The Weight of a Whisper
Sleep, for me, was no longer an escape. It was a commute.
The moment my infant consciousness succumbed to exhaustion, I didn't fall into blackness. I was pulled, gently but firmly, along a silver thread that stretched from the core of my being into a place that was both mine and infinitely beyond me. The crushing weight of my new body fell away. The confusing barrage of sensory input—the scratch of the blanket, the hum of the hospital lights, the smell of antiseptic and blood—faded into a distant hum.
I arrived not on the obsidian plain I had crafted, but at its heart. A throne room had formed in my absence. It was a vast, cathedral-like space, with arches that soared into a star-dusted ceiling. The walls were not stone, but shelves upon shelves of books, their spines glowing with soft, internal light, containing every story ever dreamed. At the center stood a throne, carved from a single piece of that same dark, smooth material. It was not ostentatious. It was… foundational. It was the anchor point of this entire realm.
This was the heart of the Dreaming. And it was waiting for me.
I approached the throne, my form that of the man I once was, a familiar shape in this place of concepts. As I sat, a sigh of cosmic relief seemed to ripple through the realm. The connection solidified. I could feel it all—the endless, rolling landscapes of dreams and nightmares, the whispering library, the silent galleries of dream-creatures not yet shaped. It was vast, vaster than I could comprehend, and it was, for this moment, stable.
But the pull of the waking world was still there, a taut leash on my soul. My time here was borrowed, a brief respite during my body's rest. I could feel the infant me, swaddled and sleeping in a plastic bassinet, a physical anchor tethering me to that bright, loud reality.
I closed my eyes on the throne and opened them to the Dreaming's sky. Not to stars, but to the dreams of the hospital. They blossomed above me like swirling nebulae.
A nurse dreamed of a quiet beach, the stress of her shift melting away in the sun.
A new father in the waiting room dreamed of teaching a small, faceless child to ride a bike.
And my mother… her dream was a warm, golden haze of relief and overwhelming love, with my infant form at its center, glowing like a tiny sun.
I reached out, a gentle god admiring his garden. I could feel the texture of their dreams, the emotional resonance. It was nourishing, like sunlight on a plant. This was my purpose. This was why I existed.
Then I felt it. A discordant note.
In a room down the hall, a dream was curdling. It was a doctor's dream. It had started as a replay of the day—rushing through corridors, the beep of monitors, the focused intensity of his work. But it was twisting. The corridors were elongating, the doors stretching away into infinity. The monitor beeps were becoming faster, more frantic, a panicked staccato. A patient's face, pale and fearful, morphed, their features dissolving into a silent scream.
A nightmare was born.
It was a small, private terror, but it was a flaw in the tapestry. A thorn on the rose. Without thinking, I reached for it. My will, which in the waking world was nothing, was here a fundamental force. I didn't destroy the nightmare—that was a part of life, too. But I softened its edges. I turned the endless corridor into a short hallway leading to a restful on-call room. I slowed the beeping into a steady, reassuring rhythm. The screaming face smoothed into one of peaceful sleep.
The doctor's dreaming form relaxed, his terror subsiding into mere fatigue. The nebula of his dream stopped its violent churning and settled into a calmer, grey-blue hue.
I had done it. I had performed my function. A quiet, profound satisfaction flowed through me. This was balance.
But the effort, minor as it was, sent a ripple back through the connection to my physical form. In the bassinet, my tiny body twitched. A faint, dreamy whimper passed my lips.
The thread pulling me back to the waking world tightened. My time was up. The Dreaming faded around me, the throne room dissolving into light.
I was back in the dark, cramped confines of my infant self. The peace of the Dreaming was replaced by a immediate, urgent need. A burning emptiness in my stomach. A damp discomfort between my legs. The needs were primal, overwhelming, and they demanded attention *now*.
I cried. It was the only language this body had.
