What could Chille Tid mean?

We started with the easy lore post yesterday, talking about Rising Tides, Crashing Skies, so let’s talk about the easy speculation: Chille Tid. The show was kind enough to hand us another chunk of information that makes the Gems seem like computers. As we said after The Test, it becomes less outlandish a thought the more times we see stuff like this.

So that means that today we’ll be briefly examining Steven’s ability to communicate with other Gems at a distance through his dreams (almost like some kind of network).

Powers for Steven!
There may be a non-zero chance that Steven only thought he was speaking to Lapis, but it’s close enough to zero that we can treat it as such. Realistically, Steven has a new power. He’s been acquiring quite a lot of those since Ocean Gem.

Not only does it not make any sense from a storytelling perspective for them to mislead Steven (and therefore the audience) for so long about the truth, this was the first time Malachite’s name has been used on the show; previously the only reason we knew her name was because of the voice credits listed for Jailbreak. It’s still possible that Steven names Malachite just like he named the Slinker, but Gems seem to come with their own name built-in.

Thankfully, very few people have been suggesting that maybe Steven imagined the whole thing. Steven has a new power, and (pretty much) everyone knows it.

Unique or not?
Unlike his possible ability to shut down electrical items, which we’ve seen happen around Rose Quartz as well, and his ability to grow plant warriors and heal people and Gems, both of which he definitely inherited from his mother, we can’t say whether this power has existed before or not. Pearl very quickly took Steven at his word that he was speaking with Lapis, but that could just be her growing faith in him (or, dare we say it, her believing in Steven).

Pearl’s supposition that Steven was forming a mental connection with his dreams seems to imply that Gems have communicated like this before, just not with dreams, but Pearl could also have been simply stating the obvious. It can’t have been too common, or else the wailing stones wouldn’t have been needed during the rebellion (unless the wailing stones were exclusively used to communicate with other planets [less likely], or a close bond is needed to mentally communicate [the more likely of the two]).

There is so little to go on in the episode to help determine how commonplace this interaction between Gems is. The focus of the episode was on the dire situation Lapis Lazuli was in, not in explaining the mechanics of the communication. This might be a mystery forever, or at least for a while, as we can’t expect them to make a second dream communication episode.

Just cross your fingers, and hope that the lore hits us eventually.