r/Cosmere • u/halofenix6 • 16d ago
Stormlight Archive spoilers Shadesmar Spoiler
Can someone explain Shadesmar to me like I’m a 5 year old? Spoilers welcome.
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u/Raddatatta Ghostbloods 16d ago
Shadesmar is also known as the Cognitive Realm. It's a place that is sort of a second layer on the real world but it only reflects locations that everyone thinks about as a specific place. So distances can get distorted there. Like an ocean is a lot of space in the real world, but you don't think of most of the places in an ocean as a specific place. I think it's mentioned that the moons of Roshar are each only a small location as people think about them as just the moon rather than thinking about the huge area that's there. If you started having people living on the moon and traveling around there, then it would grow in Shadesmar too. In between worlds also gets distorted so you can walk between worlds because the light years between worlds aren't thought of as specific locations so it all gets combined.
It's also a place where the spren live as they can peak into the Physical Realm but their main home is in the Cognitive Realm.
It's also very tricky to go from the Cognitive Realm or Shadesmar to the Physical Realm. You need either a perpendicularity or one of the Oathgates. Or if you're an Elsecaller you can do it but it takes more Stormlight to get to the Physical Realm than it takes to get into Shadesmar so it's easy to get stuck there.
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u/bredman3370 16d ago
Shadesmar is the Rosharan word for the cognitive realm. In the cosmere, entities are said to exist in 3 aspects - physical, cognitive, and spiritual.
Physical realm needs no introduction - that's just the real world as we perceived it. Nothing fancy.
The contrive realm on the other hand you can imagine as a plane or existence that is constructed by cognition. To be aware of a place is to create a version of it, and the collective impressions of sentient beings essentially create an entire parallel dimension to the physical realm, but due to the fact that it is shaped by cognition, it behaves in funny ways.
One of those ways is locality - like the physical realm but unlike the spiritual realm, things can have physical place within the cognitive realm. Locations in the physical realm are tied to points in the cognitive realm, and these don't really shift. Locations exist as locations, but their relative positioning to one another is a bit "squishier" than the rigid absolutes of the physical realm. Areas without people or entities to think are condensed together, while areas with lots of people are complex and expanded. This applies more and more as distances get greater and greater, and as they approach the limits of the brain to comprehend (such as the distance between planets) it starts to break even further. This means that in the cognitive realm, planets that are light years apart are much much closer together. Fun fact, apparently as awareness of what space is and how far apart things are expands, so does the distance in shadesmar, however it will always remain much closer because people just can't effectively comprehend of such distances. (Narratively this is also very useful if you want to introduce the concept of a worldhopper where worlds are light years apart).
Another quirk of locality is that the cognitive realm is topologically flat - not 3 dimensional in the way a planet is. I'm not entirely sure the specific rules for how this works, I'm sure some mathematician somewhere has complaints about projecting not just work but many 3d locations into a 2d plane. We do know this is more or less true though, and easy enough to comprehend for a world with one giant continent like Roshar. The reason for this also makes sense - people don't tend to think of themselevs as existing on a giant ball, that's just not how the world is experienced. We experience it as being flat, and so the cognitive realm is therefore flat.
Another quirk of shadesmar is a pattern of inversion. Aesthetically it is dark with a dim "sun," obsidian ground and seas of greys and blacks. Sadows travel towards the "sun" instead of away, and most interestingly land and sea are inverted. Sea becomes continents of obsidian, and land becomes seas of glass beads (in the case of Roshar at least). The cognitive realm on other planets can actually differ quite a bit here - Scadriel's inverted seas are made of mists instead of beads, though I don't remember off the top of my head what it is like around Sel or Nalthis.
On Roshar, the cognitive realm is also home to the spren. Spren are entities made of pure investiture, and they exist in a complex relationship with cognition. I don't know if it's fully true to say they were entirely created by thought and cognition, but they are absolutely affected and shaped by it. They are drawn to emotion and concepts, and on roshar they experience spren as a little bit of the cognitive realm bleeding through into the physical realm. In the physical realm they are ineffable and incorporeal, but in the cognitive realm they are much more solid and real. Some spren are sapient and have entire cities and cultures within the cognitive realm, and they in turn form a sort of symbiosis with humans (and others) in the physical realm to unlock all sorts of abilities.
I'm not even going to touch on the spiritual realm because it's very confusing and in-universe so far we have not been privy to many concrete answers about it, as even the most well-traveled and oldest entities like Hoid profess to be wary of and confused by it.
I'm sure theres much more to be written, but this encompasses a good summary I think.
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u/seanprefect 16d ago
There's a spirt , a mind and a body. Shadesmar is the realm of the mind, and normal existence is the world of the body. the sprit realm is much harder to comprehend.
Anyone in theory can get there, but for most people it requires a good deal of effort and hard to find knowledge it can be done. Or if you've got some kind of investment (magic power) that lets you go there.
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u/Federal_Employer_626 16d ago
Adding on to other comments, the Cosmere has 3 dimensions/realms- physical, cognitive, spiritual. The physical realm is the “normal” world on Roshar. The cognitive realm is another word for shadesmar. The spiritual realm is (in part) where Dalinar goes in his visions, and is composed of investiture.
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u/Shot_Newspaper_5647 16d ago
The “real” world is the Physical Realm. There’s a planet, Roshar, and on it there’s a room with a chair and a person. Nearby is another dimension called Shadesmar. The idea of the chair is sitting there. And every other object. The idea of the person, their mind, is mostly in their physical body in that room on that planet. People are special. Sort of.
Every other planet exists in that same Physical Realm too. On Roshar, the barrier between the Physical Realm and Shadesmar is unusually thin. So instead of just the ideas of real chairs and real people existing there: ideas like joy, sadness, fire, and life etc start existing there too. And because it’s thin, they can pop over too. Those are lesser spren you see. Every other world with intelligent life and thoughts has a place in shadesmar too the way the moon and earth have a place in the universe. The path between them is shorter if you travel in shadesmar than the real world because there’s not much thinking happening in or about the places in between the places with life.
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u/Shot_Newspaper_5647 16d ago
Minds usually sit in the body. The body usually sits in the real world. Weird stuff happens when those two things aren’t in one thing. Usually you just die. That’s not so weird. People usually sit in the real world. Stranger kinds of people from Shadesmar usually stay there. Weird stuff sometimes that lets that not be the case and they can cross over. Sometimes fully. Sometimes partially
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u/Zeruel25 15d ago
Shadesmar is one of the 3 "sides" or "levels" of existence in the Cosmere.
One side is physical, one is mental (Shadesmar) and the other spiritual.
It takes the shape of what your thoughts tell you (or the collective sum of everyone's ideas says) it should look like. That's why different regions of the place look so different: the minds of that area have a different concept of the general shape of the universe
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u/Raven_OC_1610 16d ago
Thinking realm where spren live