies, they sought to start a new war every year and took joy in their enemies' suffering.

==Debates over economics==
The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. [[STW]] mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of [[AlphaLeap]] in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

====Issues involving trade====
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

''this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.''

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly [[STW]], openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

===Arguments for capitalism===
The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising '''Teenprop''' corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, and then paying taxes in their own nations so that both the company and the citizens could benefit from the company's presence.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the '''Teenprop''' corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as the '''Anchor Empire''' (where STW sold most of its goods), and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

====Wealth creation theory====
The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as [[Kxesh]] that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

===Rise of pacifism===
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of [[Paba]], which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

====Secret diplomacy====
As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of '''capitalism''', the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

==Diplomatic outreach to Players==
In the mid-4160s, Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into [[Memnumu]] to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

The [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] also feared the Players and had suffered from their plagues. But when the Dreamers heard that the Players had broken up into four political parties, they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with at least one of them, and form an alliance between Dreamland and the most pro-Dreamer political party in the Play empire.

Because their main contact with the Players was through '''Tata''', the Dreamers understood little of the Players' internal struggles in Memnumu. The Dreamers knew that the original Play faction, the Milk Bottles, had been extremist, and that they had given way to the Pillows after a series of disasters mostly involving young children. They had heard of the rise of the Purses, but most Dreamers did not know that they were racists; they only knew that the Purses' positions on issues in general were more moderate than those of the Pillows, who were in turn more moderate than the Bottles. Therefore, the Dreamers believed that the Play nation as a whole was on a steady path towards more moderate politics, and could therefore become an ally of the Dreamers if they were able to continue along that path. The Dreamers were dismayed when they later learned that the Pillows had recovered their parliamentary majority, but figured that so long as the Purses were also represented in the Play parliament, the Dreamers still had an ally among the Players. (Most Dreamers still did not know, even years on, that the Purses considered Dreamers racially inferior, because the Purses had always focused on internal divisions among the Players in Memnumu.)

===Dreamers meet with Players===
The Dreamers had heard about the Players' new balance system, in which four parties would compete for power in the Parliament, and all four would be allowed to use game-like voting strategies, for example allowing people to vote outside their home districts, figuring that the resulting fierce competition would lead to better governance. They had been shown some anti-Dreamer literature known to have been written by the '''Milk Bottle''' faction of the Play party. With this, and other information they had learned about early happenings in the Play nation, Dreamland labeled the Milk Bottles as an extremist Play faction, and assumed that the other Play factions would thus be more friendly to Dreamland.

The Dreamers sent a team of tall, handsome male diplomats to meet with the female representatives of each of the four main Play parties, comparing and contrasting the Dolphin Riders' party platform with those of the women. The Players were feminists, but unlike the Moonshines, they respected foreign cultural norms, and therefore were accustomed to meeting with male diplomats. The Dreamers told the men to talk strictly about politics, but hoped that they could subliminally woo the women with their charms and return to Dreamland having signed a formal treaty of alliance with at least one, and perhaps more, of the new Play parties.

Four Dreamer men greeted the four Player women in the Play capital city of '''Pūpepas'''.
====Results of the meeting====
At the meeting, the Dreamer men realized that the Milk Bottles they had been calling Play extremists were in fact the most moderate of all the Play philosophies, and that the other three factions were even more hostile than that. Put another way, the Dreamers had assumed that the spectrum of Play political opinions ran the gamut from the fierce nationalism of the Milk Bottles to a cosmopolitan faction of unknown identity with whom they could form an alliance. But rather than ranging from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the Dreamers found out that the Players spanned from nationalism to racism.

Furthermore, even the racist Play faction, the '''Purses''', were nationalists, saying that the hated Eggs were still their allies in any conflict that involved a foreign power. Thus, even though the Purses had openly supported arresting the Eggs, they recognized the Eggs as fellow Players. Therefore none of the Play factions was willing to support Dreamland either militarily or economically.

The Dreamers were frustrated even by the name "balance system", confident that the Players had borrowed the idea of balance from the politics of Dreamland.

====Explanations to common people====
Dreamer diplomats had difficulty explaining to their own people why they had classified all four of Memnumu's Play parties as anti-Dreamer extremists, when the Dreamers had been expecting to find allies in the Play nation. Many Dreamers simply did not believe the diplomats' claims, arguing that at least the Eggs must be friendly towards Dreamland since they had been opposed by all of the other Play factions and had been attacked with no apparent provocation in a recent war led by the Firestones. But the Dreamers had diplomatic contacts with the wider Crystal party, who refused to accept any connection between the Dreamers and the Eggs, and still claimed that the reason the Crystals had abandoned the Eggs was because the required rescue mission would have been impossible.

====Dreamers embrace Tata====
When the Dreamers obtained a clearer understanding of the Play situation, they began to oppose the often talked about integration of Tata into a single unified Play nation, which had been proposed in 4151 but delayed over and over again for various reasons. The Dreamers believed that Tata's ruling '''Club''' party, though formally identical to the Pillows, was the only true moderate Play party, since they had legalized the Dreamer party in their own territory and did not take part in radical Play practices such as child labor and home invasions, even though they had never formally written these out of their party platform. The Dreamers considered all four of the Play parties in Memnumu's Milk Parliament to be extremists. They stated that the Purse ideology was moderate, but that because they were tribalists, the Dreamers could not ally with them after all, and therefore they were off the map of political discourse in Dreamland. The other three factions were also extremists, and most Dreamers considered them even worse than the Purses, since they all opposed Dreamland as well.

====Worries about population growth====
To the Dreamers, the greatest threat posed by the Players was their extremely high birthrate, which had for their first twenty years in power been so high that children under age thirteen comprised 3/4 of the Play population, and the population had doubled in this twenty-year period despite the many plagues, famines, and wars that the Players had endured and created. Meanwhile, though the Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had been youth-based, and had come to power with a high birthrate as well, theirs had never been nearly as high as the Players', and had been in decline for several generations, such that they had come to rely on '''Gold''' party arguments that the political power of a nation should not be related to the size of its population. By now, the Players had already outgrown the Dreamers despite having a much smaller land area, and it seemed inevitable to the Dreamers that the Players would grow even more. Since the Players had already won one major war against Dreamland, the Dreamers worried that their rapidly growing population would in the future lead them to win another.

The Players' birthrate had declined sharply around 4150 when they broke up into factions, however, and the Dreamers knew of this because of diplomatic contacts through Tata. The Dreamers stopped worrying so much about the Players' population expansion and began to focus on their problems at home. But then, when they heard that the Players were reviving the Milk Bottle party, they worried that Play women would once again have more children than they could care for, and that the children would grow up and start wars against Dreamland out of pure hunger, ignoring all common sense.

==Hipsoft war of 4183==
The immigrant '''Tipper''' party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent '''Hipsoft''' party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves '''Tippers''', disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant '''Hipsoft''' party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles
that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

===Moonshine's reaction===
Moonshine endorsed the Tippers' massacres, saying that the men were doing the right thing. Moonshine offered citizenship to all female Tippers, but stated that Tipper men would never be allowed into Moonshine territory, even though they had done a great favor for the Moonshines by killing many Dreamers. This was because Moonshine culture considered men's lives expendable, and that the best thing that men could do for Moonshine would be to stay at war and wear down the enemies of Moonshine without expecting any sort of reward other than the right to abuse the conquered people. Therefore Moonshine stated that if Tipper men wanted to marry women, they should take their wives from among the Dreamer population.

===Contact with the Matrix===
In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful [[Matrix]] army based in the nearby nation of '''Tata'''. Tata was on the north coast and was one of a chain of nations that had long been a buffer area between Dreamland and Moonshine, but had recently grown into a regional power in its own right.

The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland to focus their efforts on the city of [[Baeba Swamp]].

NOTE: The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.<ref>This is from a dream in which Russia did likewise.</ref>

==Newer economic developments==
Losing two wars had led to economic decline, and the increasing isolation of Dreamland drove up the cost of living. Furthermore, the rising cost of living made it difficult for the poorest Dreamers to afford food, and although the Dreamer states solved this problem with welfare payments, some of the western states were now encouraging people to desert their towns in order to live along the coast, much as the [[Players]] did, and obtain their food from the sea.

===Currency conversion===
Nearly three centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had opened stores in the [[Thunder Empire]], whose people owned Dreamer slaves and had little interest in friendly contacts with Dreamland. STW went further, declaring that slavery was not punishment enough, and declared war on [[Dreamland]] on its first official day of business. The result of this, over time, was that any economic growth for STW led to decline for Dreamland, and vice versa.

Dreamland had won its war with STW, even though STW was backed by the traditional military of the Thunder Empire, and nearly drove the corporation out of business despite the great physical distance between Dreamland and the primary STW stores. But in 4108, Dreamland lost control of its newly won territory, and STW returned to business holding a larger grudge against Dreamland than ever before. Dreamland continued to lose wars and cede economic supremacy for the next decades, and although STW was not a major driving force in this, STW reaped some benefit from it because their leaders were better able to take advantage of changing economic tides than were the politicians of the nations they did business with.
====The Ξ4 meal promise====
STW had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. The price of a meal was fixed at Ξ4, and STW's leaders promised that the price would never rise, regardless of what happened to the economies around them, including STW's non-restaurant stores, which did not accept the meal tokens. By tying the currency only to the price of food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and thus came to be used in international comparisons even by countries who had no interest in attracting business from STW.

The Dreamers disliked the so-called universal currency, since STW did not do business in Dreamland, and had always been hostile to Dreamland. The Dreamers stated the Ξ4 meal promise was humiliating because no Dreamers could expect to receive a meal for that price at any restaurant within Dreamland, and that STW had deliberately created an unfair setup that was only sustainable because they owned slaves and their restaurants served foods that had been obtained through slave labor and with minimal transportation and preparation costs.

====Economic restructuring====
Nonetheless, in comparing their economy to those of other nations, the Dreamers were forced to acknowledge STW's meal token currency rather than using their own. By this time, the an STW-like corporation had arisen in Dreamland, intent on solving the problems of Dreamland's economic isolation by producing goods locally and thus relieving the Dreamers' dependence on trade.

The annual per capita income of Dreamland as a whole had declined to about '''Ξ40,000''' by this time, even as the price of a meal in a typical restaurant had remained around Ξ80. The Dreamers were not bankrupted by their food prices because most Dreamers acquired some of their food themselves, cooking it at home during their free time or eating it raw if possible. Thus restaurants catered to travelers and to the wealthiest classes. On top of this, Dreamland's government encouraged its states to distribute welfare tickets to Dreamer families so that they could afford food, particularly in those areas where the natural supply of food was irregular. But Dreamland was a confederation, and could not tax its people directly, and therefore the disbursement of welfare was up to the states.

====Unskilled labor wages====
Dreamland practiced unregulated capitalism supported by welfare payments. There was no minimum wage, so it was common for young and unskilled laborers to receive just Ξ20 or Ξ25 for a day's work. Those who could not find stable employment would often work for even lower wages. Meanwhile, workers in some trades were paid only by selling things they produced and could go for months at a time without income. Therefore, Dreamland's lower class was materially poor even compared to the lower classes of poorer nations, but malnutrition was rare and usually of a sort that money would not have prevented.

===Distribution of necessities===
The charter of the ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party stated that the government must provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care for all citizens, even those Dreamers who chose to live in outlying areas where transportation costs were significant. Since transportation of food and essential goods was the responsibility of the government, the costs were socialized, and Dreamland's taxes were very high. However, the tax policies were the responsibilities of the states, and the Dolphin Riders' parliament could not enact a tax applying to a specific geographic area to force that area to improve its citizens' standard of living.

====Clothing====
Clothing was not defined as a basic human need in the Dolphin Rider platform, and on this they agreed with most of the minor Dreamer parties as well. Therefore, humans who needed protective clothes to work had to buy them on their own, disposable diapers were expensive, and people huddled together in blankets during Dreamland's rare cold winter nights.

The Dreamers and the Players had both often supported nudism, and largely for the same reasons, but opposition to nudism took different perspectives in the two empires. For the Players, opposition to nudism was entirely about hygiene, as the Players' child population had suffered from several plagues and spread these plagues outside their nation. However the Players were so tightly compacted into seaside habitats that they had early on exhausted their supply of plant fibers to weave new diapers, and the Play Parliament shut down the textile industry entirely so they could focus on fishing the sea. By contrast, the Dreamers' much lower fertility rate had kept them free of such problems. Rather, the Dreamers who supported wearing clothes were more concerned with secondary issues: since Dreamers often carried money with them, it was far more convenient for them to wear clothes to help carry the coins, and there were many trades that were much easier to perform while wearing protective clothes. The Dreamers mostly did wear clothes when it was convenient, and indeed their clothing production costs were lower than those in some poorer nations, but all clothes were distributed by private corporations who were free to charge any price they wished, even in areas where they had achieved a monopoly. Thus, many Dreamers spent much of their disposable income on clothing and could not afford to replace clothes that were worn out from daily use.

====Homes and furniture====
Likewise, Dreamland's climate was hot and sunny, and in some areas, people had traditionally lived on the beach, exposed to the elements, and not in any home at all. This extreme lifestyle was associated with the pre-Dreamer aboriginal population, numbering only a few thousand by this time, who lived in very specific locations such that the construction of a building to live in would make little difference. Nonetheless, most Dreamer homes were very simple, and the government promise as understood by the people was that Dreamers would have the right to a place to seek shelter from the rain, which might or might not be their everyday home.

===Typical prices===
The Dreamers embraced capitalism and therefore did not set standard prices on goods. Their government's role in providing for their people was limited to the welfare benefits described above, to medical care, and to providing shelter from nature. The average per capita GDP was around '''Ξ50,000'''. Note that this includes the entire population, not just those in work; the average salary of a worker was therefore significantly higher.

====Hygiene====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean. The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early. A full-body coat made from animal hides could cost around '''Ξ375'''.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living.

====Non-essential foods====
Palm wine and fruit juice averaged about the same price, about '''Ξ120''' per jug.

====Intangibles and services====
Because of the calm weather, travelers often slept outside, exposed to the elements. There was thus relatively little demands for inns, and most tended to be found in cities. A night's sleep in a room with many other travelers could cost around '''Ξ80''', and accomodations with more privacy were rare.

====Illegal transactions====
Slaves could be bought for around '''Ξ100,000''' to '''Ξ1 million''', a vastly higher price than the Ξ10,000 — Ξ50,000 that paid for their abduction and transportation from weakened nations such as Thaoa. The [[Players]] had contemplated selling people from their lower classes to foreign nations for even lower prices to relieve their population stress and also bring money into their economy, but such people were often profitable for the Players since they were little more than slaves already. Since slavery was illegal in Dreamland, such people could not be held openly, and therefore were typically prostitutes who remained in one place and were bound to a master. Male slaves nonetheless were sometimes used to row ships, where they were bound into place and released only when under the close watch of an armed guard.

===Private schools===
Dreamland's education system was privatized, and teachers charged families to enroll their pupils. This was unlike the [[Players|Play]] system, where education was free, and unlike [[STW]], which actually ''paid'' students to attend, albeit in a currency that could only be redeemed at STW.

There was no law requiring Dreamer adults to care for their aging parents, either financially or materially, since the elderly were covered under the same programs that covered disabled and sick people. (This is a relic of the '''Plume''' system that predated the Dolphin Riders.) Therefore parents had no guarantee that their children would portion off their future income to the parents, and no financial incentive to seek the best education for their children, nor to have large numbers of children, or even to have children at all.

Many Dreamer women remained at or near their homes during the daytime, and so teaching their children was simply part of their daily routine, and school systems tended to exist only in large cities. Nonetheless, tuition was affordable, averaging around '''Ξ4,000''' per student per year, much less than the average income of even the lowest class of Dreamers. This tuition covered the teachers' salaries only, and did not pay for the students' meals or their belongings, which often cost more than the tuition.

Dreamland's private schools worked both in competition and in cooperation with each other, as when two schools opened in the same city, typically each school would specialize in different subjects of study.

====Proposal for a public school system====
Nonetheless, the lack of free public education was a disincentive for couples planning to have children, and many Dreamer politicians wanted to start a tax-supported public school system based on a foreign model. But because they could not institute a tax on the entire Dreamer empire, each state would need to do this individually.

Opponents of this plan argued that a public school system would immediately turn into an unrestrained child labor operation, as the state-run school would have no authority above them and thus could not be shut down. As evidence they pointed to the school system of '''Moonshine''', which considered its students to be slaves, and to [[STW]], a private school system which had nonetheless functioned as an education monopoly for much of its existence and had relied on child labor (although with pay) to sustain itself.

The '''Play''' school system, however, did not force its students to work, or even to do schoolwork, and was a legally established government monopoly accountable to no outside authority. Supporters of the new plan claimed that the Play nation disproved all of their doubts. The opponents of the public school plan countered this argument by saying that the Players represented everything the Dreamers opposed, and that the Players in fact were the worst child abusers in the world, as they forced their children to find food for their parents with no salary at all.

===Impossible burdens===
In Dreamland, the middle class was the largest class, and therefore, in Dreamland's democratic elections, policies favoring the middle class tended to succeed. There was no welfare system, and many middle-class Dreamers believed that if they were to set up a welfare system for their poorest citizens, as some other nations had, Dreamland would become as poor as those other nations. Thus the lowest class remained poor. Some Dreamers wished that the lowest class would migrate to surrounding nations but there was no legal means of doing this.

Because the lowest class made only about Ξ20 per day, and meals often cost more than this, these people could not afford their basic needs and had to steal food or turn to other crimes to make money. Many young women, including married women, worked as prostitutes, but because there were so many prostitutes, their earnings were meager and they were worse off than men who made a career from robbing people and stealing transported goods. (These people were called pirates in most languages, because this lifestyle was not confined to the sea.)

It was nearly impossible for a poor person to meet their needs for even a day in Dreamland without committing a crime. As above, they could not even legally use the bathroom without spending more than their entire income for a day, let alone find food to eat. This meant that Dreamland's various police forces could arrest almost any poor person at any time and put them in prison. However, in general, the middle class preferred to have the lower class out on the streets, since they performed useful jobs for the rest of society, and although it was a common subject of debate, the majority of middle-class Dreamers felt that they would rather tolerate the crime than lose the services of their lower class.

==Matrix treaty of 4190==
By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of '''Memnumu''' once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny [[Matrix]] army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

==Slope treaty==

===General election of 4205===
The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in [[Memnumu]].<ref>It is possible that the descendants of the Hipsides, now adults, still practiced this lifestyle in some territory between Dreamland and Tāmta.</ref>

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

====Arrival of the Cupbearers====
Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of '''Cupbearer''' refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.<ref>This may or may not be the state of Senampattore. Where it is on the map is clear, but the borders may have changed.</ref>

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the [[Players]] in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:
#The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
#Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
#The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in [[Baeba Swamp]] as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
#The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves ''pavača'',<ref>This word is ''čava'' "long hair" spelled backwards inside the circumfix ''p-..-a'' "having (a)". This method of word formation was dying out in Play, but persisted in some groups who were influenced by Andanese, because even though Andanese itself did not use this, it was more convenient with pure CV words, as Andanese had, than with Play whose syllable structure was more diverse.</ref> just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

===Capture of Crystal slaves===
A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising '''Slope''' party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

==Postwar period==
After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

===General election of 4227===
Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The ''bopo'' philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the ''bopo'' supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The '''Cupbearers''' may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

===General election of 4238===
Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

===General election of 4254===
After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the [[Memnumu|Play army]] and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.
==Naval war==
In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the [[Players]], which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the [[Ghost Empire|Ghosts]], who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called '''Laba'''. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of [[Moonshine]], but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world.
But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the [[Players|Play]] population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

==Inversion of propaganda==
Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the [[Players]], but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the [[Matrix]] propaganda of a hundred years prior.

===Weather metaphors===
Though living right along the Equator, the people of Hipatal and Laba in general had the same variety of body types found elsewhere. Some outsiders believed that they were all dark-skinned people, but immigrants such as '''Sašuasa''' had been of the same Lenian body type as the stereotypical eastern Dreamers who had fallen into ruin.

==Naval war in the Play sea==
===General election of 4287===
As the Dreamer navy,<ref>this did not actually take twenty years, but there were no global elections in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty</ref>, '''Laba''', invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the '''Teenprop''' corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

''NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.''

===Antiwar movement in Dreamland===
===="The Real Dreamland"====
Just as Dreamland seemed likely to win its war, a group of pacifists declared themselves to be the only true Dreamers, and pledged allegiance to the '''Cupbearers''' without formally joining the Cupbearer party. They said that the earlier Dreamers' pessimism was correct, and that Dreamland should be a pacifist multinational empire trading economically with foreign nations but without military expansionist goals. They supported '''Moonshine''', and thus while committed to pacifism, assumed that they would soon be targets in the war, and perhaps could be such easy targets that they would distract the navy from their war against the Players. Thus these new pacifists felt they could help the Players whether they were successful in remaking Dreamland into an economic power, in which case the war would stall, or unsuccessful, in which case they would be slaughtered by the pirates but could hopefully still save the Players.

The pacifists' claim to be the only true Dreamers closely resembled the Players' contemporary claim that the Play navy was the only true Laba. They had made their declarations independently, however, as the Play diplomats were blocked from contacting the pacifists by the Ghosts over land and by the pirates at sea.

===General election of 4295===
The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became popular.

===General election of 4316===
After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.
===General election of 4321===
Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

===General election of 4327===
===General election of 4343===
Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

==Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)==
Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing ''bepolere'', which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The ''Pōbipōpu'' and ''Pōronopa'' distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

===Contacts with Moonshine===
The '''Habit''' party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the '''Hipsoft''' settlements to and including the '''Womb Justice''' settlements. The Habits were the sons and daughters of the Crystals who had been pushed into the underclass in Baeba Swamp when the Leapers took over. That is, they were a faction of Crystals who resisted the Leapers.

====Tribal identity====
The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

====Partition====
By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small '''Hipsoft''' migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the '''Womb Justice ''' party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name '''Dreamland''' was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

====Moonshine-Habit relations====
The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's '''Habit''' party (''Tăta'')<ref>Note that this is not a homonym of the state name '''Tàta''' because the tones are different, but that in languages such as Play, the two may have been merged.</ref> to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called '''Wagillàra''', the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

===Demographic shifts===
After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the [[Players]] had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

:''Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.''

===General election of 4351===
Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

===General election of 4390===
Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

===General election of 4402===
Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

===General election of 4412===
The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.
===General election of 4419===
Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

===General election of 4438===
Luxury goods came back into fashion.

