A dynamical system may approach such an equilibrium or stationary state along spiral trajectories, for example (figure). It retreats this way to a point in the space at it's disposal, as if this point would exert an attracting force - therefore the name attractor. Here, space is not necessarily a position space: Every independent quantity of the system (a temperature, for example) may be a coordinate of the phase space.

The figure shows how a system that lives in two dimensions (the plane) becomes finally zero-dimensional (the point).