dailybestiary:

Nagas are already halfway dreamlike (or nightmarish)
creatures.  (We’re used to half-human,
half-animal creatures—minotaurs, centaurs, harpies—but a snake with a human
head?  Who measured out the portions in that recipe?)  Even the benevolent nagas have a remote,
reptilian perspective, and they are often driven by odd obsessions, especially
regarding relics or astrology or places of power.  And their magic tends to lurk on the
outskirts—they cast spells as sorcerers, are often described as witches, and
some species can even pluck spells from the cleric spell list.  Whatever naga traditions are, they are
esoteric almost by definition.

So already we’re dealing with semi-occult creatures.  Dream nagas go the whole way—not just
studying the occult, but inhabiting
it, slipping in and out of dreams as easily as a garter snake slipping through
a fence.  Sure they’re beautiful, but
that cobra’s hood reminds the viewer that beautiful can also mean deadly.  And given than they “fly through dreamscapes
in some unknowable plan to alter the destiny of the universe” (according to the
Occult Bestiary), how you feel about
them might depend on what side of that destiny you’re on.

Cut off by a rockfall,
adventurers are trapped in a maze with a spirit naga.  Meanwhile, in their dreams they are met one
by one with a dream naga.  Sometimes the
naga’s advice in dreams helps them in their waking fight with the spirit naga;
other times the advice seems to betray them.
By the time the adventurers escape the underground labyrinth, it is no
longer clear which snake-woman is more dangerous.

Where the cops employ
diviners, criminals employ abjurers.
Adventurers are sure a local crime lord is guilty of a brutal murder and
kidnapping, but he’s far too well shielded to prove it.  There might be a way around that, though, as
they’ve heard that a naga fortuneteller in the market can actually see dreams (if the price is right, of
course).  In fact, she can do more than
that…but she’s already in the crime lord’s employ.

A dream naga chases
and devours an adventurer every night in her dreams—indeed, some nights when
the adventurer sees her, the naga is still bloated with the adventurer’s digesting
lucid body she swallowed only the night before.
When questioned, the dream naga says only that she is “writing the
destiny your mother wished for you.”
What she means, and how it fits in with the dream naga race’s larger
plans for the multiverse, is still a mystery.

—Occult Bestiary
35

Dream nagas are found in Riven, favoring populations centers with great quantities of dreaming minds. They are unusually common in the northern forests, where they associate with orang-pendak tribes. While they fend off other dream threats, like dreamthief hags, they frequently use their charges as subjects for occult rituals.