====Tribal reform====
Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The '''Tipper''' population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the '''Hipatal''' immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

===General election of 4440===
Luxury goods fell out of fashion.
===General election of 4445===
Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

===General election of 4462===
Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.
===General election of 4468===
Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.
===General election of 4485===
Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.
===General election of 4492===
The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.
===General election of 4500===
Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.
===General election of 4511===
Little changed in this election.
===General election of 4529===
Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.
===General election of 4531===
Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.
===General election of 4538===
Luxury goods became popular.
===General election of 4540===
Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

===Humanitarian attempts at intervention===
The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier.<ref>But remember that this from a different timeline. The figure cannot be taken as an exact count.</ref> Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both [[Baeba Swamp]] and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

''Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.''

==Other developments==
*56 (4150)
*52 (4202)
*13 (4215)
*24 (4239)
*79 (4318)
*80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the [[Hipatal]] people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

=Dreamer-Doll relations=
:''See [[Dolls]].''
Note that there is no convenient way to represent the [[babakiam|Play]]-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with ''dream'' and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the [[Dolls|Bottom]] party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (''nuufa''), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Bottoms did not allow their members to even have protruding fingernails. The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: '''fubap''' describing something soft and thus flexible, and '''nuufa''' describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

===Scope===
It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the '''Hiboh''' Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

===Dedication to pacifism===
The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon [[ppot#upl|drafted a party platform]] denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling '''Hailstorm''' army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

=Dreamer-Play relations=
''Žayuvas'' got its name when the rebel '''Tink''' army invaded their ally, the [[Play party]], and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, [[Dreamland]], than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory ''Memnumu''.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling '''Police''' faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the [[Play party]]. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the [[alphaleap|Leapers]] had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the '''Magic Combs''') never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

===Scope of Žayuvas===
It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of '''Šasa Kaina''', located near and traditionally friendly towards [[Thaoa]], at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

===Fertility calculations===
On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

;Oct 10 2021
There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding '''Tata''', where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

===Apportionment of representatives===
Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

==Evolution from factions to parties==
The [[Play party|Play]] charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

==Party membership==
The '''Police''' party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

==Culturebound issues of the Play Empire==
:''See also [[Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues]]''.
True to its name, the [[Play party]] dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

===Children's issues===
====Education====
The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory [[Raspara]] army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

===Tribal conflicts (general) ===
:''This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.''
====Height and hair color====

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured [[Paba]]p tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were [[#feminism|taller than their men]], this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

====Background====
Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive [[Raspara]] party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious [[swamp Kids|Tink]] army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall [[Repilia]]n tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the '''Flower Bees''' and the '''Rusted Pearls'''. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

====Conflicting tribal definitions====
Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the [[Palli]]-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

=Diplomatic contacts between the empires=

=Later periods=
These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.
===Hiboh===
The '''Hiboh''' era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true '''Sleeperism'''.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the '''Cold Men''', until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

===RKE Wars===
The '''RKE''' movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used [[Matrix]]-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.

=Notes in boats=
==Notes==

Dolphin Riders

2025-06-20T00:18:14Z

Poswob Rare: /* Impossible burdens */

The '''MFZ''' Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the [[Cosmopolitan Age]]. The original Empire, ''Mayuvas'', was [[Dreamland]], which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the [[Gold party]], as the word for gold in [[babakiam|Play]] was ''mayu''. The other two empires, ''Fayuvas'' and ''Žayuvas'', were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, [[Baeba Swamp]], which at the time was run primarily by the '''Iron''' party, an offshoot of the much older [[Zenith]] party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel '''ū''', giving ''Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas'', but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like '''uv''' (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

==Background==

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with [[Baeba Swamp]] to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of [[Moonshine]] and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with '''Tata''', also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

==Structure of Parliament==
Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the [[ppot#DPR|Dolphin Riders]], who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient [[Gold party]]. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

==Recognition of new tribes==
Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the '''Tippers''' who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

==Language==
The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited [[Lenian languages#DPR|Dolphin Rider]] language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near [[Baeba Swamp]] came to speak [[Ogili_II|Ogili]], the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

==Growth of the Kapa corporation==
An umbrella corporation called '''Kapa''' (in full, ''Nobōbo Kapa'') arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The ''kapa'' part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like '''Teenprop'''. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like '''Teens for Tomorrow''', though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after [[STW]]; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing '''Bottom''' party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the '''Yukiese''' family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of [[Paba]]. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the '''Teenprop''' political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

==Development of new political parties==
===Two-party stage===
The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support '''feminism''', believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world. The Dolphin Riders realized that if feminism took hold even in Dreamland, there would be no more land in the world run by men; free men would only exist as nomadic minorities within female nations.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support '''sarabism''', the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

==Creation of new parties==
'''Gatotōl''' had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the '''Comb''' party (''Pōrupu Resini'') which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's<ref>A vague and tentative date</ref> the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the '''Hipsoft''' party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new '''Carriage''' party (''āliki'') was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new '''Pointer''' party (''Pēbobi Lisuelesi'') was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a ''pēbobi''.

The '''Permission''' party (''Lepusepu Lesinepu'') was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the '''Butterfly''' party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

====Minor parties====
The '''Frame''' party (''Pōrupu Uimeka'') also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term ''sepu'' (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet ''lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu'' is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

==Culturebound issues==
The [[Gold party]] did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the '''Wildfire''' party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the '''Treehouse''' army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the '''Tippers''' came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

===Hupodas===
There was a ''Hupodas'' ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be ''lepisese'' "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

===Family issues===
====Early years====
The founding '''Dolphin Riders''' planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.<ref>While this logic may seem counterintuitive from the point of view of Earth, it was well illustrated in feminist societies like Moonshine that women were eager to raise children because they would be able to remain at home, and not need to work, while their husbands provided the entire financial support for raising each child.</ref>

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

====Later years====
A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

===Ilhina===
This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.
===Sarabism===
Related to the carrying of weapons.

===Capitalism and communism===
These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

===Censorship and propaganda===
These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

===Feminism===
Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

===Pimuo bopi===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as '''pacifism''' but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive [[Matrix]] army.

''This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as '''bopo''' below.''

===Pasio===
A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

===Bepolere===
Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

===Bopo===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as '''pacifism'''; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

==Proclamation of Empire==
===Proclamation of Empire in 4108===
In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the [[Play party|Play]] parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population.

Yet, 1,300<ref>an exact figure</ref> Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, [[Baeba Swamp]] had become the center of world diplomacy.

===General election of 4111===
The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the '''Treehouse''' party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the '''Wildfire''' party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

==Conflicts over hygiene==

===Hygiene laws===
The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (This is separate from the Hupodas issue.) One reason for the strong attention to hygiene was that the Dolphin Riders were tolerant of nudism, an issue that Dreamers had often gone back and forth on in the past.

The Dreamer Parliament had the power to make laws that applied to the entire empire. Thus it became a crime in Dreamland for a teenager or adult to leave a mess in a public bathroom, or even in nature, without immediately cleaning it up. The Dreamers also had to prove that they were bathing everyday, washing their clothes, and keeping their belongings clean as well. But the Parliament did not have the power to enact a tax applying to the whole Empire; this power was reserved to the states.
====Soapmaking corporation====
Thus, the Dreamer Parliament was unable to subsidize the purchase of soap and other hygiene-related goods, and Dreamers had to rely on their monthly income to buy these products. This immediately led to the rise of a powerful soapmaking class, who founded a corporation, '''Nobōbo Pobo Mosesene''' (PBM), named after the founding Mosesene family. PBM's workers allied themselves with the factions of the Baywatch and Rider parties that favored strict hygiene laws, and pledged to cooperate with each other across state and party lines since they were united on a single issue.

PBM's prices were expensive. The government's bathroom police (''pusepo serakale'') signed a contract with PBM stating that they would ride along with PBM's soap distributors to ensure that citizens were buying the product and keeping their homes and belongings clean. Thus the PBM corporation had a strong ally in the government and assumed they would not be easily shut down.

====Use of currency exchanges====
Nearly two centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. By tying the value of the currency to food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and over time, nations came to use the Ξ tokens as a neutral currency so that they could more easily compare their economies without needing to factor in inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.

The Dreamers had no STW stores and had always been hostile to STW, just as STW had always been hostile to them and had periodically raided Dreamer territory in the past to procure goods to sell in their stores. Therefore the Dreamers did not like STW's Ξ meal token currency either. But they had conceded to use it when comparing their economy to other economies, as it showed that the cost of living in Dreamland was quite high compared to most other nations, and that their people were not living as comfortably as a measure of total economic output would make it seem.

Dreamland's people had an average annual income around '''Ξ70,000''', but much higher in the east, in '''Baywatch''' territory, where the banks and most major corporations were. In fact the average per capita income ranged from about Ξ200,000 in Baywatch territory to Ξ20,000 in the various states of the west.

====Prices of hygiene and associated services====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living. The bathroom guards were separate from the bathroom police, meaning that someone needing to use the bathroom would sometimes need to greet two people just to get in, pay for the experience, and then clean up any mess they had made. Meanwhile it was illegal to hide in nature instead of using the bathroom except when that area was on private property and the landowner took it upon themselves to clean the landscape; in such a case, they were in turn subject to police oversight.

The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early.

===General election of 4116===

===General election of 4125===

===General election of 4129===

==War against the Players==
In 4132, Dreamland's '''Baywatch''' and '''Dolphin Rider''' parties voted together for a war against the distant [[Players|Play]] empire, with the Baywatchers expected to shoulder most of the combat and therefore also reserve the most gains, both territorial and political, for themselves.

===General election of 4134===
===General election of 4140===
As the soldiers of the [[Players|Play]] army massacred Dreamers in the '''Baywatch''' theater of the war, and spread plagues beyond it, the Dreamers (all states) voted to disarm their civilian population to turn over their weapons to the Dreamer army, whom they hoped would keep the Players from spreading further west.

===General election of 4142===
As the [[Play party]] occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of '''Mipatatatatai''', the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

====Immigration====
The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: The sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

====Hipsofts====
Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. These were moved to a city near the middle of the Dolphin Riders' territory, far from Moonshine and also far from the Players. The Dolphin Riders hoped that these immigrants would align themselves with Dreamland or at least become apolitical.

The '''Hipsoft''' faction of the Dolphin Rider party appeared soon after the immigrants were settled. The Hipsofts lived in the area where the immigrants had moved to and opposed the resettlement program. The other Riders seemed to have little interest in the situation, saying that they had done a good deed by adopting refugees from a pacifist nation but also unwilling to spread the immigrants around the rest of Dreamland. At this time, the immigrants had no political party of their own, and the mainstream Riders hoped that the appearance of the Hipsofts would encourage the immigrants to become strongly supportive of the mainstream Riders.

==Reforms to hygiene laws==
The Dolphin Riders had come to power in 4108 with a permissive attitude towards nudism and a strict hygiene policy, requiring all Dreamers to bathe and be clean after using the bathroom. They were required to purchase soap and other hygiene supplies on their own. This was to prevent the spread of disease. The Dreamer parliament had the authority to require Dreamer citizens to purchase soap and other supplies, but not to enact a tax to pay for the hygiene supplies, or to subsidize them in any other way. Even though there was more than one soap company, the price of soap rose high as soapmakers knew the demand for their product would never cease.

====Claims of soapmakers' complicity====
But now, the Dreamers increasingly began to blame their hygiene problems on the [[Players]] to the east, whom they suspected were deliberately polluting the rivers which flowed into coastal areas of Dreamland. The new generation of Dreamers thus came to support laws requiring Dreamers to wear clothing and deemphasizing the use of soap. Soapmakers were invested into their craft now, however, and opposed the new changes as they knew it would decrease their standard of living. The reformists accused the soapmakers of forcing the Dreamer population into a humiliating position, where they spent much of their time and money cleaning up after the Players, knowing that the Players could just as easily pollute the environment even more and thus force the Dreamers to scrub and clean themselves twice as much, all to the joy of the soapmakers. This led to accusations that the soapmakers themselves were cooperating with the Players to spread filth throughout Dreamland.

==Rise of pessimism==
Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only [[Baeba Swamp]], pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the [[Players]], but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

:''Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.''
Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

===Dreamers envy Players===
The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than 800,000 enrolled Players, more than Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself '''Hipsoft''' emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

===Comparative census of 4162===
By 4162, the Dreamer birthrate had increased, while the Player birthrate had fallen, and they had lost territory to the '''Tinks'''. Now, Dreamland's population was about double the Play population of 639,000.

====Census statistics====

{| class="wikitable"
|+ CENSUS OF 4162
|-
! Statistic
! Play
! Dreamland
! COMMENTS
|-
| Population
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 639,000
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 1,243,000
| Play population excludes '''Tata'''
|-
| Land area
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"|
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"|
|
|-
| Per capita GDP
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| Ξ3,832
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| > Ξ50,000
|
|-
| Fertility rate
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 4.74
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 3.58
|
|-
| Median age
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 12.7
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| ~24
|
|}

Although the fertility rates were not greatly different, the actual birth rate was much higher in Play territory because their adult population was primarily female (having fought many recent wars) whereas Dreamland's population consisted mostly of the Dreamers who had not been exposed to any recent wars.

===Other developments===
====Worries about defeat====
Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

===Dissolutionism===
Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

==Defeatist art and propaganda==
The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the [[Players]], as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.
===Depictions of the sun===
Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season. This meant that the entire planet experienced its summer season at the same time, and that even near the Equator, summer was much hotter than winter.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

====The Sun is Too Big====
Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but often riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

====Suntan vs sunburn====
Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, '''Pūpepas''', was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

===Linguistic issues===
The Dreamers were also ashamed of their languages, particularly the eastern ones.

====Phonology====
The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. Though both Dreamers and Players had learned to speak languages such as [[khulls|Leaper]] in the past, it required greater physical effort on their part to pronounce sounds like /k/ than it did for the native Leaper speakers, and therefore both the Dreamers and the Players had spoken languages with a similar acoustic sound for thousands of years. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

====Script====
Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

====Grammar====
Play was a ferociously complex language, with a grammar resembling [[khulls|Leaper]] but famously more difficult. For this reason, the '''Crystals''' and other groups such as the Leapers had an easier time mastering the Play language than did the Dreamers. This embarrassed the Dreamers doubly because the common perception was that Play would be an easy language for the Dreamers to learn because of its simple sound inventory. The Dreamers' inability to competently learn to speak Play had become deadly early in the Play occupation of Tata, as Play military leaders massacred Dreamer teachers for not quickly learning the language.

===Hunger===
Although the Dreamers were not short of food, even after losing the war, they spent more of their time and money on acquiring food than did the Players, who simply built their settlements around food sources so that they would never go hungry.

===Unhealable wounds===
====Hard and soft====
Even when conceding that the Dreamers were physically strong, the artists drew the Players as having square body shapes, whereas the Dreamers were depicted as being made of soft curves.

====Depiction of weapons====
A common stereotype was that Dreamers were physically delicate, but better able to handle weapons than were small, stoutly built tribes such as the Players. Some artists said that once the Dreamers lost their weapons, the Players' weakness would turn into a strength, as their poor ability to handle weapons would mean that every kill would be bloody rather than quick and clean. Meanwhile, other artists depicted the Players as fashioning better weapons, weapons that they could hold and the Dreamers could not.

====Depiction of other sharp objects====
The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The [[Crystals]] had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the [[Players]] and with the [[Soap Bubbles]] living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

====Metaphorical use====
The Dolphin Rider term for an unhealable wound was ''nu silika o pō okuleli'', which could be shortened to ''popōkuleli'' "unhealable". They saw that their people were inflicted with many such wounds, both physically and metaphorically, as they could not protect themselves from the local animal and plant life, but also could not regain territories lost to them by invasions in recent wars such as their war against the Players. Where other nations rose and fell, the Dreamers only grew around the hard barriers outsiders built for them.

The Dreamer propagandists reminded their people that the Players were only the most recent example of an army which had invaded Dreamland and come to permanently reside there. Earlier, the feminist '''Womb Justice''' army, fleeing from their homeland, took refuge in Dreamland but immediately demanded that all Dreamers move out so they could build a society run by women. The Dreamers did not fight these women, fearing that their own people would be unwilling to take up arms against such a society, but within a generation the Dreamers had grown tired of the Wombs and no longer believed that they needed to remain in Dreamland. Yet they were unable to push the Womb army out of Dreamland, and they conceded that they would remain in Dreamland for the indefinite future.

===Positive counterpoints===
For nearly a thousand years, outside cultures had stereotyped the Dreamers as being hypersexual and eager to engage in deviant sexual practices that made their men soft. This stereotype had been repeated by so many different foreign powers that the Dreamers had come to accept that it was true, but they made no plans to change their lifestyles. Instead, the Dreamers said that they were motivated by love, and that most of their enemies were motivated by hate and incapable of love. Rather than consider themselves immoral, the Dreamers said it was cultures such as the [[Players]] who were immoral, for instead of loving each other and their enemies, they sought to start a new war every year and took joy in their enemies' suffering.

==Debates over economics==
The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. [[STW]] mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of [[AlphaLeap]] in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

====Issues involving trade====
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

''this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.''

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly [[STW]], openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

===Arguments for capitalism===
The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising '''Teenprop''' corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, and then paying taxes in their own nations so that both the company and the citizens could benefit from the company's presence.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the '''Teenprop''' corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as the '''Anchor Empire''' (where STW sold most of its goods), and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

====Wealth creation theory====
The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as [[Kxesh]] that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

===Rise of pacifism===
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of [[Paba]], which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

====Secret diplomacy====
As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of '''capitalism''', the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

==Diplomatic outreach to Players==
In the mid-4160s, Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into [[Memnumu]] to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

The [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] also feared the Players and had suffered from their plagues. But when the Dreamers heard that the Players had broken up into four political parties, they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with at least one of them, and form an alliance between Dreamland and the most pro-Dreamer political party in the Play empire.

Because their main contact with the Players was through '''Tata''', the Dreamers understood little of the Players' internal struggles in Memnumu. The Dreamers knew that the original Play faction, the Milk Bottles, had been extremist, and that they had given way to the Pillows after a series of disasters mostly involving young children. They had heard of the rise of the Purses, but most Dreamers did not know that they were racists; they only knew that the Purses' positions on issues in general were more moderate than those of the Pillows, who were in turn more moderate than the Bottles. Therefore, the Dreamers believed that the Play nation as a whole was on a steady path towards more moderate politics, and could therefore become an ally of the Dreamers if they were able to continue along that path. The Dreamers were dismayed when they later learned that the Pillows had recovered their parliamentary majority, but figured that so long as the Purses were also represented in the Play parliament, the Dreamers still had an ally among the Players. (Most Dreamers still did not know, even years on, that the Purses considered Dreamers racially inferior, because the Purses had always focused on internal divisions among the Players in Memnumu.)

===Dreamers meet with Players===
The Dreamers had heard about the Players' new balance system, in which four parties would compete for power in the Parliament, and all four would be allowed to use game-like voting strategies, for example allowing people to vote outside their home districts, figuring that the resulting fierce competition would lead to better governance. They had been shown some anti-Dreamer literature known to have been written by the '''Milk Bottle''' faction of the Play party. With this, and other information they had learned about early happenings in the Play nation, Dreamland labeled the Milk Bottles as an extremist Play faction, and assumed that the other Play factions would thus be more friendly to Dreamland.

The Dreamers sent a team of tall, handsome male diplomats to meet with the female representatives of each of the four main Play parties, comparing and contrasting the Dolphin Riders' party platform with those of the women. The Players were feminists, but unlike the Moonshines, they respected foreign cultural norms, and therefore were accustomed to meeting with male diplomats. The Dreamers told the men to talk strictly about politics, but hoped that they could subliminally woo the women with their charms and return to Dreamland having signed a formal treaty of alliance with at least one, and perhaps more, of the new Play parties.

Four Dreamer men greeted the four Player women in the Play capital city of '''Pūpepas'''.
====Results of the meeting====
At the meeting, the Dreamer men realized that the Milk Bottles they had been calling Play extremists were in fact the most moderate of all the Play philosophies, and that the other three factions were even more hostile than that. Put another way, the Dreamers had assumed that the spectrum of Play political opinions ran the gamut from the fierce nationalism of the Milk Bottles to a cosmopolitan faction of unknown identity with whom they could form an alliance. But rather than ranging from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the Dreamers found out that the Players spanned from nationalism to racism.

Furthermore, even the racist Play faction, the '''Purses''', were nationalists, saying that the hated Eggs were still their allies in any conflict that involved a foreign power. Thus, even though the Purses had openly supported arresting the Eggs, they recognized the Eggs as fellow Players. Therefore none of the Play factions was willing to support Dreamland either militarily or economically.

The Dreamers were frustrated even by the name "balance system", confident that the Players had borrowed the idea of balance from the politics of Dreamland.

====Explanations to common people====
Dreamer diplomats had difficulty explaining to their own people why they had classified all four of Memnumu's Play parties as anti-Dreamer extremists, when the Dreamers had been expecting to find allies in the Play nation. Many Dreamers simply did not believe the diplomats' claims, arguing that at least the Eggs must be friendly towards Dreamland since they had been opposed by all of the other Play factions and had been attacked with no apparent provocation in a recent war led by the Firestones. But the Dreamers had diplomatic contacts with the wider Crystal party, who refused to accept any connection between the Dreamers and the Eggs, and still claimed that the reason the Crystals had abandoned the Eggs was because the required rescue mission would have been impossible.

====Dreamers embrace Tata====
When the Dreamers obtained a clearer understanding of the Play situation, they began to oppose the often talked about integration of Tata into a single unified Play nation, which had been proposed in 4151 but delayed over and over again for various reasons. The Dreamers believed that Tata's ruling '''Club''' party, though formally identical to the Pillows, was the only true moderate Play party, since they had legalized the Dreamer party in their own territory and did not take part in radical Play practices such as child labor and home invasions, even though they had never formally written these out of their party platform. The Dreamers considered all four of the Play parties in Memnumu's Milk Parliament to be extremists. They stated that the Purse ideology was moderate, but that because they were tribalists, the Dreamers could not ally with them after all, and therefore they were off the map of political discourse in Dreamland. The other three factions were also extremists, and most Dreamers considered them even worse than the Purses, since they all opposed Dreamland as well.

====Worries about population growth====
To the Dreamers, the greatest threat posed by the Players was their extremely high birthrate, which had for their first twenty years in power been so high that children under age thirteen comprised 3/4 of the Play population, and the population had doubled in this twenty-year period despite the many plagues, famines, and wars that the Players had endured and created. Meanwhile, though the Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had been youth-based, and had come to power with a high birthrate as well, theirs had never been nearly as high as the Players', and had been in decline for several generations, such that they had come to rely on '''Gold''' party arguments that the political power of a nation should not be related to the size of its population. By now, the Players had already outgrown the Dreamers despite having a much smaller land area, and it seemed inevitable to the Dreamers that the Players would grow even more. Since the Players had already won one major war against Dreamland, the Dreamers worried that their rapidly growing population would in the future lead them to win another.

