Judge us not by our seemings for we are never what we appear.
Come hither, changelings and join the dream-dance,
lest the winter come and the Dreaming pass into memory.

Changeling: The Dreaming is a tabletop role-playing game originally published by White Wolf Publishing in July 1995, and is part of the World of Darkness series. Player characters are changelings, fae souls reborn into human bodies, a practice begun by the fae to protect themselves as magic vanished from the world.

The fae are creatures of dreams, drawing magical power and their very existence from "Glamour", the dreams of mankind. Traditionally, a changeling is a fairy child substituted for a human baby, but Changeling: The Dreaming uses a very different interpretation. In the game, a changeling is a fae soul born into a human body. Early in the human's life, usually before puberty, they undergo the "Chrysalis", a magical awakening of the fae soul which previously lay dormant. Once through the Chrysalis, the Changeling exists simultaneously in both the "real" world and in the "chimerical" reality of the fae, where creative ideas and imagination have substance. (The metaphysical aspects of this are the complex concepts present in the game.) The human soul becomes joined with/cohabits alongside the fae soul.

The gates to Arcadia, the original paradise, are closed. Only the world of humanity remains. Without any awareness of our true nature, humankind crushes us beneath its banal heel. Joy and laughter are gone; only the Dreaming remains. We are changelings, the forgotten ones, neither fully fae nor wholly mortal. The last of our kind on Earth, we have built ourselves an invisible kingdom. We are everywhere, yet you have never seen us. We hide in plain sight with the power of our Glamour. We exist within a real world of make-believe where “imaginary” things can kill and “pretend” monsters are real.