Serenity

"To find your serenity is to hold a silence that has grown old before you first saw the light of day. A quietude that's been passed down generations, a peace that bids us watch the dawn, an unspoken alliance with wave and flame that lets both take all speech from tongues and sets us standing before the water's surge and swell, or waiting to bear witness to fire's consuming dance of joy."
-Speaker Desya of the Cult of Morr

The serenity trance is the state of mind in which mages can see and enter their Dream of Power. Without it a mage would not be able to see past their current world.
To do so, teachers and cultists will train novices using a variety of different stimuli; poems, stories, fragments of song, even riddles and jests, all to help them view the world through altered eyes - to see a different world entirely. Sometimes more physical help is needed in the form of objects to fascinate the eye with patterns, pieces of glass rainbowed through with colours, interlocking puzzles, or pictures that deceive - at one glance showing an old man looking right, at the next a young boy staring left, or a hill that with a shift of perception became a pit. A myriad different stimuli that all led to the same place in different ways, a path to suit each person.

Manifestation

Those who reach serenity describe it as a calm place where nothing outside can touch them, where even memories are robbed of their hurts and shape edges. It is not a state without care or purpose, but one with the serenity to rise beyond the reach of love, lose, fear, or even pain. To rise beyond the world itself.