The Players' birthrate had declined sharply around 4150 when they broke up into factions, however, and the Dreamers knew of this because of diplomatic contacts through Tata. The Dreamers stopped worrying so much about the Players' population expansion and began to focus on their problems at home. But then, when they heard that the Players were reviving the Milk Bottle party, they worried that Play women would once again have more children than they could care for, and that the children would grow up and start wars against Dreamland out of pure hunger, ignoring all common sense.

==Hipsoft war of 4183==
The immigrant '''Tipper''' party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent '''Hipsoft''' party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves '''Tippers''', disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant '''Hipsoft''' party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles
that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

===Moonshine's reaction===
Moonshine endorsed the Tippers' massacres, saying that the men were doing the right thing. Moonshine offered citizenship to all female Tippers, but stated that Tipper men would never be allowed into Moonshine territory, even though they had done a great favor for the Moonshines by killing many Dreamers. This was because Moonshine culture considered men's lives expendable, and that the best thing that men could do for Moonshine would be to stay at war and wear down the enemies of Moonshine without expecting any sort of reward other than the right to abuse the conquered people. Therefore Moonshine stated that if Tipper men wanted to marry women, they should take their wives from among the Dreamer population.

===Contact with the Matrix===
In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful [[Matrix]] army based in the nearby nation of '''Tata'''. Tata was on the north coast and was one of a chain of nations that had long been a buffer area between Dreamland and Moonshine, but had recently grown into a regional power in its own right.

The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland to focus their efforts on the city of [[Baeba Swamp]].

NOTE: The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.<ref>This is from a dream in which Russia did likewise.</ref>

==Newer economic developments==
Losing two wars had led to economic decline, and the increasing isolation of Dreamland drove up the cost of living. Furthermore, the rising cost of living made it difficult for the poorest Dreamers to afford food, and although the Dreamer states solved this problem with welfare payments, some of the western states were now encouraging people to desert their towns in order to live along the coast, much as the [[Players]] did, and obtain their food from the sea.

===Currency conversion===
Nearly three centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had opened stores in the [[Thunder Empire]], whose people owned Dreamer slaves and had little interest in friendly contacts with Dreamland. STW went further, declaring that slavery was not punishment enough, and declared war on [[Dreamland]] on its first official day of business. The result of this, over time, was that any economic growth for STW led to decline for Dreamland, and vice versa.

Dreamland had won its war with STW, even though STW was backed by the traditional military of the Thunder Empire, and nearly drove the corporation out of business despite the great physical distance between Dreamland and the primary STW stores. But in 4108, Dreamland lost control of its newly won territory, and STW returned to business holding a larger grudge against Dreamland than ever before. Dreamland continued to lose wars and cede economic supremacy for the next decades, and although STW was not a major driving force in this, STW reaped some benefit from it because their leaders were better able to take advantage of changing economic tides than were the politicians of the nations they did business with.
====The Ξ4 meal promise====
STW had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. The price of a meal was fixed at Ξ4, and STW's leaders promised that the price would never rise, regardless of what happened to the economies around them, including STW's non-restaurant stores, which did not accept the meal tokens. By tying the currency only to the price of food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and thus came to be used in international comparisons even by countries who had no interest in attracting business from STW.

The Dreamers disliked the so-called universal currency, since STW did not do business in Dreamland, and had always been hostile to Dreamland. The Dreamers stated the Ξ4 meal promise was humiliating because no Dreamers could expect to receive a meal for that price at any restaurant within Dreamland, and that STW had deliberately created an unfair setup that was only sustainable because they owned slaves and their restaurants served foods that had been obtained through slave labor and with minimal transportation and preparation costs.

====Economic restructuring====
Nonetheless, in comparing their economy to those of other nations, the Dreamers were forced to acknowledge STW's meal token currency rather than using their own. By this time, the an STW-like corporation had arisen in Dreamland, intent on solving the problems of Dreamland's economic isolation by producing goods locally and thus relieving the Dreamers' dependence on trade.

The annual per capita income of Dreamland as a whole had declined to about '''Ξ40,000''' by this time, even as the price of a meal in a typical restaurant had remained around Ξ80. The Dreamers were not bankrupted by their food prices because most Dreamers acquired some of their food themselves, cooking it at home during their free time or eating it raw if possible. Thus restaurants catered to travelers and to the wealthiest classes. On top of this, Dreamland's government encouraged its states to distribute welfare tickets to Dreamer families so that they could afford food, particularly in those areas where the natural supply of food was irregular. But Dreamland was a confederation, and could not tax its people directly, and therefore the disbursement of welfare was up to the states.

====Unskilled labor wages====
Dreamland practiced unregulated capitalism supported by welfare payments. There was no minimum wage, so it was common for young and unskilled laborers to receive just Ξ20 or Ξ25 for a day's work. Those who could not find stable employment would often work for even lower wages. Meanwhile, workers in some trades were paid only by selling things they produced and could go for months at a time without income. Therefore, Dreamland's lower class was materially poor even compared to the lower classes of poorer nations, but malnutrition was rare and usually of a sort that money would not have prevented.

===Distribution of necessities===
The charter of the ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party stated that the government must provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care for all citizens, even those Dreamers who chose to live in outlying areas where transportation costs were significant. Since transportation of food and essential goods was the responsibility of the government, the costs were socialized, and Dreamland's taxes were very high. However, the tax policies were the responsibilities of the states, and the Dolphin Riders' parliament could not enact a tax applying to a specific geographic area to force that area to improve its citizens' standard of living.

====Clothing====
Clothing was not defined as a basic human need in the Dolphin Rider platform, and on this they agreed with most of the minor Dreamer parties as well. Therefore, humans who needed protective clothes to work had to buy them on their own, disposable diapers were expensive, and people huddled together in blankets during Dreamland's rare cold winter nights.

The Dreamers and the Players had both often supported nudism, and largely for the same reasons, but opposition to nudism took different perspectives in the two empires. For the Players, opposition to nudism was entirely about hygiene, as the Players' child population had suffered from several plagues and spread these plagues outside their nation. However the Players were so tightly compacted into seaside habitats that they had early on exhausted their supply of plant fibers to weave new diapers, and the Play Parliament shut down the textile industry entirely so they could focus on fishing the sea. By contrast, the Dreamers' much lower fertility rate had kept them free of such problems. Rather, the Dreamers who supported wearing clothes were more concerned with secondary issues: since Dreamers often carried money with them, it was far more convenient for them to wear clothes to help carry the coins, and there were many trades that were much easier to perform while wearing protective clothes. The Dreamers mostly did wear clothes when it was convenient, and indeed their clothing production costs were lower than those in some poorer nations, but all clothes were distributed by private corporations who were free to charge any price they wished, even in areas where they had achieved a monopoly. Thus, many Dreamers spent much of their disposable income on clothing and could not afford to replace clothes that were worn out from daily use.

====Homes and furniture====
Likewise, Dreamland's climate was hot and sunny, and in some areas, people had traditionally lived on the beach, exposed to the elements, and not in any home at all. This extreme lifestyle was associated with the pre-Dreamer aboriginal population, numbering only a few thousand by this time, who lived in very specific locations such that the construction of a building to live in would make little difference. Nonetheless, most Dreamer homes were very simple, and the government promise as understood by the people was that Dreamers would have the right to a place to seek shelter from the rain, which might or might not be their everyday home.

===Typical prices===
The Dreamers embraced capitalism and therefore did not set standard prices on goods. Their government's role in providing for their people was limited to the welfare benefits described above, to medical care, and to providing shelter from nature. The average per capita GDP was around '''Ξ50,000'''. Note that this includes the entire population, not just those in work; the average salary of a worker was therefore significantly higher.

====Hygiene====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean. The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early. A full-body coat made from animal hides could cost around '''Ξ375'''.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living.

====Non-essential foods====
Palm wine and fruit juice averaged about the same price, about '''Ξ120''' per jug.

====Intangibles and services====
Because of the calm weather, travelers often slept outside, exposed to the elements. There was thus relatively little demands for inns, and most tended to be found in cities. A night's sleep in a room with many other travelers could cost around '''Ξ80''', and accomodations with more privacy were rare.

====Illegal transactions====
Slaves could be bought for around '''Ξ100,000''' to '''Ξ1 million''', a vastly higher price than the Ξ10,000 — Ξ50,000 that paid for their abduction and transportation from weakened nations such as Thaoa. The [[Players]] had contemplated selling people from their lower classes to foreign nations for even lower prices to relieve their population stress and also bring money into their economy, but such people were often profitable for the Players since they were little more than slaves already. Since slavery was illegal in Dreamland, such people could not be held openly, and therefore were typically prostitutes who remained in one place and were bound to a master. Male slaves nonetheless were sometimes used to row ships, where they were bound into place and released only when under the close watch of an armed guard.

===Private schools===
Dreamland's education system was privatized, and teachers charged families to enroll their pupils. This was unlike the [[Players|Play]] system, where education was free, and unlike [[STW]], which actually ''paid'' students to attend, albeit in a currency that could only be redeemed at STW.

There was no law requiring Dreamer adults to care for their aging parents, either financially or materially, since the elderly were covered under the same programs that covered disabled and sick people. (This is a relic of the '''Plume''' system that predated the Dolphin Riders.) Therefore parents had no guarantee that their children would portion off their future income to the parents, and no financial incentive to seek the best education for their children, nor to have large numbers of children, or even to have children at all.

Many Dreamer women remained at or near their homes during the daytime, and so teaching their children was simply part of their daily routine, and school systems tended to exist only in large cities. Nonetheless, tuition was affordable, averaging around '''Ξ4,000''' per student per year, much less than the average income of even the lowest class of Dreamers. This tuition covered the teachers' salaries only, and did not pay for the students' meals or their belongings, which often cost more than the tuition.

Dreamland's private schools worked both in competition and in cooperation with each other, as when two schools opened in the same city, typically each school would specialize in different subjects of study.

====Proposal for a public school system====
Nonetheless, the lack of free public education was a disincentive for couples planning to have children, and many Dreamer politicians wanted to start a tax-supported public school system based on a foreign model. But because they could not institute a tax on the entire Dreamer empire, each state would need to do this individually.

Opponents of this plan argued that a public school system would immediately turn into an unrestrained child labor operation, as the state-run school would have no authority above them and thus could not be shut down. As evidence they pointed to the school system of '''Moonshine''', which considered its students to be slaves, and to [[STW]], a private school system which had nonetheless functioned as an education monopoly for much of its existence and had relied on child labor (although with pay) to sustain itself.

The '''Play''' school system, however, did not force its students to work, or even to do schoolwork, and was a legally established government monopoly accountable to no outside authority. Supporters of the new plan claimed that the Play nation disproved all of their doubts. The opponents of the public school plan countered this argument by saying that the Players represented everything the Dreamers opposed, and that the Players in fact were the worst child abusers in the world, as they forced their children to find food for their parents with no salary at all.

===Impossible burdens===
In Dreamland, the middle class was the largest class, and therefore, in Dreamland's democratic elections, policies favoring the middle class tended to succeed. There was no welfare system, and many middle-class Dreamers believed that if they were to set up a welfare system for their poorest citizens, as some other nations had, Dreamland would become as poor as those other nations. Thus the lowest class remained poor. Some Dreamers wished that the lowest class would migrate to surrounding nations but there was no legal means of doing this.

Because the lowest class made only about Ξ20 per day, and meals often cost more than this, these people could not afford their basic needs and had to steal food or turn to other crimes to make money. Many young women, including married women, worked as prostitutes, but because there were so many prostitutes, their earnings were meager and they were worse off than men who made a career from robbing people and stealing transported goods. (These people were called pirates in most languages, because this lifestyle was not confined to the sea.)

It was nearly impossible for a poor person to live in Dreamland without breaking the law. As above, they could not even legally use the bathroom without spending more than their entire income for a day, let alone find food to eat. This meant that Dreamland's various police forces could arrest almost any poor person at any time and put them in prison. However, in general, the middle class preferred to have the lower class out on the streets, since they performed useful jobs for the rest of society, and although it was a common subject of debate, the majority of middle-class Dreamers felt that they would rather tolerate the crime than lose the services of their lower class.

==Matrix treaty of 4190==
By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of '''Memnumu''' once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny [[Matrix]] army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

==Slope treaty==

===General election of 4205===
The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in [[Memnumu]].<ref>It is possible that the descendants of the Hipsides, now adults, still practiced this lifestyle in some territory between Dreamland and Tāmta.</ref>

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

====Arrival of the Cupbearers====
Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of '''Cupbearer''' refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.<ref>This may or may not be the state of Senampattore. Where it is on the map is clear, but the borders may have changed.</ref>

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the [[Players]] in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:
#The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
#Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
#The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in [[Baeba Swamp]] as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
#The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves ''pavača'',<ref>This word is ''čava'' "long hair" spelled backwards inside the circumfix ''p-..-a'' "having (a)". This method of word formation was dying out in Play, but persisted in some groups who were influenced by Andanese, because even though Andanese itself did not use this, it was more convenient with pure CV words, as Andanese had, than with Play whose syllable structure was more diverse.</ref> just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

===Capture of Crystal slaves===
A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising '''Slope''' party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

==Postwar period==
After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

===General election of 4227===
Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The ''bopo'' philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the ''bopo'' supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The '''Cupbearers''' may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

===General election of 4238===
Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

===General election of 4254===
After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the [[Memnumu|Play army]] and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.
==Naval war==
In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the [[Players]], which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the [[Ghost Empire|Ghosts]], who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called '''Laba'''. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of [[Moonshine]], but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world.
But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the [[Players|Play]] population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

==Inversion of propaganda==
Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the [[Players]], but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the [[Matrix]] propaganda of a hundred years prior.

===Weather metaphors===
Though living right along the Equator, the people of Hipatal and Laba in general had the same variety of body types found elsewhere. Some outsiders believed that they were all dark-skinned people, but immigrants such as '''Sašuasa''' had been of the same Lenian body type as the stereotypical eastern Dreamers who had fallen into ruin.

==Naval war in the Play sea==
===General election of 4287===
As the Dreamer navy,<ref>this did not actually take twenty years, but there were no global elections in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty</ref>, '''Laba''', invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the '''Teenprop''' corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

''NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.''

===Antiwar movement in Dreamland===
===="The Real Dreamland"====
Just as Dreamland seemed likely to win its war, a group of pacifists declared themselves to be the only true Dreamers, and pledged allegiance to the '''Cupbearers''' without formally joining the Cupbearer party. They said that the earlier Dreamers' pessimism was correct, and that Dreamland should be a pacifist multinational empire trading economically with foreign nations but without military expansionist goals. They supported '''Moonshine''', and thus while committed to pacifism, assumed that they would soon be targets in the war, and perhaps could be such easy targets that they would distract the navy from their war against the Players. Thus these new pacifists felt they could help the Players whether they were successful in remaking Dreamland into an economic power, in which case the war would stall, or unsuccessful, in which case they would be slaughtered by the pirates but could hopefully still save the Players.

The pacifists' claim to be the only true Dreamers closely resembled the Players' contemporary claim that the Play navy was the only true Laba. They had made their declarations independently, however, as the Play diplomats were blocked from contacting the pacifists by the Ghosts over land and by the pirates at sea.

===General election of 4295===
The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became popular.

===General election of 4316===
After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.
===General election of 4321===
Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

===General election of 4327===
===General election of 4343===
Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

==Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)==
Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing ''bepolere'', which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The ''Pōbipōpu'' and ''Pōronopa'' distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

===Contacts with Moonshine===
The '''Habit''' party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the '''Hipsoft''' settlements to and including the '''Womb Justice''' settlements. The Habits were the sons and daughters of the Crystals who had been pushed into the underclass in Baeba Swamp when the Leapers took over. That is, they were a faction of Crystals who resisted the Leapers.

====Tribal identity====
The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

====Partition====
By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small '''Hipsoft''' migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the '''Womb Justice ''' party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name '''Dreamland''' was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

====Moonshine-Habit relations====
The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's '''Habit''' party (''Tăta'')<ref>Note that this is not a homonym of the state name '''Tàta''' because the tones are different, but that in languages such as Play, the two may have been merged.</ref> to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called '''Wagillàra''', the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

===Demographic shifts===
After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the [[Players]] had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

:''Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.''

===General election of 4351===
Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

===General election of 4390===
Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

===General election of 4402===
Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

===General election of 4412===
The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.
===General election of 4419===
Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

===General election of 4438===
Luxury goods came back into fashion.

====Tribal reform====
Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The '''Tipper''' population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the '''Hipatal''' immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

===General election of 4440===
Luxury goods fell out of fashion.
===General election of 4445===
Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

===General election of 4462===
Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.
===General election of 4468===
Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.
===General election of 4485===
Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.
===General election of 4492===
The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.
===General election of 4500===
Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.
===General election of 4511===
Little changed in this election.
===General election of 4529===
Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.
===General election of 4531===
Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.
===General election of 4538===
Luxury goods became popular.
===General election of 4540===
Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

===Humanitarian attempts at intervention===
The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier.<ref>But remember that this from a different timeline. The figure cannot be taken as an exact count.</ref> Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both [[Baeba Swamp]] and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

''Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.''

==Other developments==
*56 (4150)
*52 (4202)
*13 (4215)
*24 (4239)
*79 (4318)
*80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the [[Hipatal]] people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

=Dreamer-Doll relations=
:''See [[Dolls]].''
Note that there is no convenient way to represent the [[babakiam|Play]]-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with ''dream'' and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the [[Dolls|Bottom]] party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (''nuufa''), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Bottoms did not allow their members to even have protruding fingernails. The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: '''fubap''' describing something soft and thus flexible, and '''nuufa''' describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

===Scope===
It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the '''Hiboh''' Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

===Dedication to pacifism===
The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon [[ppot#upl|drafted a party platform]] denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling '''Hailstorm''' army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

=Dreamer-Play relations=
''Žayuvas'' got its name when the rebel '''Tink''' army invaded their ally, the [[Play party]], and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, [[Dreamland]], than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory ''Memnumu''.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling '''Police''' faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the [[Play party]]. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the [[alphaleap|Leapers]] had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the '''Magic Combs''') never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

===Scope of Žayuvas===
It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of '''Šasa Kaina''', located near and traditionally friendly towards [[Thaoa]], at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

===Fertility calculations===
On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

;Oct 10 2021
There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding '''Tata''', where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

===Apportionment of representatives===
Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

==Evolution from factions to parties==
The [[Play party|Play]] charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

==Party membership==
The '''Police''' party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

==Culturebound issues of the Play Empire==
:''See also [[Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues]]''.
True to its name, the [[Play party]] dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

===Children's issues===
====Education====
The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory [[Raspara]] army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

===Tribal conflicts (general) ===
:''This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.''
====Height and hair color====

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured [[Paba]]p tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were [[#feminism|taller than their men]], this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

====Background====
Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive [[Raspara]] party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious [[swamp Kids|Tink]] army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall [[Repilia]]n tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the '''Flower Bees''' and the '''Rusted Pearls'''. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

====Conflicting tribal definitions====
Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the [[Palli]]-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

=Diplomatic contacts between the empires=

=Later periods=
These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.
===Hiboh===
The '''Hiboh''' era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true '''Sleeperism'''.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the '''Cold Men''', until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

===RKE Wars===
The '''RKE''' movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used [[Matrix]]-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.

=Notes in boats=
==Notes==

Dolphin Riders

2025-06-20T00:16:08Z

Poswob Rare: /* Proposal for a public school system */

The '''MFZ''' Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the [[Cosmopolitan Age]]. The original Empire, ''Mayuvas'', was [[Dreamland]], which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the [[Gold party]], as the word for gold in [[babakiam|Play]] was ''mayu''. The other two empires, ''Fayuvas'' and ''Žayuvas'', were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, [[Baeba Swamp]], which at the time was run primarily by the '''Iron''' party, an offshoot of the much older [[Zenith]] party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel '''ū''', giving ''Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas'', but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like '''uv''' (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

==Background==

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with [[Baeba Swamp]] to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of [[Moonshine]] and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with '''Tata''', also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

==Structure of Parliament==
Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the [[ppot#DPR|Dolphin Riders]], who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient [[Gold party]]. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

==Recognition of new tribes==
Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the '''Tippers''' who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

==Language==
The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited [[Lenian languages#DPR|Dolphin Rider]] language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near [[Baeba Swamp]] came to speak [[Ogili_II|Ogili]], the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

==Growth of the Kapa corporation==
An umbrella corporation called '''Kapa''' (in full, ''Nobōbo Kapa'') arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The ''kapa'' part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like '''Teenprop'''. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like '''Teens for Tomorrow''', though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after [[STW]]; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing '''Bottom''' party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the '''Yukiese''' family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of [[Paba]]. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the '''Teenprop''' political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

==Development of new political parties==
===Two-party stage===
The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support '''feminism''', believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world. The Dolphin Riders realized that if feminism took hold even in Dreamland, there would be no more land in the world run by men; free men would only exist as nomadic minorities within female nations.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support '''sarabism''', the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

==Creation of new parties==
'''Gatotōl''' had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the '''Comb''' party (''Pōrupu Resini'') which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's<ref>A vague and tentative date</ref> the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the '''Hipsoft''' party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new '''Carriage''' party (''āliki'') was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new '''Pointer''' party (''Pēbobi Lisuelesi'') was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a ''pēbobi''.

The '''Permission''' party (''Lepusepu Lesinepu'') was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the '''Butterfly''' party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

====Minor parties====
The '''Frame''' party (''Pōrupu Uimeka'') also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term ''sepu'' (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet ''lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu'' is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

==Culturebound issues==
The [[Gold party]] did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the '''Wildfire''' party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the '''Treehouse''' army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the '''Tippers''' came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

===Hupodas===
There was a ''Hupodas'' ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be ''lepisese'' "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

===Family issues===
====Early years====
The founding '''Dolphin Riders''' planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.<ref>While this logic may seem counterintuitive from the point of view of Earth, it was well illustrated in feminist societies like Moonshine that women were eager to raise children because they would be able to remain at home, and not need to work, while their husbands provided the entire financial support for raising each child.</ref>

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

====Later years====
A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

===Ilhina===
This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.
===Sarabism===
Related to the carrying of weapons.