A blurry face appeared above me, cooing. Soft hands lifted me, changed me, then held me to a warm breast. The hunger was sated with a instinctual urgency that shamed my ancient consciousness. This was biology. This was base, animal necessity. I was a passenger in a vessel driven by its most fundamental requirements.
This was the pattern of my new existence.
Days bled into nights, measured not by clocks but by the cycle of need: hunger, discomfort, sleep, dream. The waking world was a smear of sensory input I lacked the hardware to process. Sounds were loud and indistinct. Light was bright and painful. My focus was measured in inches—the distance from my eyes to my mother's face as she fed me.
That face became my sun. Her voice, a soft, melodic hum as she sang to me, was the most beautiful sound in this chaotic universe. I learned her scent—a mix of milk, lavender soap, and something uniquely *her*—and it meant safety. The man, my father, was a larger, deeper-voiced presence. His hands were clumsier but no less gentle. He would hold me against his broad chest, and the rumble of his voice as he talked nonsense to me about his day was a vibration that soothed my frantic, trapped soul.
They named me Arata. Arata Shinsei. "New Beginning." The irony was not lost on me, though I could only express my appreciation by gumming my father's thumb.
My time in the Dreaming was my only respite, my only taste of control. Each nap, each night's sleep, was a journey home. I learned to navigate my realm with increasing deftness. I could feel the dreams of my entire city, a galaxy of swirling emotions above my throne. Most were mundane: dreams of work, of love, of anxiety about bills. But there were always those brighter, more potent dreams. The ones crackling with that strange, physical energy.
I began to understand them better. They weren't just vivid dreams. They were dreams intertwined with… power. A woman dreamed of flying through Tokyo, and the dream-energy carried the specific sensation of wind rushing past her face. A man dreamed of lifting a car, and the dream thrummed with the strain of metallic weight. These dreamers weren't just imagining; they were, on some level, 'practicing*'
It was puzzling. Deeply puzzling.
Months passed. My physical world expanded from the cradle to a playmat on the floor. I gained a terrifying degree of control over my limbs. I learned to roll over, a Herculean effort that left me exhausted but triumphant. I was beginning to interact with the world.
And the world was getting stranger.
One afternoon, my father was pushing me in a stroller through the local park. I was dozing, half-in, half-out of the Dreaming, my consciousness split between the sun-dappled path and the silent galleries of my realm. A woman sat on a bench nearby, talking animatedly on her phone. As her conversation grew more heated, a faint, shimmering heat-haze seemed to ripple around her fingers. The grass near her feet began to wilt, very slightly.
I blinked my infant eyes, focusing. The haze was gone. I must have imagined it.
Another time, a teenager sprinted past us, and for a split second, his feet seemed to leave trails of light on the pavement. I stared, but he was just a fast kid.
The evidence was fleeting, circumstantial. But in the Dreaming, the evidence was undeniable. The number of those potent, power-infused dreams was not just significant. It was… normal. It was a majority. It was as if everyone in this world had a secret second self, a sleeping potential that they visited each night.
A cold knot of realization began to form in my gut. This wasn't the world I remembered. This was somewhere else. Somewhere… other.
The final piece of the puzzle clicked into place on a day trip to a shopping mall. I was in my stroller, clutching a soft toy—a rabbit—and watching the world go by. A child, no more than four years old, was having a tantrum in the middle of the concourse. He was screaming, red-faced, stamping his feet.
As he stamped, the polished floor tiles 'rippled' outward from his feet like water. The ripple spread for a meter, causing people to stumble and gasp. The child's mother scooped him up, apologizing profusely to everyone. "I'm so sorry! He just got his quirk last week, he can't control it when he's upset!"
The word hit me like a physical blow.
'Quirk.'
It was a simple, silly word. But in that context, with that event, it was a key turning in a lock. Memories, not of my past life, but of the whispers I'd heard in the Dreaming, coalesced. The dreams of flight, of strength, of fire, of light—they weren't just fantasies. They were reflections of waking reality.
This world had superpowers. And they were called Quirks. And they were… common.
