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Metempsychosis is likely the most difficult sphere to understand. It is, by definition, the most abstract and least concrete, for it is the sphere of abstraction. It deals with the creations of our own minds; our thoughts, archetypes, mentalities, and dreams.
Metempsychosis is, without a doubt, the most recently harnessed of all the spheres; but despite that, there has been more written about it than about all the other spheres combined. This is because it is the most scholarly sphere, the sphere which most lends itself to classification and study. Since the time of the Lycaeum, at the very latest, Metempsychosis has been formally studied and catalogued, by students and masters calling themselves "dormitatores vigiles", or Waking Dreamers (though they are more commonly, and more disparagingly, simply called "Scholastics" by those students of the less formalized spheres). The Dreamers have developed most of the vocabulary and concepts used for understanding Metempsychosis, and it is their work on which I will elaborate; but this does not nearly mean that theirs is the conclusive view of the subject.
There is a place to which all men's thoughts eventually go. It is called the "mondus umbrarum notionum", or the world of the shadows of thoughts (commonly called simply "the Mondus", and so I will do here). Every dream, every idea, every concept, is mirrored in the Mondus. Usually, it goes no further than this; mundane mankind is not aware of nor affected by this universe his imagination has created. The flow is only downstream. The art of the Dreamer, of course, is to reverse this.
The Dreamer does this through a process called "opening", or "forming".
A single, cohesive thought, idea, archetype, etc., existing in the Mondus, is technically termed an "umbra mentis", but more commonly referred to (by the less strict Scholastics, at least) as a Mondal being, or more succinctly, simply a Mondal.
Opening is the process by which a Mondal is brought into contact with an earthly, human mind. In a word, the Mondal's and the human's reality, their "mind-space", as the Dreamers call it, is conflated into one. They overlap, and the human mind begins to map itself to the Mondal's patterns, thereby taking on some of its characteristics.
This is a simplification, of course; the process is very complex. Simply locating a Mondal which meets one's specifications in the vast Mondus is profoundly difficult. Still, the gains of a sound knowledge of Metempsychosis are amazing, for it gives one the ability to manipulate the very thoughts of others. To understand Metempsychosis more fully, I highly recommend a more detailed look at the processes whereby its individual spells are enacted.
Finally, it is important to mention the existence of free-floating, or volitive, Mondals. These are Mondals which seem to possess a will and a consciousness of their own. Very, very little is known about them. A sub-set of these volitive Mondals are personal Mondals; these are Mondals whose mental faculties would seem to mirror precisely people who have actually existed in the physical world. Dreamers categorically deny that these are "ghosts" in the colloquial sense, saying rather that they are only the sum collection of all the perceptions of all men about a given person.
It is very rare, but volitive Mondals have been known to effect an opening themselves, and even to directly interact with the corporeal world.
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