===Capitalism and communism===
These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

===Censorship and propaganda===
These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

===Feminism===
Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

===Pimuo bopi===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as '''pacifism''' but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive [[Matrix]] army.

''This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as '''bopo''' below.''

===Pasio===
A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

===Bepolere===
Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

===Bopo===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as '''pacifism'''; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

==Proclamation of Empire==
===Proclamation of Empire in 4108===
In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the [[Play party|Play]] parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population.

Yet, 1,300<ref>an exact figure</ref> Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, [[Baeba Swamp]] had become the center of world diplomacy.

===General election of 4111===
The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the '''Treehouse''' party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the '''Wildfire''' party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

==Conflicts over hygiene==

===Hygiene laws===
The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (This is separate from the Hupodas issue.) One reason for the strong attention to hygiene was that the Dolphin Riders were tolerant of nudism, an issue that Dreamers had often gone back and forth on in the past.

The Dreamer Parliament had the power to make laws that applied to the entire empire. Thus it became a crime in Dreamland for a teenager or adult to leave a mess in a public bathroom, or even in nature, without immediately cleaning it up. The Dreamers also had to prove that they were bathing everyday, washing their clothes, and keeping their belongings clean as well. But the Parliament did not have the power to enact a tax applying to the whole Empire; this power was reserved to the states.
====Soapmaking corporation====
Thus, the Dreamer Parliament was unable to subsidize the purchase of soap and other hygiene-related goods, and Dreamers had to rely on their monthly income to buy these products. This immediately led to the rise of a powerful soapmaking class, who founded a corporation, '''Nobōbo Pobo Mosesene''' (PBM), named after the founding Mosesene family. PBM's workers allied themselves with the factions of the Baywatch and Rider parties that favored strict hygiene laws, and pledged to cooperate with each other across state and party lines since they were united on a single issue.

PBM's prices were expensive. The government's bathroom police (''pusepo serakale'') signed a contract with PBM stating that they would ride along with PBM's soap distributors to ensure that citizens were buying the product and keeping their homes and belongings clean. Thus the PBM corporation had a strong ally in the government and assumed they would not be easily shut down.

====Use of currency exchanges====
Nearly two centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. By tying the value of the currency to food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and over time, nations came to use the Ξ tokens as a neutral currency so that they could more easily compare their economies without needing to factor in inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.

The Dreamers had no STW stores and had always been hostile to STW, just as STW had always been hostile to them and had periodically raided Dreamer territory in the past to procure goods to sell in their stores. Therefore the Dreamers did not like STW's Ξ meal token currency either. But they had conceded to use it when comparing their economy to other economies, as it showed that the cost of living in Dreamland was quite high compared to most other nations, and that their people were not living as comfortably as a measure of total economic output would make it seem.

Dreamland's people had an average annual income around '''Ξ70,000''', but much higher in the east, in '''Baywatch''' territory, where the banks and most major corporations were. In fact the average per capita income ranged from about Ξ200,000 in Baywatch territory to Ξ20,000 in the various states of the west.

====Prices of hygiene and associated services====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living. The bathroom guards were separate from the bathroom police, meaning that someone needing to use the bathroom would sometimes need to greet two people just to get in, pay for the experience, and then clean up any mess they had made. Meanwhile it was illegal to hide in nature instead of using the bathroom except when that area was on private property and the landowner took it upon themselves to clean the landscape; in such a case, they were in turn subject to police oversight.

The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early.

===General election of 4116===

===General election of 4125===

===General election of 4129===

==War against the Players==
In 4132, Dreamland's '''Baywatch''' and '''Dolphin Rider''' parties voted together for a war against the distant [[Players|Play]] empire, with the Baywatchers expected to shoulder most of the combat and therefore also reserve the most gains, both territorial and political, for themselves.

===General election of 4134===
===General election of 4140===
As the soldiers of the [[Players|Play]] army massacred Dreamers in the '''Baywatch''' theater of the war, and spread plagues beyond it, the Dreamers (all states) voted to disarm their civilian population to turn over their weapons to the Dreamer army, whom they hoped would keep the Players from spreading further west.

===General election of 4142===
As the [[Play party]] occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of '''Mipatatatatai''', the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

====Immigration====
The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: The sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

====Hipsofts====
Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. These were moved to a city near the middle of the Dolphin Riders' territory, far from Moonshine and also far from the Players. The Dolphin Riders hoped that these immigrants would align themselves with Dreamland or at least become apolitical.

The '''Hipsoft''' faction of the Dolphin Rider party appeared soon after the immigrants were settled. The Hipsofts lived in the area where the immigrants had moved to and opposed the resettlement program. The other Riders seemed to have little interest in the situation, saying that they had done a good deed by adopting refugees from a pacifist nation but also unwilling to spread the immigrants around the rest of Dreamland. At this time, the immigrants had no political party of their own, and the mainstream Riders hoped that the appearance of the Hipsofts would encourage the immigrants to become strongly supportive of the mainstream Riders.

==Reforms to hygiene laws==
The Dolphin Riders had come to power in 4108 with a permissive attitude towards nudism and a strict hygiene policy, requiring all Dreamers to bathe and be clean after using the bathroom. They were required to purchase soap and other hygiene supplies on their own. This was to prevent the spread of disease. The Dreamer parliament had the authority to require Dreamer citizens to purchase soap and other supplies, but not to enact a tax to pay for the hygiene supplies, or to subsidize them in any other way. Even though there was more than one soap company, the price of soap rose high as soapmakers knew the demand for their product would never cease.

====Claims of soapmakers' complicity====
But now, the Dreamers increasingly began to blame their hygiene problems on the [[Players]] to the east, whom they suspected were deliberately polluting the rivers which flowed into coastal areas of Dreamland. The new generation of Dreamers thus came to support laws requiring Dreamers to wear clothing and deemphasizing the use of soap. Soapmakers were invested into their craft now, however, and opposed the new changes as they knew it would decrease their standard of living. The reformists accused the soapmakers of forcing the Dreamer population into a humiliating position, where they spent much of their time and money cleaning up after the Players, knowing that the Players could just as easily pollute the environment even more and thus force the Dreamers to scrub and clean themselves twice as much, all to the joy of the soapmakers. This led to accusations that the soapmakers themselves were cooperating with the Players to spread filth throughout Dreamland.

==Rise of pessimism==
Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only [[Baeba Swamp]], pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the [[Players]], but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

:''Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.''
Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

===Dreamers envy Players===
The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than 800,000 enrolled Players, more than Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself '''Hipsoft''' emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

===Comparative census of 4162===
By 4162, the Dreamer birthrate had increased, while the Player birthrate had fallen, and they had lost territory to the '''Tinks'''. Now, Dreamland's population was about double the Play population of 639,000.

====Census statistics====

{| class="wikitable"
|+ CENSUS OF 4162
|-
! Statistic
! Play
! Dreamland
! COMMENTS
|-
| Population
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 639,000
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 1,243,000
| Play population excludes '''Tata'''
|-
| Land area
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"|
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"|
|
|-
| Per capita GDP
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| Ξ3,832
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| > Ξ50,000
|
|-
| Fertility rate
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 4.74
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 3.58
|
|-
| Median age
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 12.7
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| ~24
|
|}

Although the fertility rates were not greatly different, the actual birth rate was much higher in Play territory because their adult population was primarily female (having fought many recent wars) whereas Dreamland's population consisted mostly of the Dreamers who had not been exposed to any recent wars.

===Other developments===
====Worries about defeat====
Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

===Dissolutionism===
Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

==Defeatist art and propaganda==
The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the [[Players]], as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.
===Depictions of the sun===
Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season. This meant that the entire planet experienced its summer season at the same time, and that even near the Equator, summer was much hotter than winter.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

====The Sun is Too Big====
Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but often riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

====Suntan vs sunburn====
Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, '''Pūpepas''', was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

===Linguistic issues===
The Dreamers were also ashamed of their languages, particularly the eastern ones.

====Phonology====
The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. Though both Dreamers and Players had learned to speak languages such as [[khulls|Leaper]] in the past, it required greater physical effort on their part to pronounce sounds like /k/ than it did for the native Leaper speakers, and therefore both the Dreamers and the Players had spoken languages with a similar acoustic sound for thousands of years. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

====Script====
Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

====Grammar====
Play was a ferociously complex language, with a grammar resembling [[khulls|Leaper]] but famously more difficult. For this reason, the '''Crystals''' and other groups such as the Leapers had an easier time mastering the Play language than did the Dreamers. This embarrassed the Dreamers doubly because the common perception was that Play would be an easy language for the Dreamers to learn because of its simple sound inventory. The Dreamers' inability to competently learn to speak Play had become deadly early in the Play occupation of Tata, as Play military leaders massacred Dreamer teachers for not quickly learning the language.

===Hunger===
Although the Dreamers were not short of food, even after losing the war, they spent more of their time and money on acquiring food than did the Players, who simply built their settlements around food sources so that they would never go hungry.

===Unhealable wounds===
====Hard and soft====
Even when conceding that the Dreamers were physically strong, the artists drew the Players as having square body shapes, whereas the Dreamers were depicted as being made of soft curves.

====Depiction of weapons====
A common stereotype was that Dreamers were physically delicate, but better able to handle weapons than were small, stoutly built tribes such as the Players. Some artists said that once the Dreamers lost their weapons, the Players' weakness would turn into a strength, as their poor ability to handle weapons would mean that every kill would be bloody rather than quick and clean. Meanwhile, other artists depicted the Players as fashioning better weapons, weapons that they could hold and the Dreamers could not.

====Depiction of other sharp objects====
The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The [[Crystals]] had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the [[Players]] and with the [[Soap Bubbles]] living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

====Metaphorical use====
The Dolphin Rider term for an unhealable wound was ''nu silika o pō okuleli'', which could be shortened to ''popōkuleli'' "unhealable". They saw that their people were inflicted with many such wounds, both physically and metaphorically, as they could not protect themselves from the local animal and plant life, but also could not regain territories lost to them by invasions in recent wars such as their war against the Players. Where other nations rose and fell, the Dreamers only grew around the hard barriers outsiders built for them.

The Dreamer propagandists reminded their people that the Players were only the most recent example of an army which had invaded Dreamland and come to permanently reside there. Earlier, the feminist '''Womb Justice''' army, fleeing from their homeland, took refuge in Dreamland but immediately demanded that all Dreamers move out so they could build a society run by women. The Dreamers did not fight these women, fearing that their own people would be unwilling to take up arms against such a society, but within a generation the Dreamers had grown tired of the Wombs and no longer believed that they needed to remain in Dreamland. Yet they were unable to push the Womb army out of Dreamland, and they conceded that they would remain in Dreamland for the indefinite future.

===Positive counterpoints===
For nearly a thousand years, outside cultures had stereotyped the Dreamers as being hypersexual and eager to engage in deviant sexual practices that made their men soft. This stereotype had been repeated by so many different foreign powers that the Dreamers had come to accept that it was true, but they made no plans to change their lifestyles. Instead, the Dreamers said that they were motivated by love, and that most of their enemies were motivated by hate and incapable of love. Rather than consider themselves immoral, the Dreamers said it was cultures such as the [[Players]] who were immoral, for instead of loving each other and their enemies, they sought to start a new war every year and took joy in their enemies' suffering.

==Debates over economics==
The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. [[STW]] mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of [[AlphaLeap]] in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

====Issues involving trade====
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

''this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.''

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly [[STW]], openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

===Arguments for capitalism===
The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising '''Teenprop''' corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, and then paying taxes in their own nations so that both the company and the citizens could benefit from the company's presence.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the '''Teenprop''' corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as the '''Anchor Empire''' (where STW sold most of its goods), and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

====Wealth creation theory====
The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as [[Kxesh]] that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

===Rise of pacifism===
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of [[Paba]], which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

====Secret diplomacy====
As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of '''capitalism''', the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

==Diplomatic outreach to Players==
In the mid-4160s, Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into [[Memnumu]] to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

The [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] also feared the Players and had suffered from their plagues. But when the Dreamers heard that the Players had broken up into four political parties, they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with at least one of them, and form an alliance between Dreamland and the most pro-Dreamer political party in the Play empire.

Because their main contact with the Players was through '''Tata''', the Dreamers understood little of the Players' internal struggles in Memnumu. The Dreamers knew that the original Play faction, the Milk Bottles, had been extremist, and that they had given way to the Pillows after a series of disasters mostly involving young children. They had heard of the rise of the Purses, but most Dreamers did not know that they were racists; they only knew that the Purses' positions on issues in general were more moderate than those of the Pillows, who were in turn more moderate than the Bottles. Therefore, the Dreamers believed that the Play nation as a whole was on a steady path towards more moderate politics, and could therefore become an ally of the Dreamers if they were able to continue along that path. The Dreamers were dismayed when they later learned that the Pillows had recovered their parliamentary majority, but figured that so long as the Purses were also represented in the Play parliament, the Dreamers still had an ally among the Players. (Most Dreamers still did not know, even years on, that the Purses considered Dreamers racially inferior, because the Purses had always focused on internal divisions among the Players in Memnumu.)

===Dreamers meet with Players===
The Dreamers had heard about the Players' new balance system, in which four parties would compete for power in the Parliament, and all four would be allowed to use game-like voting strategies, for example allowing people to vote outside their home districts, figuring that the resulting fierce competition would lead to better governance. They had been shown some anti-Dreamer literature known to have been written by the '''Milk Bottle''' faction of the Play party. With this, and other information they had learned about early happenings in the Play nation, Dreamland labeled the Milk Bottles as an extremist Play faction, and assumed that the other Play factions would thus be more friendly to Dreamland.

The Dreamers sent a team of tall, handsome male diplomats to meet with the female representatives of each of the four main Play parties, comparing and contrasting the Dolphin Riders' party platform with those of the women. The Players were feminists, but unlike the Moonshines, they respected foreign cultural norms, and therefore were accustomed to meeting with male diplomats. The Dreamers told the men to talk strictly about politics, but hoped that they could subliminally woo the women with their charms and return to Dreamland having signed a formal treaty of alliance with at least one, and perhaps more, of the new Play parties.

Four Dreamer men greeted the four Player women in the Play capital city of '''Pūpepas'''.
====Results of the meeting====
At the meeting, the Dreamer men realized that the Milk Bottles they had been calling Play extremists were in fact the most moderate of all the Play philosophies, and that the other three factions were even more hostile than that. Put another way, the Dreamers had assumed that the spectrum of Play political opinions ran the gamut from the fierce nationalism of the Milk Bottles to a cosmopolitan faction of unknown identity with whom they could form an alliance. But rather than ranging from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the Dreamers found out that the Players spanned from nationalism to racism.

Furthermore, even the racist Play faction, the '''Purses''', were nationalists, saying that the hated Eggs were still their allies in any conflict that involved a foreign power. Thus, even though the Purses had openly supported arresting the Eggs, they recognized the Eggs as fellow Players. Therefore none of the Play factions was willing to support Dreamland either militarily or economically.

The Dreamers were frustrated even by the name "balance system", confident that the Players had borrowed the idea of balance from the politics of Dreamland.

====Explanations to common people====
Dreamer diplomats had difficulty explaining to their own people why they had classified all four of Memnumu's Play parties as anti-Dreamer extremists, when the Dreamers had been expecting to find allies in the Play nation. Many Dreamers simply did not believe the diplomats' claims, arguing that at least the Eggs must be friendly towards Dreamland since they had been opposed by all of the other Play factions and had been attacked with no apparent provocation in a recent war led by the Firestones. But the Dreamers had diplomatic contacts with the wider Crystal party, who refused to accept any connection between the Dreamers and the Eggs, and still claimed that the reason the Crystals had abandoned the Eggs was because the required rescue mission would have been impossible.

====Dreamers embrace Tata====
When the Dreamers obtained a clearer understanding of the Play situation, they began to oppose the often talked about integration of Tata into a single unified Play nation, which had been proposed in 4151 but delayed over and over again for various reasons. The Dreamers believed that Tata's ruling '''Club''' party, though formally identical to the Pillows, was the only true moderate Play party, since they had legalized the Dreamer party in their own territory and did not take part in radical Play practices such as child labor and home invasions, even though they had never formally written these out of their party platform. The Dreamers considered all four of the Play parties in Memnumu's Milk Parliament to be extremists. They stated that the Purse ideology was moderate, but that because they were tribalists, the Dreamers could not ally with them after all, and therefore they were off the map of political discourse in Dreamland. The other three factions were also extremists, and most Dreamers considered them even worse than the Purses, since they all opposed Dreamland as well.

====Worries about population growth====
To the Dreamers, the greatest threat posed by the Players was their extremely high birthrate, which had for their first twenty years in power been so high that children under age thirteen comprised 3/4 of the Play population, and the population had doubled in this twenty-year period despite the many plagues, famines, and wars that the Players had endured and created. Meanwhile, though the Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had been youth-based, and had come to power with a high birthrate as well, theirs had never been nearly as high as the Players', and had been in decline for several generations, such that they had come to rely on '''Gold''' party arguments that the political power of a nation should not be related to the size of its population. By now, the Players had already outgrown the Dreamers despite having a much smaller land area, and it seemed inevitable to the Dreamers that the Players would grow even more. Since the Players had already won one major war against Dreamland, the Dreamers worried that their rapidly growing population would in the future lead them to win another.

The Players' birthrate had declined sharply around 4150 when they broke up into factions, however, and the Dreamers knew of this because of diplomatic contacts through Tata. The Dreamers stopped worrying so much about the Players' population expansion and began to focus on their problems at home. But then, when they heard that the Players were reviving the Milk Bottle party, they worried that Play women would once again have more children than they could care for, and that the children would grow up and start wars against Dreamland out of pure hunger, ignoring all common sense.

==Hipsoft war of 4183==
The immigrant '''Tipper''' party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent '''Hipsoft''' party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves '''Tippers''', disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant '''Hipsoft''' party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles
that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

===Moonshine's reaction===
Moonshine endorsed the Tippers' massacres, saying that the men were doing the right thing. Moonshine offered citizenship to all female Tippers, but stated that Tipper men would never be allowed into Moonshine territory, even though they had done a great favor for the Moonshines by killing many Dreamers. This was because Moonshine culture considered men's lives expendable, and that the best thing that men could do for Moonshine would be to stay at war and wear down the enemies of Moonshine without expecting any sort of reward other than the right to abuse the conquered people. Therefore Moonshine stated that if Tipper men wanted to marry women, they should take their wives from among the Dreamer population.

===Contact with the Matrix===
In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful [[Matrix]] army based in the nearby nation of '''Tata'''. Tata was on the north coast and was one of a chain of nations that had long been a buffer area between Dreamland and Moonshine, but had recently grown into a regional power in its own right.

The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland to focus their efforts on the city of [[Baeba Swamp]].

NOTE: The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.<ref>This is from a dream in which Russia did likewise.</ref>

==Newer economic developments==
Losing two wars had led to economic decline, and the increasing isolation of Dreamland drove up the cost of living. Furthermore, the rising cost of living made it difficult for the poorest Dreamers to afford food, and although the Dreamer states solved this problem with welfare payments, some of the western states were now encouraging people to desert their towns in order to live along the coast, much as the [[Players]] did, and obtain their food from the sea.

===Currency conversion===
Nearly three centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had opened stores in the [[Thunder Empire]], whose people owned Dreamer slaves and had little interest in friendly contacts with Dreamland. STW went further, declaring that slavery was not punishment enough, and declared war on [[Dreamland]] on its first official day of business. The result of this, over time, was that any economic growth for STW led to decline for Dreamland, and vice versa.

Dreamland had won its war with STW, even though STW was backed by the traditional military of the Thunder Empire, and nearly drove the corporation out of business despite the great physical distance between Dreamland and the primary STW stores. But in 4108, Dreamland lost control of its newly won territory, and STW returned to business holding a larger grudge against Dreamland than ever before. Dreamland continued to lose wars and cede economic supremacy for the next decades, and although STW was not a major driving force in this, STW reaped some benefit from it because their leaders were better able to take advantage of changing economic tides than were the politicians of the nations they did business with.
====The Ξ4 meal promise====
STW had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. The price of a meal was fixed at Ξ4, and STW's leaders promised that the price would never rise, regardless of what happened to the economies around them, including STW's non-restaurant stores, which did not accept the meal tokens. By tying the currency only to the price of food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and thus came to be used in international comparisons even by countries who had no interest in attracting business from STW.

The Dreamers disliked the so-called universal currency, since STW did not do business in Dreamland, and had always been hostile to Dreamland. The Dreamers stated the Ξ4 meal promise was humiliating because no Dreamers could expect to receive a meal for that price at any restaurant within Dreamland, and that STW had deliberately created an unfair setup that was only sustainable because they owned slaves and their restaurants served foods that had been obtained through slave labor and with minimal transportation and preparation costs.

====Economic restructuring====
Nonetheless, in comparing their economy to those of other nations, the Dreamers were forced to acknowledge STW's meal token currency rather than using their own. By this time, the an STW-like corporation had arisen in Dreamland, intent on solving the problems of Dreamland's economic isolation by producing goods locally and thus relieving the Dreamers' dependence on trade.

The annual per capita income of Dreamland as a whole had declined to about '''Ξ40,000''' by this time, even as the price of a meal in a typical restaurant had remained around Ξ80. The Dreamers were not bankrupted by their food prices because most Dreamers acquired some of their food themselves, cooking it at home during their free time or eating it raw if possible. Thus restaurants catered to travelers and to the wealthiest classes. On top of this, Dreamland's government encouraged its states to distribute welfare tickets to Dreamer families so that they could afford food, particularly in those areas where the natural supply of food was irregular. But Dreamland was a confederation, and could not tax its people directly, and therefore the disbursement of welfare was up to the states.

====Unskilled labor wages====
Dreamland practiced unregulated capitalism supported by welfare payments. There was no minimum wage, so it was common for young and unskilled laborers to receive just Ξ20 or Ξ25 for a day's work. Those who could not find stable employment would often work for even lower wages. Meanwhile, workers in some trades were paid only by selling things they produced and could go for months at a time without income. Therefore, Dreamland's lower class was materially poor even compared to the lower classes of poorer nations, but malnutrition was rare and usually of a sort that money would not have prevented.

===Distribution of necessities===
The charter of the ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party stated that the government must provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care for all citizens, even those Dreamers who chose to live in outlying areas where transportation costs were significant. Since transportation of food and essential goods was the responsibility of the government, the costs were socialized, and Dreamland's taxes were very high. However, the tax policies were the responsibilities of the states, and the Dolphin Riders' parliament could not enact a tax applying to a specific geographic area to force that area to improve its citizens' standard of living.

