Mostly applied to the shitweasels but Mr.

īyrum: anytime some quantity of byrus has to develop as an individual with some rudimentary mind of its own. Gray when comparing human minds arguing with themselves) but is pretty much of uniform mind and purpose (likely simply to spread) otherwise. At times it 'divides' into 'different colonies' (thoughts of Mr. It's telepathic, intelligent but 'not conscious'. Some definitions, according to my take:īyrus: the redgold fungus, the infection, pretty much the aliens' 'true form'. A good author often leaves questions unanswered and threads untied. King deliberately keeps things spooky and metaphorical. I don't know of any sources from King that solve the question. As for what King meant, I don't know that there is actually an answer to this question. So to me, Mr Gray is an image that the infectious fungus causes you to see. But I think Mr Gray had to both real (he could infect Jonesy's mind) and not-real (he didn't seem to ever truly have an honest-to-goodness physical form separate from the byrus). The byrus and byrum were definitely different life-stages of the alien. Wikipedia claims that the fungus, the shitweasels, and the grays were the three separate life stages of the aliens but don't think there is much support for that. He wasn't a hallucination, he was more of a projection of the byrus's will into the character's minds. Using these archetypes and images, the Ripleys created a telephathic projection recognized by the humans: Mr Gray. Ripleys were telepathic, and drew archetypes and images from the minds of their hosts. My take on this is that the actual aliens were just the Ripleys, the colonies of parasitic viral spores that matured into shitweasels. Maybe it just doesn't add up, or maybe there is something I missed in the book :) If the grayboys don't truly exist, who built the spaceship? Or was the spaceship itself an hallucination?

Who were the actual aliens? I think King actually comes close to answering this with the non-sentient byrus (the fungus) and the byrum (the 'shit weasels'), but it still doesn't make sense.

Were all the 'grayboys' a collective hallucination of the main characters and their antagonists from the army?.

Gray a product of Jonesy's imagination? Was there any kind of infection at all? Did he have any 'byrus' inside at all? King seems to imply it was a complete hallucination, but in that case, why was the alien 'learning' to be human? Why did he have an 'imperative to seed', if he didn't exist at all? However, and maybe because King doesn't specialize in writing SF (though I love his horror stories), the explanation seems confusing to me. Gray' was somehow a figment of Jonesy's imagination. In the book, and near the end, it is revealed that 'Mr.

This question is about the book by Stephen King, not about the movie.

Dreamcatcher by Stephen King