Conscious Plane

Also known as the collective unconscious, the afterlife, or the Shadowless Dream, the conscious plane is defined as a conjoined space overlapped with material reality, and a central component of Phlogistic Model of intuitive phenomena. The conscious plane is so named for its role in housing the soul and its processes, such as thought, choice, and emotion. At the time of writing, competing theories disagree on whether consciousness is a consequence of soulfire or vice versa.

Careful investigation has revealed that the conscious plane is filled with a kind of noise, theorized to be the result of infinitely many unique fluctuation patterns overlapping and destructively interfering. Soulfire is brought into existence along with change in the conscious plane’s structure and unraveled by tidal forces, and thus a small amount of soulfire percolates throughout reality in accordance with the noise.

Additionally, though the conscious plane is named so, current science can only confirm it maps to the 3 spatial and singular temporal dimensions, but not that the plane is constrained to these. In particular, souls are believed to be rather high-dimensional to account for their complexity, perhaps extending into compactified extra dimensions. No known ethical methods of empirically testing this theory have been developed, though many [[fireborn]] and trained practitioners of natural firekeeping report being able to “feel” the shape of their soul, to varying results.

Soul Plane

A subplane with a distinct boundary seperating it from the wider conscious plane, which contains a core of engrammatic mass called the soul.

Impressions

A region of higher than average curvature in the conscious plane, caused by a congregation of soulfire around an organic object or other construct uniquely adapted to receive certain patterns of soulfire fluctuation. Such regions tend to form around living objects, as the structure of life naturally lends itself to resonating with the phases, with each organism favoring different patterns.

Space Density

Uniformity of space density is not a given when transitioning between conscious planes. In fact, most souls, in comparison to the greater conscious plane, are much denser due to their high engrammatic mass. Necessarily, crossing this boundary appropriately stretches or squishes whatever does so.

Field Equivalence

A component of many emerging theories at time of composition is the notion that soulfire and the conscious plane are identical on some deep, fundamental level. That is, soulfire is a compactified form of the conscious plane, and the conscious plane is a vast sea of soulfire. This has many implications on its own, but some unified theories which attempt to marry phlogistics to physical science even go so far as to say physical matter and energy have a similar relation with some as yet undetected field.

Curvature

According to the current phlogistic model of the conscious plane as a four dimensional manifold, soulfire interacts with the plane in such a manner as to be compelled to follow geodesics in the plane rather than reality. In simple terms, the structure of the plane generates gravitational forces which are exerted on soulfire, allowing for its movement. Additionally, soulfire is observed not to follow null geodesics, meaning it has a sense of “mass” that inhibits it. This imaginary mass can be similarly measured in soul planes, and seems to be dependent on their “density” as mentioned in refinement.