The Gardener of the Subconscious
Patience, I discovered, was not a passive state. It was an active, deliberate slowing of one's own tempo to match the rhythm of growth. My life settled into a new, deliberate cadence. The terrified urgency of my first years bled away, replaced by the slow, steady beat of a long-term project. I was no longer a castaway frantically trying to build a raft. I was a gardener, and I had finally learned to appreciate the soil.
My waking hours were dedicated to the meticulous, often frustrating, work of building a human being from the ground up. Speech was the next great frontier. My mind was a library of language, but my vocal cords and mouth were clumsy, untrained instruments. I practiced in private, forming words with silent lips while I played, shaping the alien sounds.
"Wa-ter," I would whisper, the 'r' catching in my throat.
"Moth-er." The 'th' was a slippery fiend.
My first intentional word, spoken aloud to my mother's delighted face, was not "mama." It was "soft." My chubby finger was pointing at Mr. Hopper's ear. Her reaction—a gasp of surprise followed by a rain of kisses and a joyful call to my father—was a reward more fulfilling than any cosmic power. I was communicating. I was building a bridge, plank by painful plank, between my ancient consciousness and their world.
The world of Quirks continued to unfold around me with mundane wonder. My father's Quirk was a minor telekinetic ability, strong enough to retrieve the remote control from across the room without getting up, but little more. He called it his "Lazy Man's Power." My mother could, when she concentrated, change the colour of fresh flowers for a few hours. It was a party trick she used to make centrepieces for family gatherings. They were small, gentle powers, perfectly suited to the small, gentle people they were. Their dreams, which I visited every night, were reflections of that: dreams of family, of small joys, of quiet contentment, all tinged with that ever-present, protective love for me.
Their fear of an early, dangerous Quirk manifestation had gradually faded, replaced by a new, unspoken anxiety. I was three years old. The age when the very first, faint signs might sometimes appear. They watched me with a careful, hopeful tension.
I gave them nothing to worry about. I was a careful gardener here, too. I kept my power locked away deep, a still, silent pool. The incident with the nosebleed was a scar and a lesson I would not forget. My physical vessel was not yet seaworthy.
But in the Dreaming, my garden flourished.
I stopped trying to build castles and instead planted seeds. I would sit on my throne—which now felt less like a seat of power and more like a comfortable old armchair at the heart of my home—and cast my awareness not to direct, but to listen.
I found a young artist, plagued by a creative block, dreaming in frustrating circles of blank canvases. I didn't give her an image. Instead, I nurtured the feeling of inspiration itself. I let the concept of a perfect, vibrant colour bleed into the edges of her dream. The next night, her dream was a riot of swirling paints and half-formed, beautiful shapes. A week later, my father pointed out a piece in the local paper about a promising new artist's exhibition. A small, quiet pride bloomed in my chest.
I found an old man dreaming of his long-dead wife, the memory faded and painful. I didn't recreate her. I couldn't. Instead, I gently softened the sharp edges of his grief and nurtured the warmth of a happy memory—the feel of her hand in his, the sound of her laugh. His dream of loss became a dream of bittersweet comfort. He woke, I sensed, not with a fresh wound, but with a lingering sense of peace.
This was my work. I was a curator of the subconscious, a facilitator of healing and inspiration. The realm responded to this gentle touch. The obsidian plains grew softer, covered in a fine, silver moss that felt like cool grass underfoot. The memory-nebulae in the sky pulsed with a more rhythmic, calming light. New, simple life began to appear—not because I forced it, but because the realm was now healthy enough to dream itself into being. Small, glowing moths flitted through the library aisles. Silent, fish-like creatures made of light swam through the air of the throne room.
I was balancing the scales. It was deeply, fundamentally satisfying.
And then, I found 'her.'
Her dream was a screaming vortex in the tapestry. It wasn't a nightmare of monsters or failure. It was a nightmare of noise. An unbearable, cacophonous onslaught of sound that had no source and no end. It was the dream of a mind that could find no silence, even in sleep. The dream-energy wasn't crackling with power; it was vibrating with a painful, hyper-stimulated frequency that grated against my senses.
Her name was Akari. She was six years old.
