The Impossibility of Distinction

It is like you are sick. It is no longer possible to hold something clearly in your head and to make a decision one way or the other. There are great machines, hidden, drumming their awful repetitions, burning into and stopping up the grey matter of the brain. There are times when the room you live is like hell, and then it is back again, exactly as it was. You can't control this. People survive as best they can, and sometimes they disappear. Casual cruelty is omnipresent, accompanied by terrifying and apparently random acts of violence, strangers killing strangers.

This is the invasion - a psychic illness. The police multiply and multiply. The difficulty is in knowing where to start. When you can't think you can't draw the necessary distinctions and nothing coheres. You struggle through mud and darkness and the best minds turn slowly to their private despairs. 

A dreamer can still (yes, still, even in the face of it all) see things brightly and clearly. They can imagine the world apart from itself, and in the act make an incision in the terrible power of the invasion. When the world became sick it also became more plastic. They can make things different, better and also worse, but different, and different in their own name. They can distinguish one thing from the other, because there is their difference, and there is the rest, the mud world of police and random killings, and the two are utterly unalike.

Dreamers are in terrible danger, and nearly all of them are abducted by the invaders, to fates obscure and awful. They live in terror of discovery. 

You must find them, teach them trust, and galvanise that clarity of purpose that still (yes, still!) burns, hot, bright, wonderful, in true colour. 

-

A dreamer is exactly like an operative, but takes a full turn to reload a weapon, has -1 to hit with everything, and takes 1 stress every time they are subjected to enemy fire.

They also have a spatially-limited omnipotence - they have to concentrate, but when they do, what they describe in their minds, happens. If they concentrate for a turn, this is 5 metres, for 2 turns, 10, for 3, 15, etc. 

Every turn that they do this, they must roll a d6, +1 for every turn already spent concentrating. If the number is above five, they fall unconscious for the rest of the mission. 

Gustave Moreau, St Cecilia (The Angels Announcing Her Coming Martyrdom)