====Clothing====
Clothing was not defined as a basic human need in the Dolphin Rider platform, and on this they agreed with most of the minor Dreamer parties as well. Therefore, humans who needed protective clothes to work had to buy them on their own, disposable diapers were expensive, and people huddled together in blankets during Dreamland's rare cold winter nights.

The Dreamers and the Players had both often supported nudism, and largely for the same reasons, but opposition to nudism took different perspectives in the two empires. For the Players, opposition to nudism was entirely about hygiene, as the Players' child population had suffered from several plagues and spread these plagues outside their nation. However the Players were so tightly compacted into seaside habitats that they had early on exhausted their supply of plant fibers to weave new diapers, and the Play Parliament shut down the textile industry entirely so they could focus on fishing the sea. By contrast, the Dreamers' much lower fertility rate had kept them free of such problems. Rather, the Dreamers who supported wearing clothes were more concerned with secondary issues: since Dreamers often carried money with them, it was far more convenient for them to wear clothes to help carry the coins, and there were many trades that were much easier to perform while wearing protective clothes. The Dreamers mostly did wear clothes when it was convenient, and indeed their clothing production costs were lower than those in some poorer nations, but all clothes were distributed by private corporations who were free to charge any price they wished, even in areas where they had achieved a monopoly. Thus, many Dreamers spent much of their disposable income on clothing and could not afford to replace clothes that were worn out from daily use.

====Homes and furniture====
Likewise, Dreamland's climate was hot and sunny, and in some areas, people had traditionally lived on the beach, exposed to the elements, and not in any home at all. This extreme lifestyle was associated with the pre-Dreamer aboriginal population, numbering only a few thousand by this time, who lived in very specific locations such that the construction of a building to live in would make little difference. Nonetheless, most Dreamer homes were very simple, and the government promise as understood by the people was that Dreamers would have the right to a place to seek shelter from the rain, which might or might not be their everyday home.

===Typical prices===
The Dreamers embraced capitalism and therefore did not set standard prices on goods. Their government's role in providing for their people was limited to the welfare benefits described above, to medical care, and to providing shelter from nature. The average per capita GDP was around '''Ξ50,000'''. Note that this includes the entire population, not just those in work; the average salary of a worker was therefore significantly higher.

====Hygiene====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean. The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early. A full-body coat made from animal hides could cost around '''Ξ375'''.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living.

====Non-essential foods====
Palm wine and fruit juice averaged about the same price, about '''Ξ120''' per jug.

====Intangibles and services====
Because of the calm weather, travelers often slept outside, exposed to the elements. There was thus relatively little demands for inns, and most tended to be found in cities. A night's sleep in a room with many other travelers could cost around '''Ξ80''', and accomodations with more privacy were rare.

====Illegal transactions====
Slaves could be bought for around '''Ξ100,000''' to '''Ξ1 million''', a vastly higher price than the Ξ10,000 — Ξ50,000 that paid for their abduction and transportation from weakened nations such as Thaoa. The [[Players]] had contemplated selling people from their lower classes to foreign nations for even lower prices to relieve their population stress and also bring money into their economy, but such people were often profitable for the Players since they were little more than slaves already. Since slavery was illegal in Dreamland, such people could not be held openly, and therefore were typically prostitutes who remained in one place and were bound to a master. Male slaves nonetheless were sometimes used to row ships, where they were bound into place and released only when under the close watch of an armed guard.

===Private schools===
Dreamland's education system was privatized, and teachers charged families to enroll their pupils. This was unlike the [[Players|Play]] system, where education was free, and unlike [[STW]], which actually ''paid'' students to attend, albeit in a currency that could only be redeemed at STW.

There was no law requiring Dreamer adults to care for their aging parents, either financially or materially, since the elderly were covered under the same programs that covered disabled and sick people. (This is a relic of the '''Plume''' system that predated the Dolphin Riders.) Therefore parents had no guarantee that their children would portion off their future income to the parents, and no financial incentive to seek the best education for their children, nor to have large numbers of children, or even to have children at all.

Many Dreamer women remained at or near their homes during the daytime, and so teaching their children was simply part of their daily routine, and school systems tended to exist only in large cities. Nonetheless, tuition was affordable, averaging around '''Ξ4,000''' per student per year, much less than the average income of even the lowest class of Dreamers. This tuition covered the teachers' salaries only, and did not pay for the students' meals or their belongings, which often cost more than the tuition.

Dreamland's private schools worked both in competition and in cooperation with each other, as when two schools opened in the same city, typically each school would specialize in different subjects of study.

====Proposal for a public school system====
Nonetheless, the lack of free public education was a disincentive for couples planning to have children, and many Dreamer politicians wanted to start a tax-supported public school system based on a foreign model. But because they could not institute a tax on the entire Dreamer empire, each state would need to do this individually.

Opponents of this plan argued that a public school system would immediately turn into an unrestrained child labor operation, as the state-run school would have no authority above them and thus could not be shut down. As evidence they pointed to the school system of '''Moonshine''', which considered its students to be slaves, and to [[STW]], a private school system which had nonetheless functioned as an education monopoly for much of its existence and had relied on child labor (although with pay) to sustain itself.

The '''Play''' school system, however, did not force its students to work, or even to do schoolwork, and was a legally established government monopoly accountable to no outside authority. Supporters of the new plan claimed that the Play nation disproved all of their doubts. The opponents of the public school plan countered this argument by saying that the Players represented everything the Dreamers opposed, and that the Players in fact were the worst child abusers in the world, as they forced their children to find food for their parents with no salary at all.

===Impossible burdens===
In Dreamland, the middle class was the largest class, and therefore, in Dreamland's democratic elections, policies favoring the middle class tended to succeed. There was no welfare system, and many middle-class Dreamers believed that if they were to set up a welfare system for their poorest citizens, as some other nations had, Dreamland would become as poor as those other nations. Thus the lowest class remained poor. Some Dreamers wished that the lowest class would migrate to surrounding nations but there was no legal means of doing this.

Because the lowest class made only about Ξ20 per day, and meals often cost more than this, these people could not afford their basic needs and had to steal food or turn to other crimes to make money. Many young women, including married women, worked as prostitutes, but because there were so many prostitutes, their earnings were meager and they were worse off than men who made a career from robbing people and stealing transported goods. (These people were called pirates in most languages, because this lifestyle was not confined to the sea.)

==Matrix treaty of 4190==
By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of '''Memnumu''' once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny [[Matrix]] army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

==Slope treaty==

===General election of 4205===
The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in [[Memnumu]].<ref>It is possible that the descendants of the Hipsides, now adults, still practiced this lifestyle in some territory between Dreamland and Tāmta.</ref>

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

====Arrival of the Cupbearers====
Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of '''Cupbearer''' refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.<ref>This may or may not be the state of Senampattore. Where it is on the map is clear, but the borders may have changed.</ref>

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the [[Players]] in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:
#The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
#Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
#The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in [[Baeba Swamp]] as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
#The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves ''pavača'',<ref>This word is ''čava'' "long hair" spelled backwards inside the circumfix ''p-..-a'' "having (a)". This method of word formation was dying out in Play, but persisted in some groups who were influenced by Andanese, because even though Andanese itself did not use this, it was more convenient with pure CV words, as Andanese had, than with Play whose syllable structure was more diverse.</ref> just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

===Capture of Crystal slaves===
A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising '''Slope''' party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

==Postwar period==
After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

===General election of 4227===
Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The ''bopo'' philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the ''bopo'' supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The '''Cupbearers''' may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

===General election of 4238===
Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

===General election of 4254===
After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the [[Memnumu|Play army]] and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.
==Naval war==
In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the [[Players]], which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the [[Ghost Empire|Ghosts]], who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called '''Laba'''. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of [[Moonshine]], but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world.
But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the [[Players|Play]] population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

==Inversion of propaganda==
Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the [[Players]], but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the [[Matrix]] propaganda of a hundred years prior.

===Weather metaphors===
Though living right along the Equator, the people of Hipatal and Laba in general had the same variety of body types found elsewhere. Some outsiders believed that they were all dark-skinned people, but immigrants such as '''Sašuasa''' had been of the same Lenian body type as the stereotypical eastern Dreamers who had fallen into ruin.

==Naval war in the Play sea==
===General election of 4287===
As the Dreamer navy,<ref>this did not actually take twenty years, but there were no global elections in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty</ref>, '''Laba''', invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the '''Teenprop''' corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

''NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.''

===Antiwar movement in Dreamland===
===="The Real Dreamland"====
Just as Dreamland seemed likely to win its war, a group of pacifists declared themselves to be the only true Dreamers, and pledged allegiance to the '''Cupbearers''' without formally joining the Cupbearer party. They said that the earlier Dreamers' pessimism was correct, and that Dreamland should be a pacifist multinational empire trading economically with foreign nations but without military expansionist goals. They supported '''Moonshine''', and thus while committed to pacifism, assumed that they would soon be targets in the war, and perhaps could be such easy targets that they would distract the navy from their war against the Players. Thus these new pacifists felt they could help the Players whether they were successful in remaking Dreamland into an economic power, in which case the war would stall, or unsuccessful, in which case they would be slaughtered by the pirates but could hopefully still save the Players.

The pacifists' claim to be the only true Dreamers closely resembled the Players' contemporary claim that the Play navy was the only true Laba. They had made their declarations independently, however, as the Play diplomats were blocked from contacting the pacifists by the Ghosts over land and by the pirates at sea.

===General election of 4295===
The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became popular.

===General election of 4316===
After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.
===General election of 4321===
Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

===General election of 4327===
===General election of 4343===
Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

==Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)==
Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing ''bepolere'', which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The ''Pōbipōpu'' and ''Pōronopa'' distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

===Contacts with Moonshine===
The '''Habit''' party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the '''Hipsoft''' settlements to and including the '''Womb Justice''' settlements. The Habits were the sons and daughters of the Crystals who had been pushed into the underclass in Baeba Swamp when the Leapers took over. That is, they were a faction of Crystals who resisted the Leapers.

====Tribal identity====
The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

====Partition====
By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small '''Hipsoft''' migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the '''Womb Justice ''' party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name '''Dreamland''' was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

====Moonshine-Habit relations====
The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's '''Habit''' party (''Tăta'')<ref>Note that this is not a homonym of the state name '''Tàta''' because the tones are different, but that in languages such as Play, the two may have been merged.</ref> to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called '''Wagillàra''', the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

===Demographic shifts===
After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the [[Players]] had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

:''Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.''

===General election of 4351===
Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

===General election of 4390===
Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

===General election of 4402===
Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

===General election of 4412===
The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.
===General election of 4419===
Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

===General election of 4438===
Luxury goods came back into fashion.

====Tribal reform====
Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The '''Tipper''' population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the '''Hipatal''' immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

===General election of 4440===
Luxury goods fell out of fashion.
===General election of 4445===
Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

===General election of 4462===
Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.
===General election of 4468===
Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.
===General election of 4485===
Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.
===General election of 4492===
The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.
===General election of 4500===
Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.
===General election of 4511===
Little changed in this election.
===General election of 4529===
Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.
===General election of 4531===
Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.
===General election of 4538===
Luxury goods became popular.
===General election of 4540===
Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

===Humanitarian attempts at intervention===
The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier.<ref>But remember that this from a different timeline. The figure cannot be taken as an exact count.</ref> Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both [[Baeba Swamp]] and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

''Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.''

==Other developments==
*56 (4150)
*52 (4202)
*13 (4215)
*24 (4239)
*79 (4318)
*80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the [[Hipatal]] people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

=Dreamer-Doll relations=
:''See [[Dolls]].''
Note that there is no convenient way to represent the [[babakiam|Play]]-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with ''dream'' and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the [[Dolls|Bottom]] party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (''nuufa''), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Bottoms did not allow their members to even have protruding fingernails. The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: '''fubap''' describing something soft and thus flexible, and '''nuufa''' describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

===Scope===
It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the '''Hiboh''' Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

===Dedication to pacifism===
The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon [[ppot#upl|drafted a party platform]] denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling '''Hailstorm''' army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

=Dreamer-Play relations=
''Žayuvas'' got its name when the rebel '''Tink''' army invaded their ally, the [[Play party]], and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, [[Dreamland]], than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory ''Memnumu''.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling '''Police''' faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the [[Play party]]. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the [[alphaleap|Leapers]] had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the '''Magic Combs''') never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

===Scope of Žayuvas===
It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of '''Šasa Kaina''', located near and traditionally friendly towards [[Thaoa]], at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

===Fertility calculations===
On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

;Oct 10 2021
There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding '''Tata''', where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

===Apportionment of representatives===
Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

==Evolution from factions to parties==
The [[Play party|Play]] charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

==Party membership==
The '''Police''' party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

==Culturebound issues of the Play Empire==
:''See also [[Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues]]''.
True to its name, the [[Play party]] dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

===Children's issues===
====Education====
The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory [[Raspara]] army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

===Tribal conflicts (general) ===
:''This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.''
====Height and hair color====

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured [[Paba]]p tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were [[#feminism|taller than their men]], this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

====Background====
Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive [[Raspara]] party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious [[swamp Kids|Tink]] army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall [[Repilia]]n tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the '''Flower Bees''' and the '''Rusted Pearls'''. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

====Conflicting tribal definitions====
Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the [[Palli]]-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

=Diplomatic contacts between the empires=

=Later periods=
These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.
===Hiboh===
The '''Hiboh''' era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true '''Sleeperism'''.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the '''Cold Men''', until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

===RKE Wars===
The '''RKE''' movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used [[Matrix]]-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.

=Notes in boats=
==Notes==

Dolphin Riders

2025-06-20T00:03:08Z

Poswob Rare: clarify

The '''MFZ''' Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the [[Cosmopolitan Age]]. The original Empire, ''Mayuvas'', was [[Dreamland]], which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the [[Gold party]], as the word for gold in [[babakiam|Play]] was ''mayu''. The other two empires, ''Fayuvas'' and ''Žayuvas'', were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, [[Baeba Swamp]], which at the time was run primarily by the '''Iron''' party, an offshoot of the much older [[Zenith]] party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel '''ū''', giving ''Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas'', but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like '''uv''' (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

==Background==

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with [[Baeba Swamp]] to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of [[Moonshine]] and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with '''Tata''', also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

==Structure of Parliament==
Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the [[ppot#DPR|Dolphin Riders]], who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient [[Gold party]]. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

==Recognition of new tribes==
Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the '''Tippers''' who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

==Language==
The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited [[Lenian languages#DPR|Dolphin Rider]] language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near [[Baeba Swamp]] came to speak [[Ogili_II|Ogili]], the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

==Growth of the Kapa corporation==
An umbrella corporation called '''Kapa''' (in full, ''Nobōbo Kapa'') arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The ''kapa'' part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like '''Teenprop'''. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like '''Teens for Tomorrow''', though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after [[STW]]; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing '''Bottom''' party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the '''Yukiese''' family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of [[Paba]]. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the '''Teenprop''' political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

==Development of new political parties==
===Two-party stage===
The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support '''feminism''', believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world. The Dolphin Riders realized that if feminism took hold even in Dreamland, there would be no more land in the world run by men; free men would only exist as nomadic minorities within female nations.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support '''sarabism''', the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

==Creation of new parties==
'''Gatotōl''' had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the '''Comb''' party (''Pōrupu Resini'') which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's<ref>A vague and tentative date</ref> the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the '''Hipsoft''' party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new '''Carriage''' party (''āliki'') was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new '''Pointer''' party (''Pēbobi Lisuelesi'') was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a ''pēbobi''.

The '''Permission''' party (''Lepusepu Lesinepu'') was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the '''Butterfly''' party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

====Minor parties====
The '''Frame''' party (''Pōrupu Uimeka'') also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term ''sepu'' (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet ''lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu'' is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

==Culturebound issues==
The [[Gold party]] did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the '''Wildfire''' party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the '''Treehouse''' army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the '''Tippers''' came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

===Hupodas===
There was a ''Hupodas'' ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be ''lepisese'' "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

===Family issues===
====Early years====
The founding '''Dolphin Riders''' planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.<ref>While this logic may seem counterintuitive from the point of view of Earth, it was well illustrated in feminist societies like Moonshine that women were eager to raise children because they would be able to remain at home, and not need to work, while their husbands provided the entire financial support for raising each child.</ref>

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

====Later years====
A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

===Ilhina===
This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.
===Sarabism===
Related to the carrying of weapons.

===Capitalism and communism===
These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

===Censorship and propaganda===
These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

===Feminism===
Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

===Pimuo bopi===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as '''pacifism''' but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive [[Matrix]] army.

''This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as '''bopo''' below.''

===Pasio===
A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

===Bepolere===
Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

===Bopo===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as '''pacifism'''; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

==Proclamation of Empire==
===Proclamation of Empire in 4108===
In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the [[Play party|Play]] parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population.

Yet, 1,300<ref>an exact figure</ref> Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, [[Baeba Swamp]] had become the center of world diplomacy.

===General election of 4111===
The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the '''Treehouse''' party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the '''Wildfire''' party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

==Conflicts over hygiene==

===Hygiene laws===
The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (This is separate from the Hupodas issue.) One reason for the strong attention to hygiene was that the Dolphin Riders were tolerant of nudism, an issue that Dreamers had often gone back and forth on in the past.

The Dreamer Parliament had the power to make laws that applied to the entire empire. Thus it became a crime in Dreamland for a teenager or adult to leave a mess in a public bathroom, or even in nature, without immediately cleaning it up. The Dreamers also had to prove that they were bathing everyday, washing their clothes, and keeping their belongings clean as well. But the Parliament did not have the power to enact a tax applying to the whole Empire; this power was reserved to the states.
====Soapmaking corporation====
Thus, the Dreamer Parliament was unable to subsidize the purchase of soap and other hygiene-related goods, and Dreamers had to rely on their monthly income to buy these products. This immediately led to the rise of a powerful soapmaking class, who founded a corporation, '''Nobōbo Pobo Mosesene''' (PBM), named after the founding Mosesene family. PBM's workers allied themselves with the factions of the Baywatch and Rider parties that favored strict hygiene laws, and pledged to cooperate with each other across state and party lines since they were united on a single issue.

PBM's prices were expensive. The government's bathroom police (''pusepo serakale'') signed a contract with PBM stating that they would ride along with PBM's soap distributors to ensure that citizens were buying the product and keeping their homes and belongings clean. Thus the PBM corporation had a strong ally in the government and assumed they would not be easily shut down.

====Use of currency exchanges====
Nearly two centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. By tying the value of the currency to food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and over time, nations came to use the Ξ tokens as a neutral currency so that they could more easily compare their economies without needing to factor in inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.

The Dreamers had no STW stores and had always been hostile to STW, just as STW had always been hostile to them and had periodically raided Dreamer territory in the past to procure goods to sell in their stores. Therefore the Dreamers did not like STW's Ξ meal token currency either. But they had conceded to use it when comparing their economy to other economies, as it showed that the cost of living in Dreamland was quite high compared to most other nations, and that their people were not living as comfortably as a measure of total economic output would make it seem.

Dreamland's people had an average annual income around '''Ξ70,000''', but much higher in the east, in '''Baywatch''' territory, where the banks and most major corporations were. In fact the average per capita income ranged from about Ξ200,000 in Baywatch territory to Ξ20,000 in the various states of the west.

====Prices of hygiene and associated services====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living. The bathroom guards were separate from the bathroom police, meaning that someone needing to use the bathroom would sometimes need to greet two people just to get in, pay for the experience, and then clean up any mess they had made. Meanwhile it was illegal to hide in nature instead of using the bathroom except when that area was on private property and the landowner took it upon themselves to clean the landscape; in such a case, they were in turn subject to police oversight.

The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early.

===General election of 4116===

===General election of 4125===

===General election of 4129===

==War against the Players==
In 4132, Dreamland's '''Baywatch''' and '''Dolphin Rider''' parties voted together for a war against the distant [[Players|Play]] empire, with the Baywatchers expected to shoulder most of the combat and therefore also reserve the most gains, both territorial and political, for themselves.

===General election of 4134===
===General election of 4140===
As the soldiers of the [[Players|Play]] army massacred Dreamers in the '''Baywatch''' theater of the war, and spread plagues beyond it, the Dreamers (all states) voted to disarm their civilian population to turn over their weapons to the Dreamer army, whom they hoped would keep the Players from spreading further west.

===General election of 4142===
As the [[Play party]] occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of '''Mipatatatatai''', the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

====Immigration====
The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: The sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

====Hipsofts====
Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. These were moved to a city near the middle of the Dolphin Riders' territory, far from Moonshine and also far from the Players. The Dolphin Riders hoped that these immigrants would align themselves with Dreamland or at least become apolitical.

The '''Hipsoft''' faction of the Dolphin Rider party appeared soon after the immigrants were settled. The Hipsofts lived in the area where the immigrants had moved to and opposed the resettlement program. The other Riders seemed to have little interest in the situation, saying that they had done a good deed by adopting refugees from a pacifist nation but also unwilling to spread the immigrants around the rest of Dreamland. At this time, the immigrants had no political party of their own, and the mainstream Riders hoped that the appearance of the Hipsofts would encourage the immigrants to become strongly supportive of the mainstream Riders.

==Reforms to hygiene laws==
The Dolphin Riders had come to power in 4108 with a permissive attitude towards nudism and a strict hygiene policy, requiring all Dreamers to bathe and be clean after using the bathroom. They were required to purchase soap and other hygiene supplies on their own. This was to prevent the spread of disease. The Dreamer parliament had the authority to require Dreamer citizens to purchase soap and other supplies, but not to enact a tax to pay for the hygiene supplies, or to subsidize them in any other way. Even though there was more than one soap company, the price of soap rose high as soapmakers knew the demand for their product would never cease.

====Claims of soapmakers' complicity====
But now, the Dreamers increasingly began to blame their hygiene problems on the [[Players]] to the east, whom they suspected were deliberately polluting the rivers which flowed into coastal areas of Dreamland. The new generation of Dreamers thus came to support laws requiring Dreamers to wear clothing and deemphasizing the use of soap. Soapmakers were invested into their craft now, however, and opposed the new changes as they knew it would decrease their standard of living. The reformists accused the soapmakers of forcing the Dreamer population into a humiliating position, where they spent much of their time and money cleaning up after the Players, knowing that the Players could just as easily pollute the environment even more and thus force the Dreamers to scrub and clean themselves twice as much, all to the joy of the soapmakers. This led to accusations that the soapmakers themselves were cooperating with the Players to spread filth throughout Dreamland.