The revelation was staggering. It explained everything and nothing. Where was I? What kind of world was this?
That night, in the Dreaming, I sought answers. I sat on my throne and cast my awareness not toward pleasant dreams, but toward the dreams of those who burned brightest. I found a hero, a man who dreamed of saving people, his dream-self surrounded by adoring crowds. His dream-energy was a roaring fire of confidence and power. I found a villain, dreaming of conquest, his dream a dark, cold thing of sharp edges and freezing fear.
And I found a historian, an old man asleep in a study filled with books. He was dreaming of the past. His dream was a tapestry of images: a glowing baby in a Chinese city, news headlines proclaiming the dawn of a new age, the collapse of old societies, the rise of new ones built around these powers. The Age of Quirks.
I watched, I listened, I learned. This was not my Earth. This was a parallel reality, one where superhuman abilities had become the global norm. Heroes and villains were not concepts from comics; they were professions, part of the daily news.
The weight of this knowledge was immense. I was not just a reincarnated soul in a new body. I was an alien on a planet of demigods. My power—the power of the Dreaming—was not a Quirk. It was something older, more fundamental. It was the substrate upon which their Quirks played out in their sleep. I was the stage, not one of the actors.
The fear returned. What place did I, a seemingly normal infant, have in a world like this? My parents were normal, loving people. Their dreams were simple, devoid of that crackling Quirk-energy. Would I develop a Quirk? Could the power of the Dreaming manifest as one? Or would I be Quirkless, an outlier in a world of extraordinary people?
The uncertainty festered.
It began to affect the Dreaming. A low fog of anxiety crept across the obsidian plains. In the library, books of tragedy glowed a little brighter. I tried to maintain control, but the worry was a constant undertow.
This internal turmoil finally breached the barrier between my two worlds. I was ten months old. I was in my high chair, playing with mashed peas, practicing the fine motor skill of getting them into my mouth instead of up my nose. My mother was humming, washing dishes at the sink.
My father came home from work, his shoulders slumped with a fatigue I could feel from across the room. He dropped his briefcase by the door with a louder thud than usual.
My mother turned, her smile fading. "Rough day, Kenji?"
He sighed, running a hand through his hair. "Just… everything. The commute was hell. Work was a nightmare. It feels like I'm constantly running just to stay in place."
The word 'nightmare' echoed in my mind. His stress was a sharp, sour note in the warm room. I could feel his waking mind, tired and frayed, and I knew what his dream would be that night. A dream of being chased, of falling behind, of failure.
A pulse of empathetic anxiety went through me. I didn't want him to have that dream. I wanted to help. I reached for the Dreaming, for the connection that was always there, a faint silver thread in the back of my mind. I pushed a feeling down that thread, a thought shaped by my will: 'Calm. Safety. Rest.'
It was a tiny thing. The gentlest of touches.
In the waking world, my father, who was heading to the fridge, stopped. He blinked, and then a slow, genuine smile spread across his face. He looked over at my mother. "You know what? It's over. I'm home. That's what matters." He walked over to her and kissed her cheek. "Sorry for grumbling."
She smiled, surprised but pleased. "That's okay. Welcome home."
I felt a flicker of triumph. I had done it. I had influenced the waking world, just a little.
But the effort had a cost. My ten-month-old brain, my developing nervous system, was not meant to channel such power. A sharp, stabbing pain lanced through my temples. My vision swam.
I opened my mouth to cry out, but no sound came. A warm, sudden wetness trickled from my nose.
My mother turned back to me, her smile vanishing instantly. "Arata?"
Her voice sounded miles away. I felt dizzy, nauseous. I looked down at my high chair tray. A single, perfect drop of crimson blood bloomed against the pale green of the mashed peas.
Then, the world tilted sideways, and the waking world went black as I slumped forward, unconscious.
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(trying to keep the mystic that the sandman portrays, how am i doing? (https://ko-fi.com/godtiersage- 5 more chapters here)