Glossary
Oniraya uses a few words of its own. Here they are, from the everyday to the technical — the first few are enough to get started.
- Dream
- A story you submit. It is encrypted as soon as it is saved and never shown to another member — not its text, not its place, not its date. It only ever serves to be compared, by meaning, with other people's.
- Convergence
- A measured hypothesis: two dreams resemble each other enough that their authors are offered a conversation. It is expressed as a percentage — the higher it is, the more the two stories answer each other. It proves nothing; verifying it is what the two people do, if they choose to talk. A convergence reveals nothing of the other dream — only that it exists.
- Threshold
- The percentage above which the hypothesis is judged serious enough to be put to two people. It is deliberately high: better to offer nothing than an unrelated meeting. As long as no pair reaches it, nothing is offered to anyone.
- Alias
- The name under which you appear to someone whose dream converged with yours — “Subject B-3”, for instance. It is stable, and says nothing about you: not your address, not your handle, not how many dreams you have submitted.
- Double consent
- No exchange begins unless BOTH people have agreed. As long as only one side has said yes, the other sees a request and nothing more: no message, no open room.
- Tone
- Positive, negative or neutral — the overall impression the dream left you with. Optional. You can ask to see only convergences with the same tone as yours: that setting hides the others from you, and never removes you from anyone else's results.
- Mood
- A word or two for the dream's atmosphere — mist, vertigo, station. Optional. A shared mood brings two stories closer, but its absence never counts against them.
- Beam
- The detail of a convergence: what brings two dreams together and in what proportion — the story, the keywords, the place, the tone, the mood. It is revealed only after both people agree, and shows only SHAPES of resemblance, never text.
- Matching run
- The computation that compares dreams with one another. It happens when you record: your account is compared with the corpus within the second. A nightly pass then follows up, to catch anything that failed.
- Encryption
- Stories are encrypted on our servers. We must be able to analyse them to detect a resemblance — encryption we could not lift ourselves would make the service impossible — but a stolen database would not make a single dream readable.
Still wondering? Submit a dream and see what it meets — that is still the best explanation.