==Rise of pessimism==
Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only [[Baeba Swamp]], pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the [[Players]], but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

:''Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.''
Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

===Dreamers envy Players===
The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than 800,000 enrolled Players, more than Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself '''Hipsoft''' emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

===Comparative census of 4162===
By 4162, the Dreamer birthrate had increased, while the Player birthrate had fallen, and they had lost territory to the '''Tinks'''. Now, Dreamland's population was about double the Play population of 639,000.

====Census statistics====

{| class="wikitable"
|+ CENSUS OF 4162
|-
! Statistic
! Play
! Dreamland
! COMMENTS
|-
| Population
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 639,000
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 1,243,000
| Play population excludes '''Tata'''
|-
| Land area
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"|
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"|
|
|-
| Per capita GDP
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| Ξ3,832
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| > Ξ50,000
|
|-
| Fertility rate
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 4.74
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 3.58
|
|-
| Median age
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 12.7
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| ~24
|
|}

Although the fertility rates were not greatly different, the actual birth rate was much higher in Play territory because their adult population was primarily female (having fought many recent wars) whereas Dreamland's population consisted mostly of the Dreamers who had not been exposed to any recent wars.

===Other developments===
====Worries about defeat====
Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

===Dissolutionism===
Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

==Defeatist art and propaganda==
The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the [[Players]], as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.
===Depictions of the sun===
Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season. This meant that the entire planet experienced its summer season at the same time, and that even near the Equator, summer was much hotter than winter.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

====The Sun is Too Big====
Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but often riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

====Suntan vs sunburn====
Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, '''Pūpepas''', was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

===Linguistic issues===
The Dreamers were also ashamed of their languages, particularly the eastern ones.

====Phonology====
The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. Though both Dreamers and Players had learned to speak languages such as [[khulls|Leaper]] in the past, it required greater physical effort on their part to pronounce sounds like /k/ than it did for the native Leaper speakers, and therefore both the Dreamers and the Players had spoken languages with a similar acoustic sound for thousands of years. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

====Script====
Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

====Grammar====
Play was a ferociously complex language, with a grammar resembling [[khulls|Leaper]] but famously more difficult. For this reason, the '''Crystals''' and other groups such as the Leapers had an easier time mastering the Play language than did the Dreamers. This embarrassed the Dreamers doubly because the common perception was that Play would be an easy language for the Dreamers to learn because of its simple sound inventory. The Dreamers' inability to competently learn to speak Play had become deadly early in the Play occupation of Tata, as Play military leaders massacred Dreamer teachers for not quickly learning the language.

===Hunger===
Although the Dreamers were not short of food, even after losing the war, they spent more of their time and money on acquiring food than did the Players, who simply built their settlements around food sources so that they would never go hungry.

===Unhealable wounds===
====Hard and soft====
Even when conceding that the Dreamers were physically strong, the artists drew the Players as having square body shapes, whereas the Dreamers were depicted as being made of soft curves.

====Depiction of weapons====
A common stereotype was that Dreamers were physically delicate, but better able to handle weapons than were small, stoutly built tribes such as the Players. Some artists said that once the Dreamers lost their weapons, the Players' weakness would turn into a strength, as their poor ability to handle weapons would mean that every kill would be bloody rather than quick and clean. Meanwhile, other artists depicted the Players as fashioning better weapons, weapons that they could hold and the Dreamers could not.

====Depiction of other sharp objects====
The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The [[Crystals]] had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the [[Players]] and with the [[Soap Bubbles]] living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

====Metaphorical use====
The Dolphin Rider term for an unhealable wound was ''nu silika o pō okuleli'', which could be shortened to ''popōkuleli'' "unhealable". They saw that their people were inflicted with many such wounds, both physically and metaphorically, as they could not protect themselves from the local animal and plant life, but also could not regain territories lost to them by invasions in recent wars such as their war against the Players. Where other nations rose and fell, the Dreamers only grew around the hard barriers outsiders built for them.

The Dreamer propagandists reminded their people that the Players were only the most recent example of an army which had invaded Dreamland and come to permanently reside there. Earlier, the feminist '''Womb Justice''' army, fleeing from their homeland, took refuge in Dreamland but immediately demanded that all Dreamers move out so they could build a society run by women. The Dreamers did not fight these women, fearing that their own people would be unwilling to take up arms against such a society, but within a generation the Dreamers had grown tired of the Wombs and no longer believed that they needed to remain in Dreamland. Yet they were unable to push the Womb army out of Dreamland, and they conceded that they would remain in Dreamland for the indefinite future.

===Positive counterpoints===
For nearly a thousand years, outside cultures had stereotyped the Dreamers as being hypersexual and eager to engage in deviant sexual practices that made their men soft. This stereotype had been repeated by so many different foreign powers that the Dreamers had come to accept that it was true, but they made no plans to change their lifestyles. Instead, the Dreamers said that they were motivated by love, and that most of their enemies were motivated by hate and incapable of love. Rather than consider themselves immoral, the Dreamers said it was cultures such as the [[Players]] who were immoral, for instead of loving each other and their enemies, they sought to start a new war every year and took joy in their enemies' suffering.

==Debates over economics==
The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. [[STW]] mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of [[AlphaLeap]] in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

====Issues involving trade====
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

''this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.''

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly [[STW]], openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

===Arguments for capitalism===
The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising '''Teenprop''' corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, and then paying taxes in their own nations so that both the company and the citizens could benefit from the company's presence.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the '''Teenprop''' corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as the '''Anchor Empire''' (where STW sold most of its goods), and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

====Wealth creation theory====
The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as [[Kxesh]] that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

===Rise of pacifism===
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of [[Paba]], which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

====Secret diplomacy====
As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of '''capitalism''', the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

==Diplomatic outreach to Players==
In the mid-4160s, Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into [[Memnumu]] to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

The [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] also feared the Players and had suffered from their plagues. But when the Dreamers heard that the Players had broken up into four political parties, they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with at least one of them, and form an alliance between Dreamland and the most pro-Dreamer political party in the Play empire.

Because their main contact with the Players was through '''Tata''', the Dreamers understood little of the Players' internal struggles in Memnumu. The Dreamers knew that the original Play faction, the Milk Bottles, had been extremist, and that they had given way to the Pillows after a series of disasters mostly involving young children. They had heard of the rise of the Purses, but most Dreamers did not know that they were racists; they only knew that the Purses' positions on issues in general were more moderate than those of the Pillows, who were in turn more moderate than the Bottles. Therefore, the Dreamers believed that the Play nation as a whole was on a steady path towards more moderate politics, and could therefore become an ally of the Dreamers if they were able to continue along that path. The Dreamers were dismayed when they later learned that the Pillows had recovered their parliamentary majority, but figured that so long as the Purses were also represented in the Play parliament, the Dreamers still had an ally among the Players. (Most Dreamers still did not know, even years on, that the Purses considered Dreamers racially inferior, because the Purses had always focused on internal divisions among the Players in Memnumu.)

===Dreamers meet with Players===
The Dreamers had heard about the Players' new balance system, in which four parties would compete for power in the Parliament, and all four would be allowed to use game-like voting strategies, for example allowing people to vote outside their home districts, figuring that the resulting fierce competition would lead to better governance. They had been shown some anti-Dreamer literature known to have been written by the '''Milk Bottle''' faction of the Play party. With this, and other information they had learned about early happenings in the Play nation, Dreamland labeled the Milk Bottles as an extremist Play faction, and assumed that the other Play factions would thus be more friendly to Dreamland.

The Dreamers sent a team of tall, handsome male diplomats to meet with the female representatives of each of the four main Play parties, comparing and contrasting the Dolphin Riders' party platform with those of the women. The Players were feminists, but unlike the Moonshines, they respected foreign cultural norms, and therefore were accustomed to meeting with male diplomats. The Dreamers told the men to talk strictly about politics, but hoped that they could subliminally woo the women with their charms and return to Dreamland having signed a formal treaty of alliance with at least one, and perhaps more, of the new Play parties.

Four Dreamer men greeted the four Player women in the Play capital city of '''Pūpepas'''.
====Results of the meeting====
At the meeting, the Dreamer men realized that the Milk Bottles they had been calling Play extremists were in fact the most moderate of all the Play philosophies, and that the other three factions were even more hostile than that. Put another way, the Dreamers had assumed that the spectrum of Play political opinions ran the gamut from the fierce nationalism of the Milk Bottles to a cosmopolitan faction of unknown identity with whom they could form an alliance. But rather than ranging from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the Dreamers found out that the Players spanned from nationalism to racism.

Furthermore, even the racist Play faction, the '''Purses''', were nationalists, saying that the hated Eggs were still their allies in any conflict that involved a foreign power. Thus, even though the Purses had openly supported arresting the Eggs, they recognized the Eggs as fellow Players. Therefore none of the Play factions was willing to support Dreamland either militarily or economically.

The Dreamers were frustrated even by the name "balance system", confident that the Players had borrowed the idea of balance from the politics of Dreamland.

====Explanations to common people====
Dreamer diplomats had difficulty explaining to their own people why they had classified all four of Memnumu's Play parties as anti-Dreamer extremists, when the Dreamers had been expecting to find allies in the Play nation. Many Dreamers simply did not believe the diplomats' claims, arguing that at least the Eggs must be friendly towards Dreamland since they had been opposed by all of the other Play factions and had been attacked with no apparent provocation in a recent war led by the Firestones. But the Dreamers had diplomatic contacts with the wider Crystal party, who refused to accept any connection between the Dreamers and the Eggs, and still claimed that the reason the Crystals had abandoned the Eggs was because the required rescue mission would have been impossible.

====Dreamers embrace Tata====
When the Dreamers obtained a clearer understanding of the Play situation, they began to oppose the often talked about integration of Tata into a single unified Play nation, which had been proposed in 4151 but delayed over and over again for various reasons. The Dreamers believed that Tata's ruling '''Club''' party, though formally identical to the Pillows, was the only true moderate Play party, since they had legalized the Dreamer party in their own territory and did not take part in radical Play practices such as child labor and home invasions, even though they had never formally written these out of their party platform. The Dreamers considered all four of the Play parties in Memnumu's Milk Parliament to be extremists. They stated that the Purse ideology was moderate, but that because they were tribalists, the Dreamers could not ally with them after all, and therefore they were off the map of political discourse in Dreamland. The other three factions were also extremists, and most Dreamers considered them even worse than the Purses, since they all opposed Dreamland as well.

====Worries about population growth====
To the Dreamers, the greatest threat posed by the Players was their extremely high birthrate, which had for their first twenty years in power been so high that children under age thirteen comprised 3/4 of the Play population, and the population had doubled in this twenty-year period despite the many plagues, famines, and wars that the Players had endured and created. Meanwhile, though the Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had been youth-based, and had come to power with a high birthrate as well, theirs had never been nearly as high as the Players', and had been in decline for several generations, such that they had come to rely on '''Gold''' party arguments that the political power of a nation should not be related to the size of its population. By now, the Players had already outgrown the Dreamers despite having a much smaller land area, and it seemed inevitable to the Dreamers that the Players would grow even more. Since the Players had already won one major war against Dreamland, the Dreamers worried that their rapidly growing population would in the future lead them to win another.

The Players' birthrate had declined sharply around 4150 when they broke up into factions, however, and the Dreamers knew of this because of diplomatic contacts through Tata. The Dreamers stopped worrying so much about the Players' population expansion and began to focus on their problems at home. But then, when they heard that the Players were reviving the Milk Bottle party, they worried that Play women would once again have more children than they could care for, and that the children would grow up and start wars against Dreamland out of pure hunger, ignoring all common sense.

==Hipsoft war of 4183==
The immigrant '''Tipper''' party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent '''Hipsoft''' party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves '''Tippers''', disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant '''Hipsoft''' party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles
that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

===Moonshine's reaction===
Moonshine endorsed the Tippers' massacres, saying that the men were doing the right thing. Moonshine offered citizenship to all female Tippers, but stated that Tipper men would never be allowed into Moonshine territory, even though they had done a great favor for the Moonshines by killing many Dreamers. This was because Moonshine culture considered men's lives expendable, and that the best thing that men could do for Moonshine would be to stay at war and wear down the enemies of Moonshine without expecting any sort of reward other than the right to abuse the conquered people. Therefore Moonshine stated that if Tipper men wanted to marry women, they should take their wives from among the Dreamer population.

===Contact with the Matrix===
In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful [[Matrix]] army based in the nearby nation of '''Tata'''. Tata was on the north coast and was one of a chain of nations that had long been a buffer area between Dreamland and Moonshine, but had recently grown into a regional power in its own right.

The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland to focus their efforts on the city of [[Baeba Swamp]].

NOTE: The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.<ref>This is from a dream in which Russia did likewise.</ref>

==Newer economic developments==
Losing two wars had led to economic decline, and the increasing isolation of Dreamland drove up the cost of living. Furthermore, the rising cost of living made it difficult for the poorest Dreamers to afford food, and although the Dreamer states solved this problem with welfare payments, some of the western states were now encouraging people to desert their towns in order to live along the coast, much as the [[Players]] did, and obtain their food from the sea.

===Currency conversion===
Nearly three centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had opened stores in the [[Thunder Empire]], whose people owned Dreamer slaves and had little interest in friendly contacts with Dreamland. STW went further, declaring that slavery was not punishment enough, and declared war on [[Dreamland]] on its first official day of business. The result of this, over time, was that any economic growth for STW led to decline for Dreamland, and vice versa.

Dreamland had won its war with STW, even though STW was backed by the traditional military of the Thunder Empire, and nearly drove the corporation out of business despite the great physical distance between Dreamland and the primary STW stores. But in 4108, Dreamland lost control of its newly won territory, and STW returned to business holding a larger grudge against Dreamland than ever before. Dreamland continued to lose wars and cede economic supremacy for the next decades, and although STW was not a major driving force in this, STW reaped some benefit from it because their leaders were better able to take advantage of changing economic tides than were the politicians of the nations they did business with.
====The Ξ4 meal promise====
STW had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. The price of a meal was fixed at Ξ4, and STW's leaders promised that the price would never rise, regardless of what happened to the economies around them, including STW's non-restaurant stores, which did not accept the meal tokens. By tying the currency only to the price of food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and thus came to be used in international comparisons even by countries who had no interest in attracting business from STW.

The Dreamers disliked the so-called universal currency, since STW did not do business in Dreamland, and had always been hostile to Dreamland. The Dreamers stated the Ξ4 meal promise was humiliating because no Dreamers could expect to receive a meal for that price at any restaurant within Dreamland, and that STW had deliberately created an unfair setup that was only sustainable because they owned slaves and their restaurants served foods that had been obtained through slave labor and with minimal transportation and preparation costs.

====Economic restructuring====
Nonetheless, in comparing their economy to those of other nations, the Dreamers were forced to acknowledge STW's meal token currency rather than using their own. By this time, the an STW-like corporation had arisen in Dreamland, intent on solving the problems of Dreamland's economic isolation by producing goods locally and thus relieving the Dreamers' dependence on trade.

The annual per capita income of Dreamland as a whole had declined to about '''Ξ40,000''' by this time, even as the price of a meal in a typical restaurant had remained around Ξ80. The Dreamers were not bankrupted by their food prices because most Dreamers acquired some of their food themselves, cooking it at home during their free time or eating it raw if possible. Thus restaurants catered to travelers and to the wealthiest classes. On top of this, Dreamland's government encouraged its states to distribute welfare tickets to Dreamer families so that they could afford food, particularly in those areas where the natural supply of food was irregular. But Dreamland was a confederation, and could not tax its people directly, and therefore the disbursement of welfare was up to the states.

====Unskilled labor wages====
Dreamland practiced unregulated capitalism supported by welfare payments. There was no minimum wage, so it was common for young and unskilled laborers to receive just Ξ20 or Ξ25 for a day's work. Those who could not find stable employment would often work for even lower wages. Meanwhile, workers in some trades were paid only by selling things they produced and could go for months at a time without income. Therefore, Dreamland's lower class was materially poor even compared to the lower classes of poorer nations, but malnutrition was rare and usually of a sort that money would not have prevented.

===Distribution of necessities===
The charter of the ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party stated that the government must provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care for all citizens, even those Dreamers who chose to live in outlying areas where transportation costs were significant. Since transportation of food and essential goods was the responsibility of the government, the costs were socialized, and Dreamland's taxes were very high. However, the tax policies were the responsibilities of the states, and the Dolphin Riders' parliament could not enact a tax applying to a specific geographic area to force that area to improve its citizens' standard of living.

====Clothing====
Clothing was not defined as a basic human need in the Dolphin Rider platform, and on this they agreed with most of the minor Dreamer parties as well. Therefore, humans who needed protective clothes to work had to buy them on their own, disposable diapers were expensive, and people huddled together in blankets during Dreamland's rare cold winter nights.

The Dreamers and the Players had both often supported nudism, and largely for the same reasons, but opposition to nudism took different perspectives in the two empires. For the Players, opposition to nudism was entirely about hygiene, as the Players' child population had suffered from several plagues and spread these plagues outside their nation. However the Players were so tightly compacted into seaside habitats that they had early on exhausted their supply of plant fibers to weave new diapers, and the Play Parliament shut down the textile industry entirely so they could focus on fishing the sea. By contrast, the Dreamers' much lower fertility rate had kept them free of such problems. Rather, the Dreamers who supported wearing clothes were more concerned with secondary issues: since Dreamers often carried money with them, it was far more convenient for them to wear clothes to help carry the coins, and there were many trades that were much easier to perform while wearing protective clothes. The Dreamers mostly did wear clothes when it was convenient, and indeed their clothing production costs were lower than those in some poorer nations, but all clothes were distributed by private corporations who were free to charge any price they wished, even in areas where they had achieved a monopoly. Thus, many Dreamers spent much of their disposable income on clothing and could not afford to replace clothes that were worn out from daily use.

====Homes and furniture====
Likewise, Dreamland's climate was hot and sunny, and in some areas, people had traditionally lived on the beach, exposed to the elements, and not in any home at all. This extreme lifestyle was associated with the pre-Dreamer aboriginal population, numbering only a few thousand by this time, who lived in very specific locations such that the construction of a building to live in would make little difference. Nonetheless, most Dreamer homes were very simple, and the government promise as understood by the people was that Dreamers would have the right to a place to seek shelter from the rain, which might or might not be their everyday home.

===Typical prices===
The Dreamers embraced capitalism and therefore did not set standard prices on goods. Their government's role in providing for their people was limited to the welfare benefits described above, to medical care, and to providing shelter from nature. The average per capita GDP was around '''Ξ50,000'''. Note that this includes the entire population, not just those in work; the average salary of a worker was therefore significantly higher.

====Hygiene====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean. The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early. A full-body coat made from animal hides could cost around '''Ξ375'''.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living.

====Non-essential foods====
Palm wine and fruit juice averaged about the same price, about '''Ξ120''' per jug.

====Intangibles and services====
Because of the calm weather, travelers often slept outside, exposed to the elements. There was thus relatively little demands for inns, and most tended to be found in cities. A night's sleep in a room with many other travelers could cost around '''Ξ80''', and accomodations with more privacy were rare.

====Illegal transactions====
Slaves could be bought for around '''Ξ100,000''' to '''Ξ1 million''', a vastly higher price than the Ξ10,000 — Ξ50,000 that paid for their abduction and transportation from weakened nations such as Thaoa. The [[Players]] had contemplated selling people from their lower classes to foreign nations for even lower prices to relieve their population stress and also bring money into their economy, but such people were often profitable for the Players since they were little more than slaves already. Since slavery was illegal in Dreamland, such people could not be held openly, and therefore were typically prostitutes who remained in one place and were bound to a master. Male slaves nonetheless were sometimes used to row ships, where they were bound into place and released only when under the close watch of an armed guard.

===Private schools===
Dreamland's education system was privatized, and teachers charged families to enroll their pupils. This was unlike the [[Players|Play]] system, where education was free, and unlike [[STW]], which actually ''paid'' students to attend, albeit in a currency that could only be redeemed at STW.

There was no law requiring Dreamer adults to care for their aging parents, either financially or materially, since the elderly were covered under the same programs that covered disabled and sick people. (This is a relic of the '''Plume''' system that predated the Dolphin Riders.) Therefore parents had no guarantee that their children would portion off their future income to the parents, and no financial incentive to seek the best education for their children, nor to have large numbers of children, or even to have children at all.

Many Dreamer women remained at or near their homes during the daytime, and so teaching their children was simply part of their daily routine, and school systems tended to exist only in large cities. Nonetheless, tuition was affordable, averaging around '''Ξ4,000''' per student per year, much less than the average income of even the lowest class of Dreamers. This tuition covered the teachers' salaries only, and did not pay for the students' meals or their belongings, which often cost more than the tuition.

Dreamland's private schools worked both in competition and in cooperation with each other, as when two schools opened in the same city, typically each school would specialize in different subjects of study.

====Proposal for a public school system====
Nonetheless, the lack of free public education was a disincentive for couples planning to have children, and many Dreamer politicians wanted to start a tax-supported public school system based on a foreign model. But because they could not institute a tax on the entire Dreamer empire, each state would need to do this individually.

Opponents of this plan argued that a public school system would immediately turn into an unrestrained child labor operation, as the state-run school would have no authority above them and thus could not be shut down. As evidence they pointed to the school system of '''Moonshine''', which considered its students to be slaves, and to [[STW]], a private school system which had nonetheless functioned as an education monopoly for much of its existence and had relied on child labor (although with pay) to sustain itself.

The '''Play''' school system, however, did not force its students to work, or even to do schoolwork, and was a legally established government monopoly accountable to no outside authority. Supporters of the new plan claimed that the Play nation disproved all of their doubts. The opponents of the public school plan countered this argument by saying that the Players represented everything the Dreamers opposed, and that the Players in fact were the worst child abusers in the world, as they forced their children to find food for their parents with no salary at all.

==Matrix treaty of 4190==
By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of '''Memnumu''' once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny [[Matrix]] army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

==Slope treaty==

===General election of 4205===
The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in [[Memnumu]].<ref>It is possible that the descendants of the Hipsides, now adults, still practiced this lifestyle in some territory between Dreamland and Tāmta.</ref>

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

====Arrival of the Cupbearers====
Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of '''Cupbearer''' refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.<ref>This may or may not be the state of Senampattore. Where it is on the map is clear, but the borders may have changed.</ref>

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the [[Players]] in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:
#The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
#Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
#The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in [[Baeba Swamp]] as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
#The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves ''pavača'',<ref>This word is ''čava'' "long hair" spelled backwards inside the circumfix ''p-..-a'' "having (a)". This method of word formation was dying out in Play, but persisted in some groups who were influenced by Andanese, because even though Andanese itself did not use this, it was more convenient with pure CV words, as Andanese had, than with Play whose syllable structure was more diverse.</ref> just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

===Capture of Crystal slaves===
A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising '''Slope''' party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

==Postwar period==
After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

===General election of 4227===
Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The ''bopo'' philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the ''bopo'' supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The '''Cupbearers''' may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

===General election of 4238===
Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

===General election of 4254===
After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the [[Memnumu|Play army]] and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.
==Naval war==
In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the [[Players]], which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the [[Ghost Empire|Ghosts]], who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called '''Laba'''. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of [[Moonshine]], but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world.
But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the [[Players|Play]] population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

==Inversion of propaganda==
Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the [[Players]], but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the [[Matrix]] propaganda of a hundred years prior.

