Nyctef

Or to put it another way... Why does the landscape of Shadesmar reflect the landscape of Roshar (and then, why does it reflect Roshar's landscape with a land/sea inversion?) Do other parts of the Cognitive Realm behave the same as Shadesmar, or is this a peculiarity of the area close to Roshar?

Right now I'm in favour of theory 1 - characters having a crisis of faith before literally becoming God is something we've seen already, and I think Dalinar committing the ultimate heresy would be really fun to watch (if just for the reactions of everyone who's dismissed him so far...)

Was anyone else surprised by how .. 'real' the Cognitive Realm felt in Part 4? I was expecting it to be a lot more mental, but we see land, plants, animals, and travel - if you want to get from one place to another then you actually have to hike there (or take a boat) and Kaladin's Windrunner powers seem to work in the same way as well. I think the main reason I was surprised is passages like this from WoR: which suggests that the Cognitive Realm can't be 'touched, seen or heard' (although now we know that's not true) and which implies that spren / forces from the Cognitive Realm are somewhat responsible for what we think of as physical laws in the Physical Realm. And yet, when we enter the Cognitive Realm, all of those forces still exist, without spren to influence them. Is this just a limitation of perception, where humans can only see the Cognitive in the way that they'd expect? I don't think the book gives us any suggestions in this direction, given that Syl and Pattern seem to interact with the realm in the same way that the humans do. Is the Cognitive Realm somehow more real than the Physical, with nature in the Physical mimicking that of the Cognitive? That definitely seems backwards, although it would be an interesting twist. The most likely explanation (which I think we've heard a few times, although I can't find a good quote) is that humans somehow created the Cognitive Realm, or at least shaped it somehow so that it would behave as a human expects the world to behave. It still feels strangely similar to the 'real' world, though, rather than being some other plane of existence like I was expecting. What do you think?