Her waking life, which I glimpsed through the cracks in her dreaming mind, was a special kind of hell. Her Quirk was always on, and it was called Hyper-Auditory Perception. She heard everything. The hum of electricity in the walls, the respiration of people three rooms away, the friction of socks on carpet, the blood rushing in her own veins. It was a constant, overwhelming barrage. She wore special noise-cancelling headphones, but they were a feeble dam against a tidal wave of sound. She lived in a state of perpetual flinch, her small body always tense, her eyes wide with a pain she was too young to articulate.
Her dream was just a reflection of her waking hell. There was no story, no images. Just the noise.
My heart ached for her. This was a torture I could not imagine. To have no refuge, not even in sleep…
I approached her dream with more caution than I had ever used. It was a raw, exposed nerve. I couldn't simply soothe it or add a happy feeling. That would be like putting a bandage on a gaping wound.
I had to build her a sanctuary within the noise.
Gently, with the lightest touch of my will, I did not try to silence the sounds. Instead, I began to organize them. I took the scream of a distant kettle and turned it into the steady, rhythmic crash of ocean waves. I took the rumble of a truck outside her window and shaped it into the deep, reassuring purr of a giant cat. The chaotic rustle of leaves became the whisper of wind through tall grass.
I composed a symphony from her torture.
I built a dream for her of a wide, open field under a quiet night sky. In the distance, the sounds of the world continued, but they were transformed, made part of the landscape, predictable and harmonious. And in the center of that field, there was a circle of perfect, profound silence.
She stood in that silence, for the first time in her life. Her dream-self, a small girl with tired eyes, looked around in wonder. She hugged herself. And she cried, not tears of pain, but of relief.
I held the dream for her, maintaining the delicate composition for the entire night. It was the most draining thing I had ever done, a constant, focused effort of will. But it was worth it. As dawn approached in the waking world, I felt her dream-self take a deep, shuddering breath of the quiet air, committing the sensation to memory.
She woke up.
The connection severed. I slumped back on my throne, exhausted but exhilarated.
The next night, I went to her again. The screaming vortex was back, but it was… lessened. Fainter. As if her mind remembered the sanctuary and was trying, feebly, to reach for it. I built it for her again, stronger this time, the circle of silence a little wider.
I did this for a week. Each night, her own mind took more ownership of the dream. She began to add things to it—a blanket, a favourite stuffed animal from her waking life. She was learning to dream her own peace.
On the eighth night, I arrived to find her dream already formed. It was our field. The sounds were already orchestrated into her symphony. The circle of silence was there, waiting. She was sitting in it, drawing pictures in the air with her finger. She had built it herself.
She had learned to find silence.
I withdrew, my work done. A profound sense of purpose settled over me. This was not just curation. This was healing. This was why I existed.
A few days later, my mother was talking to a neighbour over the garden fence. I was sitting on a blanket nearby, ostensibly playing with a toy truck, but listening intently.
"...and little Akari Sato," the neighbour said, her voice full of gossipy warmth. "You know, the one with the hearing Quirk? The poor thing who always looked so frightened? Her mother says she's like a different child. She's started smiling. She actually took her headphones off at breakfast yesterday, just for a minute, and said it was 'quiet enough.' Can you imagine?"
My mother made a pleased sound. "That's wonderful. She must be learning to control it."
"Must be," the neighbour agreed. "What a relief for that family."
I pushed my truck back and forth, a quiet, secret joy burning in my chest. It was a small thing. A single life made marginally better. But to me, it was everything. It was proof that my power had meaning beyond the confines of my own realm.
That night, in the Dreaming, I found a new book on a shelf in the library. It was small, bound in a soft, grey material that felt like felt. On the cover, in embossed letters, was the name *Akari Sato*. I opened it. The pages were filled with musical notation, a beautiful, complex score titled *Symphony of a Quiet Mind*.
I had not placed it there. The Dreaming had grown it itself, a record of the healing that had taken place within it.
I ran my fingers over the notes, and a single, perfect, tear-shaped drop of silver dew fell from the air above and landed on the page. It soaked in without a trace.
I was not just a gardener. I was a healer. And my garden was vast.