===Weather metaphors===
Though living right along the Equator, the people of Hipatal and Laba in general had the same variety of body types found elsewhere. Some outsiders believed that they were all dark-skinned people, but immigrants such as '''Sašuasa''' had been of the same Lenian body type as the stereotypical eastern Dreamers who had fallen into ruin.

==Naval war in the Play sea==
===General election of 4287===
As the Dreamer navy,<ref>this did not actually take twenty years, but there were no global elections in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty</ref>, '''Laba''', invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the '''Teenprop''' corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

''NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.''

===Antiwar movement in Dreamland===
===="The Real Dreamland"====
Just as Dreamland seemed likely to win its war, a group of pacifists declared themselves to be the only true Dreamers, and pledged allegiance to the '''Cupbearers''' without formally joining the Cupbearer party. They said that the earlier Dreamers' pessimism was correct, and that Dreamland should be a pacifist multinational empire trading economically with foreign nations but without military expansionist goals. They supported '''Moonshine''', and thus while committed to pacifism, assumed that they would soon be targets in the war, and perhaps could be such easy targets that they would distract the navy from their war against the Players. Thus these new pacifists felt they could help the Players whether they were successful in remaking Dreamland into an economic power, in which case the war would stall, or unsuccessful, in which case they would be slaughtered by the pirates but could hopefully still save the Players.

The pacifists' claim to be the only true Dreamers closely resembled the Players' contemporary claim that the Play navy was the only true Laba. They had made their declarations independently, however, as the Play diplomats were blocked from contacting the pacifists by the Ghosts over land and by the pirates at sea.

===General election of 4295===
The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became popular.

===General election of 4316===
After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.
===General election of 4321===
Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

===General election of 4327===
===General election of 4343===
Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

==Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)==
Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing ''bepolere'', which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The ''Pōbipōpu'' and ''Pōronopa'' distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

===Contacts with Moonshine===
The '''Habit''' party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the '''Hipsoft''' settlements to and including the '''Womb Justice''' settlements. The Habits were the sons and daughters of the Crystals who had been pushed into the underclass in Baeba Swamp when the Leapers took over. That is, they were a faction of Crystals who resisted the Leapers.

====Tribal identity====
The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

====Partition====
By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small '''Hipsoft''' migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the '''Womb Justice ''' party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name '''Dreamland''' was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

====Moonshine-Habit relations====
The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's '''Habit''' party (''Tăta'')<ref>Note that this is not a homonym of the state name '''Tàta''' because the tones are different, but that in languages such as Play, the two may have been merged.</ref> to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called '''Wagillàra''', the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

===Demographic shifts===
After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the [[Players]] had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

:''Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.''

===General election of 4351===
Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

===General election of 4390===
Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

===General election of 4402===
Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

===General election of 4412===
The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.
===General election of 4419===
Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

===General election of 4438===
Luxury goods came back into fashion.

====Tribal reform====
Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The '''Tipper''' population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the '''Hipatal''' immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

===General election of 4440===
Luxury goods fell out of fashion.
===General election of 4445===
Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

===General election of 4462===
Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.
===General election of 4468===
Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.
===General election of 4485===
Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.
===General election of 4492===
The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.
===General election of 4500===
Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.
===General election of 4511===
Little changed in this election.
===General election of 4529===
Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.
===General election of 4531===
Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.
===General election of 4538===
Luxury goods became popular.
===General election of 4540===
Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

===Humanitarian attempts at intervention===
The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier.<ref>But remember that this from a different timeline. The figure cannot be taken as an exact count.</ref> Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both [[Baeba Swamp]] and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

''Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.''

==Other developments==
*56 (4150)
*52 (4202)
*13 (4215)
*24 (4239)
*79 (4318)
*80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the [[Hipatal]] people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

=Dreamer-Doll relations=
:''See [[Dolls]].''
Note that there is no convenient way to represent the [[babakiam|Play]]-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with ''dream'' and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the [[Dolls|Bottom]] party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (''nuufa''), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Bottoms did not allow their members to even have protruding fingernails. The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: '''fubap''' describing something soft and thus flexible, and '''nuufa''' describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

===Scope===
It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the '''Hiboh''' Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

===Dedication to pacifism===
The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon [[ppot#upl|drafted a party platform]] denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling '''Hailstorm''' army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

=Dreamer-Play relations=
''Žayuvas'' got its name when the rebel '''Tink''' army invaded their ally, the [[Play party]], and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, [[Dreamland]], than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory ''Memnumu''.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling '''Police''' faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the [[Play party]]. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the [[alphaleap|Leapers]] had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the '''Magic Combs''') never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

===Scope of Žayuvas===
It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of '''Šasa Kaina''', located near and traditionally friendly towards [[Thaoa]], at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

===Fertility calculations===
On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

;Oct 10 2021
There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding '''Tata''', where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

===Apportionment of representatives===
Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

==Evolution from factions to parties==
The [[Play party|Play]] charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

==Party membership==
The '''Police''' party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

==Culturebound issues of the Play Empire==
:''See also [[Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues]]''.
True to its name, the [[Play party]] dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

===Children's issues===
====Education====
The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory [[Raspara]] army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

===Tribal conflicts (general) ===
:''This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.''
====Height and hair color====

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured [[Paba]]p tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were [[#feminism|taller than their men]], this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

====Background====
Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive [[Raspara]] party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious [[swamp Kids|Tink]] army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall [[Repilia]]n tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the '''Flower Bees''' and the '''Rusted Pearls'''. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

====Conflicting tribal definitions====
Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the [[Palli]]-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

=Diplomatic contacts between the empires=

=Later periods=
These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.
===Hiboh===
The '''Hiboh''' era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true '''Sleeperism'''.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the '''Cold Men''', until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

===RKE Wars===
The '''RKE''' movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used [[Matrix]]-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.

=Notes in boats=
==Notes==

Dolphin Riders

2025-06-20T00:02:22Z

Poswob Rare: /* Immigration */

The '''MFZ''' Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the [[Cosmopolitan Age]]. The original Empire, ''Mayuvas'', was [[Dreamland]], which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the [[Gold party]], as the word for gold in [[babakiam|Play]] was ''mayu''. The other two empires, ''Fayuvas'' and ''Žayuvas'', were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, [[Baeba Swamp]], which at the time was run primarily by the '''Iron''' party, an offshoot of the much older [[Zenith]] party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel '''ū''', giving ''Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas'', but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like '''uv''' (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

==Background==

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with [[Baeba Swamp]] to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of [[Moonshine]] and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with '''Tata''', also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

==Structure of Parliament==
Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the [[ppot#DPR|Dolphin Riders]], who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient [[Gold party]]. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

==Recognition of new tribes==
Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the '''Tippers''' who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

==Language==
The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited [[Lenian languages#DPR|Dolphin Rider]] language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near [[Baeba Swamp]] came to speak [[Ogili_II|Ogili]], the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

==Growth of the Kapa corporation==
An umbrella corporation called '''Kapa''' (in full, ''Nobōbo Kapa'') arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The ''kapa'' part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like '''Teenprop'''. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like '''Teens for Tomorrow''', though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after [[STW]]; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing '''Bottom''' party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the '''Yukiese''' family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of [[Paba]]. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the '''Teenprop''' political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

==Development of new political parties==
===Two-party stage===
The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support '''feminism''', believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world. The Dolphin Riders realized that if feminism took hold even in Dreamland, there would be no more land in the world run by men; free men would only exist as nomadic minorities within female nations.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support '''sarabism''', the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

==Creation of new parties==
'''Gatotōl''' had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the '''Comb''' party (''Pōrupu Resini'') which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's<ref>A vague and tentative date</ref> the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the '''Hipsoft''' party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new '''Carriage''' party (''āliki'') was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new '''Pointer''' party (''Pēbobi Lisuelesi'') was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a ''pēbobi''.

The '''Permission''' party (''Lepusepu Lesinepu'') was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the '''Butterfly''' party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

====Minor parties====
The '''Frame''' party (''Pōrupu Uimeka'') also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term ''sepu'' (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet ''lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu'' is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

==Culturebound issues==
The [[Gold party]] did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the '''Wildfire''' party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the '''Treehouse''' army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the '''Tippers''' came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

===Hupodas===
There was a ''Hupodas'' ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be ''lepisese'' "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

===Family issues===
====Early years====
The founding '''Dolphin Riders''' planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.<ref>While this logic may seem counterintuitive from the point of view of Earth, it was well illustrated in feminist societies like Moonshine that women were eager to raise children because they would be able to remain at home, and not need to work, while their husbands provided the entire financial support for raising each child.</ref>

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

====Later years====
A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

===Ilhina===
This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.
===Sarabism===
Related to the carrying of weapons.

===Capitalism and communism===
These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

===Censorship and propaganda===
These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

===Feminism===
Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

===Pimuo bopi===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as '''pacifism''' but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive [[Matrix]] army.

''This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as '''bopo''' below.''

===Pasio===
A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

===Bepolere===
Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

===Bopo===
A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as '''pacifism'''; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

==Proclamation of Empire==
===Proclamation of Empire in 4108===
In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the [[Play party|Play]] parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population.

Yet, 1,300<ref>an exact figure</ref> Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, [[Baeba Swamp]] had become the center of world diplomacy.

===General election of 4111===
The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the '''Treehouse''' party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the '''Wildfire''' party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

==Conflicts over hygiene==

===Hygiene laws===
The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (This is separate from the Hupodas issue.) One reason for the strong attention to hygiene was that the Dolphin Riders were tolerant of nudism, an issue that Dreamers had often gone back and forth on in the past.

The Dreamer Parliament had the power to make laws that applied to the entire empire. Thus it became a crime in Dreamland for a teenager or adult to leave a mess in a public bathroom, or even in nature, without immediately cleaning it up. The Dreamers also had to prove that they were bathing everyday, washing their clothes, and keeping their belongings clean as well. But the Parliament did not have the power to enact a tax applying to the whole Empire; this power was reserved to the states.
====Soapmaking corporation====
Thus, the Dreamer Parliament was unable to subsidize the purchase of soap and other hygiene-related goods, and Dreamers had to rely on their monthly income to buy these products. This immediately led to the rise of a powerful soapmaking class, who founded a corporation, '''Nobōbo Pobo Mosesene''' (PBM), named after the founding Mosesene family. PBM's workers allied themselves with the factions of the Baywatch and Rider parties that favored strict hygiene laws, and pledged to cooperate with each other across state and party lines since they were united on a single issue.

PBM's prices were expensive. The government's bathroom police (''pusepo serakale'') signed a contract with PBM stating that they would ride along with PBM's soap distributors to ensure that citizens were buying the product and keeping their homes and belongings clean. Thus the PBM corporation had a strong ally in the government and assumed they would not be easily shut down.

====Use of currency exchanges====
Nearly two centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. By tying the value of the currency to food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and over time, nations came to use the Ξ tokens as a neutral currency so that they could more easily compare their economies without needing to factor in inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.

The Dreamers had no STW stores and had always been hostile to STW, just as STW had always been hostile to them and had periodically raided Dreamer territory in the past to procure goods to sell in their stores. Therefore the Dreamers did not like STW's Ξ meal token currency either. But they had conceded to use it when comparing their economy to other economies, as it showed that the cost of living in Dreamland was quite high compared to most other nations, and that their people were not living as comfortably as a measure of total economic output would make it seem.

Dreamland's people had an average annual income around '''Ξ70,000''', but much higher in the east, in '''Baywatch''' territory, where the banks and most major corporations were. In fact the average per capita income ranged from about Ξ200,000 in Baywatch territory to Ξ20,000 in the various states of the west.

====Prices of hygiene and associated services====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living. The bathroom guards were separate from the bathroom police, meaning that someone needing to use the bathroom would sometimes need to greet two people just to get in, pay for the experience, and then clean up any mess they had made. Meanwhile it was illegal to hide in nature instead of using the bathroom except when that area was on private property and the landowner took it upon themselves to clean the landscape; in such a case, they were in turn subject to police oversight.

The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early.

===General election of 4116===

===General election of 4125===

===General election of 4129===

==War against the Players==
In 4132, Dreamland's '''Baywatch''' and '''Dolphin Rider''' parties voted together for a war against the distant [[Players|Play]] empire, with the Baywatchers expected to shoulder most of the combat and therefore also reserve the most gains, both territorial and political, for themselves.

===General election of 4134===
===General election of 4140===
As the soldiers of the [[Players|Play]] army massacred Dreamers and spread plagues, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population to turn over their weapons to the Dreamer army.

===General election of 4142===
As the [[Play party]] occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of '''Mipatatatatai''', the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

====Immigration====
The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: The sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

====Hipsofts====
Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. These were moved to a city near the middle of the Dolphin Riders' territory, far from Moonshine and also far from the Players. The Dolphin Riders hoped that these immigrants would align themselves with Dreamland or at least become apolitical.

The '''Hipsoft''' faction of the Dolphin Rider party appeared soon after the immigrants were settled. The Hipsofts lived in the area where the immigrants had moved to and opposed the resettlement program. The other Riders seemed to have little interest in the situation, saying that they had done a good deed by adopting refugees from a pacifist nation but also unwilling to spread the immigrants around the rest of Dreamland. At this time, the immigrants had no political party of their own, and the mainstream Riders hoped that the appearance of the Hipsofts would encourage the immigrants to become strongly supportive of the mainstream Riders.

==Reforms to hygiene laws==
The Dolphin Riders had come to power in 4108 with a permissive attitude towards nudism and a strict hygiene policy, requiring all Dreamers to bathe and be clean after using the bathroom. They were required to purchase soap and other hygiene supplies on their own. This was to prevent the spread of disease. The Dreamer parliament had the authority to require Dreamer citizens to purchase soap and other supplies, but not to enact a tax to pay for the hygiene supplies, or to subsidize them in any other way. Even though there was more than one soap company, the price of soap rose high as soapmakers knew the demand for their product would never cease.

====Claims of soapmakers' complicity====
But now, the Dreamers increasingly began to blame their hygiene problems on the [[Players]] to the east, whom they suspected were deliberately polluting the rivers which flowed into coastal areas of Dreamland. The new generation of Dreamers thus came to support laws requiring Dreamers to wear clothing and deemphasizing the use of soap. Soapmakers were invested into their craft now, however, and opposed the new changes as they knew it would decrease their standard of living. The reformists accused the soapmakers of forcing the Dreamer population into a humiliating position, where they spent much of their time and money cleaning up after the Players, knowing that the Players could just as easily pollute the environment even more and thus force the Dreamers to scrub and clean themselves twice as much, all to the joy of the soapmakers. This led to accusations that the soapmakers themselves were cooperating with the Players to spread filth throughout Dreamland.

==Rise of pessimism==
Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only [[Baeba Swamp]], pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the [[Players]], but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

:''Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.''
Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

===Dreamers envy Players===
The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than 800,000 enrolled Players, more than Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself '''Hipsoft''' emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

===Comparative census of 4162===
By 4162, the Dreamer birthrate had increased, while the Player birthrate had fallen, and they had lost territory to the '''Tinks'''. Now, Dreamland's population was about double the Play population of 639,000.

====Census statistics====

{| class="wikitable"
|+ CENSUS OF 4162
|-
! Statistic
! Play
! Dreamland
! COMMENTS
|-
| Population
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 639,000
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 1,243,000
| Play population excludes '''Tata'''
|-
| Land area
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"|
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"|
|
|-
| Per capita GDP
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| Ξ3,832
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| > Ξ50,000
|
|-
| Fertility rate
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 4.74
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| 3.58
|
|-
| Median age
| style="background-color:#80ffc4;"| 12.7
| style="background-color:#ffc480;"| ~24
|
|}

Although the fertility rates were not greatly different, the actual birth rate was much higher in Play territory because their adult population was primarily female (having fought many recent wars) whereas Dreamland's population consisted mostly of the Dreamers who had not been exposed to any recent wars.

===Other developments===
====Worries about defeat====
Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

===Dissolutionism===
Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

==Defeatist art and propaganda==
The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the [[Players]], as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.
===Depictions of the sun===
Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season. This meant that the entire planet experienced its summer season at the same time, and that even near the Equator, summer was much hotter than winter.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

====The Sun is Too Big====
Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but often riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

====Suntan vs sunburn====
Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, '''Pūpepas''', was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

===Linguistic issues===
The Dreamers were also ashamed of their languages, particularly the eastern ones.

====Phonology====
The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. Though both Dreamers and Players had learned to speak languages such as [[khulls|Leaper]] in the past, it required greater physical effort on their part to pronounce sounds like /k/ than it did for the native Leaper speakers, and therefore both the Dreamers and the Players had spoken languages with a similar acoustic sound for thousands of years. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

====Script====
Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

====Grammar====
Play was a ferociously complex language, with a grammar resembling [[khulls|Leaper]] but famously more difficult. For this reason, the '''Crystals''' and other groups such as the Leapers had an easier time mastering the Play language than did the Dreamers. This embarrassed the Dreamers doubly because the common perception was that Play would be an easy language for the Dreamers to learn because of its simple sound inventory. The Dreamers' inability to competently learn to speak Play had become deadly early in the Play occupation of Tata, as Play military leaders massacred Dreamer teachers for not quickly learning the language.

===Hunger===
Although the Dreamers were not short of food, even after losing the war, they spent more of their time and money on acquiring food than did the Players, who simply built their settlements around food sources so that they would never go hungry.

===Unhealable wounds===
====Hard and soft====
Even when conceding that the Dreamers were physically strong, the artists drew the Players as having square body shapes, whereas the Dreamers were depicted as being made of soft curves.

====Depiction of weapons====
A common stereotype was that Dreamers were physically delicate, but better able to handle weapons than were small, stoutly built tribes such as the Players. Some artists said that once the Dreamers lost their weapons, the Players' weakness would turn into a strength, as their poor ability to handle weapons would mean that every kill would be bloody rather than quick and clean. Meanwhile, other artists depicted the Players as fashioning better weapons, weapons that they could hold and the Dreamers could not.

====Depiction of other sharp objects====
The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The [[Crystals]] had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the [[Players]] and with the [[Soap Bubbles]] living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

====Metaphorical use====
The Dolphin Rider term for an unhealable wound was ''nu silika o pō okuleli'', which could be shortened to ''popōkuleli'' "unhealable". They saw that their people were inflicted with many such wounds, both physically and metaphorically, as they could not protect themselves from the local animal and plant life, but also could not regain territories lost to them by invasions in recent wars such as their war against the Players. Where other nations rose and fell, the Dreamers only grew around the hard barriers outsiders built for them.

The Dreamer propagandists reminded their people that the Players were only the most recent example of an army which had invaded Dreamland and come to permanently reside there. Earlier, the feminist '''Womb Justice''' army, fleeing from their homeland, took refuge in Dreamland but immediately demanded that all Dreamers move out so they could build a society run by women. The Dreamers did not fight these women, fearing that their own people would be unwilling to take up arms against such a society, but within a generation the Dreamers had grown tired of the Wombs and no longer believed that they needed to remain in Dreamland. Yet they were unable to push the Womb army out of Dreamland, and they conceded that they would remain in Dreamland for the indefinite future.

===Positive counterpoints===
For nearly a thousand years, outside cultures had stereotyped the Dreamers as being hypersexual and eager to engage in deviant sexual practices that made their men soft. This stereotype had been repeated by so many different foreign powers that the Dreamers had come to accept that it was true, but they made no plans to change their lifestyles. Instead, the Dreamers said that they were motivated by love, and that most of their enemies were motivated by hate and incapable of love. Rather than consider themselves immoral, the Dreamers said it was cultures such as the [[Players]] who were immoral, for instead of loving each other and their enemies, they sought to start a new war every year and took joy in their enemies' suffering.

==Debates over economics==
The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. [[STW]] mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of [[AlphaLeap]] in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

====Issues involving trade====
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

''this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.''

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly [[STW]], openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

===Arguments for capitalism===
The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising '''Teenprop''' corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, and then paying taxes in their own nations so that both the company and the citizens could benefit from the company's presence.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the '''Teenprop''' corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as the '''Anchor Empire''' (where STW sold most of its goods), and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

====Wealth creation theory====
The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as [[Kxesh]] that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

===Rise of pacifism===
Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of [[Paba]], which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

====Secret diplomacy====
As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of '''capitalism''', the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

==Diplomatic outreach to Players==
In the mid-4160s, Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into [[Memnumu]] to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

The [[Dreamland|Dreamers]] also feared the Players and had suffered from their plagues. But when the Dreamers heard that the Players had broken up into four political parties, they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with at least one of them, and form an alliance between Dreamland and the most pro-Dreamer political party in the Play empire.

Because their main contact with the Players was through '''Tata''', the Dreamers understood little of the Players' internal struggles in Memnumu. The Dreamers knew that the original Play faction, the Milk Bottles, had been extremist, and that they had given way to the Pillows after a series of disasters mostly involving young children. They had heard of the rise of the Purses, but most Dreamers did not know that they were racists; they only knew that the Purses' positions on issues in general were more moderate than those of the Pillows, who were in turn more moderate than the Bottles. Therefore, the Dreamers believed that the Play nation as a whole was on a steady path towards more moderate politics, and could therefore become an ally of the Dreamers if they were able to continue along that path. The Dreamers were dismayed when they later learned that the Pillows had recovered their parliamentary majority, but figured that so long as the Purses were also represented in the Play parliament, the Dreamers still had an ally among the Players. (Most Dreamers still did not know, even years on, that the Purses considered Dreamers racially inferior, because the Purses had always focused on internal divisions among the Players in Memnumu.)

===Dreamers meet with Players===
The Dreamers had heard about the Players' new balance system, in which four parties would compete for power in the Parliament, and all four would be allowed to use game-like voting strategies, for example allowing people to vote outside their home districts, figuring that the resulting fierce competition would lead to better governance. They had been shown some anti-Dreamer literature known to have been written by the '''Milk Bottle''' faction of the Play party. With this, and other information they had learned about early happenings in the Play nation, Dreamland labeled the Milk Bottles as an extremist Play faction, and assumed that the other Play factions would thus be more friendly to Dreamland.

The Dreamers sent a team of tall, handsome male diplomats to meet with the female representatives of each of the four main Play parties, comparing and contrasting the Dolphin Riders' party platform with those of the women. The Players were feminists, but unlike the Moonshines, they respected foreign cultural norms, and therefore were accustomed to meeting with male diplomats. The Dreamers told the men to talk strictly about politics, but hoped that they could subliminally woo the women with their charms and return to Dreamland having signed a formal treaty of alliance with at least one, and perhaps more, of the new Play parties.

Four Dreamer men greeted the four Player women in the Play capital city of '''Pūpepas'''.
====Results of the meeting====
At the meeting, the Dreamer men realized that the Milk Bottles they had been calling Play extremists were in fact the most moderate of all the Play philosophies, and that the other three factions were even more hostile than that. Put another way, the Dreamers had assumed that the spectrum of Play political opinions ran the gamut from the fierce nationalism of the Milk Bottles to a cosmopolitan faction of unknown identity with whom they could form an alliance. But rather than ranging from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the Dreamers found out that the Players spanned from nationalism to racism.

Furthermore, even the racist Play faction, the '''Purses''', were nationalists, saying that the hated Eggs were still their allies in any conflict that involved a foreign power. Thus, even though the Purses had openly supported arresting the Eggs, they recognized the Eggs as fellow Players. Therefore none of the Play factions was willing to support Dreamland either militarily or economically.

The Dreamers were frustrated even by the name "balance system", confident that the Players had borrowed the idea of balance from the politics of Dreamland.

====Explanations to common people====
Dreamer diplomats had difficulty explaining to their own people why they had classified all four of Memnumu's Play parties as anti-Dreamer extremists, when the Dreamers had been expecting to find allies in the Play nation. Many Dreamers simply did not believe the diplomats' claims, arguing that at least the Eggs must be friendly towards Dreamland since they had been opposed by all of the other Play factions and had been attacked with no apparent provocation in a recent war led by the Firestones. But the Dreamers had diplomatic contacts with the wider Crystal party, who refused to accept any connection between the Dreamers and the Eggs, and still claimed that the reason the Crystals had abandoned the Eggs was because the required rescue mission would have been impossible.

====Dreamers embrace Tata====
When the Dreamers obtained a clearer understanding of the Play situation, they began to oppose the often talked about integration of Tata into a single unified Play nation, which had been proposed in 4151 but delayed over and over again for various reasons. The Dreamers believed that Tata's ruling '''Club''' party, though formally identical to the Pillows, was the only true moderate Play party, since they had legalized the Dreamer party in their own territory and did not take part in radical Play practices such as child labor and home invasions, even though they had never formally written these out of their party platform. The Dreamers considered all four of the Play parties in Memnumu's Milk Parliament to be extremists. They stated that the Purse ideology was moderate, but that because they were tribalists, the Dreamers could not ally with them after all, and therefore they were off the map of political discourse in Dreamland. The other three factions were also extremists, and most Dreamers considered them even worse than the Purses, since they all opposed Dreamland as well.

====Worries about population growth====
To the Dreamers, the greatest threat posed by the Players was their extremely high birthrate, which had for their first twenty years in power been so high that children under age thirteen comprised 3/4 of the Play population, and the population had doubled in this twenty-year period despite the many plagues, famines, and wars that the Players had endured and created. Meanwhile, though the Dreamers' ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had been youth-based, and had come to power with a high birthrate as well, theirs had never been nearly as high as the Players', and had been in decline for several generations, such that they had come to rely on '''Gold''' party arguments that the political power of a nation should not be related to the size of its population. By now, the Players had already outgrown the Dreamers despite having a much smaller land area, and it seemed inevitable to the Dreamers that the Players would grow even more. Since the Players had already won one major war against Dreamland, the Dreamers worried that their rapidly growing population would in the future lead them to win another.

The Players' birthrate had declined sharply around 4150 when they broke up into factions, however, and the Dreamers knew of this because of diplomatic contacts through Tata. The Dreamers stopped worrying so much about the Players' population expansion and began to focus on their problems at home. But then, when they heard that the Players were reviving the Milk Bottle party, they worried that Play women would once again have more children than they could care for, and that the children would grow up and start wars against Dreamland out of pure hunger, ignoring all common sense.

==Hipsoft war of 4183==
The immigrant '''Tipper''' party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent '''Hipsoft''' party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves '''Tippers''', disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant '''Hipsoft''' party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles
that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

===Moonshine's reaction===
Moonshine endorsed the Tippers' massacres, saying that the men were doing the right thing. Moonshine offered citizenship to all female Tippers, but stated that Tipper men would never be allowed into Moonshine territory, even though they had done a great favor for the Moonshines by killing many Dreamers. This was because Moonshine culture considered men's lives expendable, and that the best thing that men could do for Moonshine would be to stay at war and wear down the enemies of Moonshine without expecting any sort of reward other than the right to abuse the conquered people. Therefore Moonshine stated that if Tipper men wanted to marry women, they should take their wives from among the Dreamer population.

===Contact with the Matrix===
In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful [[Matrix]] army based in the nearby nation of '''Tata'''. Tata was on the north coast and was one of a chain of nations that had long been a buffer area between Dreamland and Moonshine, but had recently grown into a regional power in its own right.

The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland to focus their efforts on the city of [[Baeba Swamp]].

NOTE: The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.<ref>This is from a dream in which Russia did likewise.</ref>

==Newer economic developments==
Losing two wars had led to economic decline, and the increasing isolation of Dreamland drove up the cost of living. Furthermore, the rising cost of living made it difficult for the poorest Dreamers to afford food, and although the Dreamer states solved this problem with welfare payments, some of the western states were now encouraging people to desert their towns in order to live along the coast, much as the [[Players]] did, and obtain their food from the sea.

===Currency conversion===
Nearly three centuries earlier, the [[STW]] corporation had opened stores in the [[Thunder Empire]], whose people owned Dreamer slaves and had little interest in friendly contacts with Dreamland. STW went further, declaring that slavery was not punishment enough, and declared war on [[Dreamland]] on its first official day of business. The result of this, over time, was that any economic growth for STW led to decline for Dreamland, and vice versa.

Dreamland had won its war with STW, even though STW was backed by the traditional military of the Thunder Empire, and nearly drove the corporation out of business despite the great physical distance between Dreamland and the primary STW stores. But in 4108, Dreamland lost control of its newly won territory, and STW returned to business holding a larger grudge against Dreamland than ever before. Dreamland continued to lose wars and cede economic supremacy for the next decades, and although STW was not a major driving force in this, STW reaped some benefit from it because their leaders were better able to take advantage of changing economic tides than were the politicians of the nations they did business with.
====The Ξ4 meal promise====
STW had created a currency, here symbolized as '''Ξ''', which was redeemable only at STW's restaurants. The price of a meal was fixed at Ξ4, and STW's leaders promised that the price would never rise, regardless of what happened to the economies around them, including STW's non-restaurant stores, which did not accept the meal tokens. By tying the currency only to the price of food, STW had created a currency that was immune to inflation, and thus came to be used in international comparisons even by countries who had no interest in attracting business from STW.

The Dreamers disliked the so-called universal currency, since STW did not do business in Dreamland, and had always been hostile to Dreamland. The Dreamers stated the Ξ4 meal promise was humiliating because no Dreamers could expect to receive a meal for that price at any restaurant within Dreamland, and that STW had deliberately created an unfair setup that was only sustainable because they owned slaves and their restaurants served foods that had been obtained through slave labor and with minimal transportation and preparation costs.

====Economic restructuring====
Nonetheless, in comparing their economy to those of other nations, the Dreamers were forced to acknowledge STW's meal token currency rather than using their own. By this time, the an STW-like corporation had arisen in Dreamland, intent on solving the problems of Dreamland's economic isolation by producing goods locally and thus relieving the Dreamers' dependence on trade.

The annual per capita income of Dreamland as a whole had declined to about '''Ξ40,000''' by this time, even as the price of a meal in a typical restaurant had remained around Ξ80. The Dreamers were not bankrupted by their food prices because most Dreamers acquired some of their food themselves, cooking it at home during their free time or eating it raw if possible. Thus restaurants catered to travelers and to the wealthiest classes. On top of this, Dreamland's government encouraged its states to distribute welfare tickets to Dreamer families so that they could afford food, particularly in those areas where the natural supply of food was irregular. But Dreamland was a confederation, and could not tax its people directly, and therefore the disbursement of welfare was up to the states.

====Unskilled labor wages====
Dreamland practiced unregulated capitalism supported by welfare payments. There was no minimum wage, so it was common for young and unskilled laborers to receive just Ξ20 or Ξ25 for a day's work. Those who could not find stable employment would often work for even lower wages. Meanwhile, workers in some trades were paid only by selling things they produced and could go for months at a time without income. Therefore, Dreamland's lower class was materially poor even compared to the lower classes of poorer nations, but malnutrition was rare and usually of a sort that money would not have prevented.

===Distribution of necessities===
The charter of the ruling '''Dolphin Rider''' party stated that the government must provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care for all citizens, even those Dreamers who chose to live in outlying areas where transportation costs were significant. Since transportation of food and essential goods was the responsibility of the government, the costs were socialized, and Dreamland's taxes were very high. However, the tax policies were the responsibilities of the states, and the Dolphin Riders' parliament could not enact a tax applying to a specific geographic area to force that area to improve its citizens' standard of living.

====Clothing====
Clothing was not defined as a basic human need in the Dolphin Rider platform, and on this they agreed with most of the minor Dreamer parties as well. Therefore, humans who needed protective clothes to work had to buy them on their own, disposable diapers were expensive, and people huddled together in blankets during Dreamland's rare cold winter nights.

The Dreamers and the Players had both often supported nudism, and largely for the same reasons, but opposition to nudism took different perspectives in the two empires. For the Players, opposition to nudism was entirely about hygiene, as the Players' child population had suffered from several plagues and spread these plagues outside their nation. However the Players were so tightly compacted into seaside habitats that they had early on exhausted their supply of plant fibers to weave new diapers, and the Play Parliament shut down the textile industry entirely so they could focus on fishing the sea. By contrast, the Dreamers' much lower fertility rate had kept them free of such problems. Rather, the Dreamers who supported wearing clothes were more concerned with secondary issues: since Dreamers often carried money with them, it was far more convenient for them to wear clothes to help carry the coins, and there were many trades that were much easier to perform while wearing protective clothes. The Dreamers mostly did wear clothes when it was convenient, and indeed their clothing production costs were lower than those in some poorer nations, but all clothes were distributed by private corporations who were free to charge any price they wished, even in areas where they had achieved a monopoly. Thus, many Dreamers spent much of their disposable income on clothing and could not afford to replace clothes that were worn out from daily use.

====Homes and furniture====
Likewise, Dreamland's climate was hot and sunny, and in some areas, people had traditionally lived on the beach, exposed to the elements, and not in any home at all. This extreme lifestyle was associated with the pre-Dreamer aboriginal population, numbering only a few thousand by this time, who lived in very specific locations such that the construction of a building to live in would make little difference. Nonetheless, most Dreamer homes were very simple, and the government promise as understood by the people was that Dreamers would have the right to a place to seek shelter from the rain, which might or might not be their everyday home.

===Typical prices===
The Dreamers embraced capitalism and therefore did not set standard prices on goods. Their government's role in providing for their people was limited to the welfare benefits described above, to medical care, and to providing shelter from nature. The average per capita GDP was around '''Ξ50,000'''. Note that this includes the entire population, not just those in work; the average salary of a worker was therefore significantly higher.

====Hygiene====
The Dreamers spent much of their money keeping themselves clean. The price of a disposable diaper averaged around '''Ξ50''', while the price of cloth underwear fit for adults ran around '''Ξ45''', with lower prices for smaller garments. Thus children were weaned off of diapers fairly early. A full-body coat made from animal hides could cost around '''Ξ375'''.

A typical bar of hard soap, intended to last about a week, could sell for '''Ξ115''', but these could be cheaper when sold close to their source. Public baths cost about '''Ξ50''' per person and a public toilet could cost '''Ξ30''' for one use, but the price was variable and bathroom guards were expected to set their own prices in order to make a living.

====Non-essential foods====
Palm wine and fruit juice averaged about the same price, about '''Ξ120''' per jug.

====Intangibles and services====
Because of the calm weather, travelers often slept outside, exposed to the elements. There was thus relatively little demands for inns, and most tended to be found in cities. A night's sleep in a room with many other travelers could cost around '''Ξ80''', and accomodations with more privacy were rare.

====Illegal transactions====
Slaves could be bought for around '''Ξ100,000''' to '''Ξ1 million''', a vastly higher price than the Ξ10,000 — Ξ50,000 that paid for their abduction and transportation from weakened nations such as Thaoa. The [[Players]] had contemplated selling people from their lower classes to foreign nations for even lower prices to relieve their population stress and also bring money into their economy, but such people were often profitable for the Players since they were little more than slaves already. Since slavery was illegal in Dreamland, such people could not be held openly, and therefore were typically prostitutes who remained in one place and were bound to a master. Male slaves nonetheless were sometimes used to row ships, where they were bound into place and released only when under the close watch of an armed guard.

===Private schools===
Dreamland's education system was privatized, and teachers charged families to enroll their pupils. This was unlike the [[Players|Play]] system, where education was free, and unlike [[STW]], which actually ''paid'' students to attend, albeit in a currency that could only be redeemed at STW.

There was no law requiring Dreamer adults to care for their aging parents, either financially or materially, since the elderly were covered under the same programs that covered disabled and sick people. (This is a relic of the '''Plume''' system that predated the Dolphin Riders.) Therefore parents had no guarantee that their children would portion off their future income to the parents, and no financial incentive to seek the best education for their children, nor to have large numbers of children, or even to have children at all.

Many Dreamer women remained at or near their homes during the daytime, and so teaching their children was simply part of their daily routine, and school systems tended to exist only in large cities. Nonetheless, tuition was affordable, averaging around '''Ξ4,000''' per student per year, much less than the average income of even the lowest class of Dreamers. This tuition covered the teachers' salaries only, and did not pay for the students' meals or their belongings, which often cost more than the tuition.

Dreamland's private schools worked both in competition and in cooperation with each other, as when two schools opened in the same city, typically each school would specialize in different subjects of study.

====Proposal for a public school system====
Nonetheless, the lack of free public education was a disincentive for couples planning to have children, and many Dreamer politicians wanted to start a tax-supported public school system based on a foreign model. But because they could not institute a tax on the entire Dreamer empire, each state would need to do this individually.

Opponents of this plan argued that a public school system would immediately turn into an unrestrained child labor operation, as the state-run school would have no authority above them and thus could not be shut down. As evidence they pointed to the school system of '''Moonshine''', which considered its students to be slaves, and to [[STW]], a private school system which had nonetheless functioned as an education monopoly for much of its existence and had relied on child labor (although with pay) to sustain itself.

The '''Play''' school system, however, did not force its students to work, or even to do schoolwork, and was a legally established government monopoly accountable to no outside authority. Supporters of the new plan claimed that the Play nation disproved all of their doubts. The opponents of the public school plan countered this argument by saying that the Players represented everything the Dreamers opposed, and that the Players in fact were the worst child abusers in the world, as they forced their children to find food for their parents with no salary at all.

==Matrix treaty of 4190==
By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of '''Memnumu''' once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny [[Matrix]] army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

==Slope treaty==

===General election of 4205===
The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in [[Memnumu]].<ref>It is possible that the descendants of the Hipsides, now adults, still practiced this lifestyle in some territory between Dreamland and Tāmta.</ref>

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

====Arrival of the Cupbearers====
Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of '''Cupbearer''' refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.<ref>This may or may not be the state of Senampattore. Where it is on the map is clear, but the borders may have changed.</ref>

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the [[Players]] in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:
#The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
#Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
#The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in [[Baeba Swamp]] as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
#The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves ''pavača'',<ref>This word is ''čava'' "long hair" spelled backwards inside the circumfix ''p-..-a'' "having (a)". This method of word formation was dying out in Play, but persisted in some groups who were influenced by Andanese, because even though Andanese itself did not use this, it was more convenient with pure CV words, as Andanese had, than with Play whose syllable structure was more diverse.</ref> just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

===Capture of Crystal slaves===
A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising '''Slope''' party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

==Postwar period==
After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

===General election of 4227===
Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The ''bopo'' philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the ''bopo'' supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The '''Cupbearers''' may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

===General election of 4238===
Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

===General election of 4254===
After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the [[Memnumu|Play army]] and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.
==Naval war==
In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the [[Players]], which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the [[Ghost Empire|Ghosts]], who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called '''Laba'''. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of [[Moonshine]], but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world.
But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the [[Players|Play]] population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

==Inversion of propaganda==
Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the [[Players]], but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the [[Matrix]] propaganda of a hundred years prior.

===Weather metaphors===
Though living right along the Equator, the people of Hipatal and Laba in general had the same variety of body types found elsewhere. Some outsiders believed that they were all dark-skinned people, but immigrants such as '''Sašuasa''' had been of the same Lenian body type as the stereotypical eastern Dreamers who had fallen into ruin.

==Naval war in the Play sea==
===General election of 4287===
As the Dreamer navy,<ref>this did not actually take twenty years, but there were no global elections in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty</ref>, '''Laba''', invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the '''Teenprop''' corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

''NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.''

===Antiwar movement in Dreamland===
===="The Real Dreamland"====
Just as Dreamland seemed likely to win its war, a group of pacifists declared themselves to be the only true Dreamers, and pledged allegiance to the '''Cupbearers''' without formally joining the Cupbearer party. They said that the earlier Dreamers' pessimism was correct, and that Dreamland should be a pacifist multinational empire trading economically with foreign nations but without military expansionist goals. They supported '''Moonshine''', and thus while committed to pacifism, assumed that they would soon be targets in the war, and perhaps could be such easy targets that they would distract the navy from their war against the Players. Thus these new pacifists felt they could help the Players whether they were successful in remaking Dreamland into an economic power, in which case the war would stall, or unsuccessful, in which case they would be slaughtered by the pirates but could hopefully still save the Players.

The pacifists' claim to be the only true Dreamers closely resembled the Players' contemporary claim that the Play navy was the only true Laba. They had made their declarations independently, however, as the Play diplomats were blocked from contacting the pacifists by the Ghosts over land and by the pirates at sea.

===General election of 4295===
The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became popular.

===General election of 4316===
After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.
===General election of 4321===
Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

===General election of 4327===
===General election of 4343===
Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

==Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)==
Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing ''bepolere'', which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The ''Pōbipōpu'' and ''Pōronopa'' distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

===Contacts with Moonshine===
The '''Habit''' party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the '''Hipsoft''' settlements to and including the '''Womb Justice''' settlements. The Habits were the sons and daughters of the Crystals who had been pushed into the underclass in Baeba Swamp when the Leapers took over. That is, they were a faction of Crystals who resisted the Leapers.

====Tribal identity====
The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

====Partition====
By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small '''Hipsoft''' migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the '''Womb Justice ''' party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name '''Dreamland''' was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

====Moonshine-Habit relations====
The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's '''Habit''' party (''Tăta'')<ref>Note that this is not a homonym of the state name '''Tàta''' because the tones are different, but that in languages such as Play, the two may have been merged.</ref> to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called '''Wagillàra''', the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

===Demographic shifts===
After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the [[Players]] had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

:''Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.''

===General election of 4351===
Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

===General election of 4390===
Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

===General election of 4402===
Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

===General election of 4412===
The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.
===General election of 4419===
Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

===General election of 4438===
Luxury goods came back into fashion.

====Tribal reform====
Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The '''Tipper''' population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the '''Hipatal''' immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

===General election of 4440===
Luxury goods fell out of fashion.
===General election of 4445===
Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

===General election of 4462===
Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.
===General election of 4468===
Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.
===General election of 4485===
Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.
===General election of 4492===
The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.
===General election of 4500===
Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.
===General election of 4511===
Little changed in this election.
===General election of 4529===
Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.
===General election of 4531===
Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.
===General election of 4538===
Luxury goods became popular.
===General election of 4540===
Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

===Humanitarian attempts at intervention===
The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier.<ref>But remember that this from a different timeline. The figure cannot be taken as an exact count.</ref> Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both [[Baeba Swamp]] and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

''Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.''

==Other developments==
*56 (4150)
*52 (4202)
*13 (4215)
*24 (4239)
*79 (4318)
*80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the [[Hipatal]] people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

=Dreamer-Doll relations=
:''See [[Dolls]].''
Note that there is no convenient way to represent the [[babakiam|Play]]-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with ''dream'' and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the [[Dolls|Bottom]] party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (''nuufa''), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Bottoms did not allow their members to even have protruding fingernails. The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: '''fubap''' describing something soft and thus flexible, and '''nuufa''' describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

===Scope===
It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the '''Hiboh''' Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

===Dedication to pacifism===
The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon [[ppot#upl|drafted a party platform]] denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling '''Hailstorm''' army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

=Dreamer-Play relations=
''Žayuvas'' got its name when the rebel '''Tink''' army invaded their ally, the [[Play party]], and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, [[Dreamland]], than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory ''Memnumu''.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling '''Police''' faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the [[Play party]]. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the [[alphaleap|Leapers]] had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the '''Magic Combs''') never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

===Scope of Žayuvas===
It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of '''Šasa Kaina''', located near and traditionally friendly towards [[Thaoa]], at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

===Fertility calculations===
On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

;Oct 10 2021
There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding '''Tata''', where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

===Apportionment of representatives===
Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

==Evolution from factions to parties==
The [[Play party|Play]] charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

==Party membership==
The '''Police''' party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

==Culturebound issues of the Play Empire==
:''See also [[Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues]]''.
True to its name, the [[Play party]] dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

===Children's issues===
====Education====
The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory [[Raspara]] army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

===Tribal conflicts (general) ===
:''This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.''
====Height and hair color====

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured [[Paba]]p tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were [[#feminism|taller than their men]], this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

====Background====
Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive [[Raspara]] party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious [[swamp Kids|Tink]] army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall [[Repilia]]n tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the '''Flower Bees''' and the '''Rusted Pearls'''. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

====Conflicting tribal definitions====
Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of [[Lenia]]n ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the [[Palli]]-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

=Diplomatic contacts between the empires=

=Later periods=
These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.
===Hiboh===
The '''Hiboh''' era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true '''Sleeperism'''.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the '''Cold Men''', until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

===RKE Wars===
The '''RKE''' movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used [[Matrix]]-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.

=Notes in boats=
==Notes==