The Unmaking of a Man, The Making of a Dream
There was nothing.
Not the black of a moonless night, nor the grey of thick fog. This was a profound, absolute negation of everything. No light, no sound, no scent, no sensation of up or down, cold or warm. It was the void before the first note of the symphony, the blank page before the first word was inked. It was, in the most literal sense, *nothing*.
And within this nothing, I was.
I had no body to feel the absence of sensation. No lungs to gasp at the lack of air. No heart to pound in a chest that didn't exist. Yet, a core of *me* persisted, a fragile, frantic consciousness adrift in an infinite sea of nullity. Thought was my only anchor, my only proof that I had ever been.
*What…?*
The question echoed in the silent theatre of my mind, a ghost of a voice with no throat to produce it.
*Where is… everything?*
Memories, those flickering, half-remembered things, began to surface like bubbles in a tar pit. A name. Did I have a name? There was a sense of one, a shape of it in my mind, but it slipped away, dissolving before I could grasp it. There were faces, blurred and featureless, that sparked a faint warmth, a deep ache. A life. I had lived a life. I was sure of it. There had been a world of colour and noise, of joy and pain, of mundane routines and profound moments.
But it was all gone. Erased.
Panic, a pure, distilled emotion without a physical vessel to contain it, erupted. This was wrong. This was beyond wrong. This was an impossibility. Death wasn't supposed to be like this. Was this death? It had to be. What else could reduce a man to a single, terrified point of awareness in an endless nothing?
The panic crested, a silent scream into the void, and then… something shifted.
It wasn't a sound or a light. It was a *pressure*. A change in the quality of the nothingness. The void, which had been utterly inert, began to… *stir*. It was as if the fabric of non-existence itself had developed a current. And I was caught in its flow.
My consciousness, that tiny, fragile point of *self*, began to stretch. Not in a physical sense—there was nothing physical here—but in a conceptual one. I was being pulled thin, my awareness fraying at the edges, bleeding into the void. The memories, those precious, fading remnants of who I was, began to leach away faster, their essence siphoned into the infinite nothing.
*No. No, stop!* The thought was a desperate plea. *That's all I have left! That's me!*
But the void was indifferent. It was a hunger, a cosmic appetite, and I was the only morsel on an endless plate. I felt myself unraveling, my identity dissolving like sugar in water. The fear was eclipsed by a profound, soul-crushing loneliness. To die was one thing. To be unmade, to have every trace of your existence scoured away, was another horror entirely.
I was forgetting. The faces were gone. The warmth was gone. The name was a forgotten whisper. Soon, there would be nothing left but the raw, terrified awareness, and then, not even that.
*Please…* I begged whatever, whoever, might be listening in this godless place. *Someone… anything… remember me…*
As my consciousness frayed to its breaking point, on the very precipice of dissolution, something new bloomed within me. It wasn't a memory. It was a *sense*. A deep, instinctual knowing that rose from the very core of what I was becoming—or un-becoming.
The void wasn't just taking. I was… giving.
The pieces of me that were leaching away, the memories, the fears, the regrets—they weren't vanishing. They were… seeding. They were becoming the antithesis of the void. Where my fear of darkness bled out, a concept of light, faint and nascent, sparked into being. Where a memory of a lover's whispered promise dissolved, the echo of sound rippled through the silence. The loneliness I felt created the potential for connection.
I was dreaming.
The realization was not intellectual. It was fundamental, a law of this new existence being written with my unmade soul as the ink. This void wasn't Hell or Purgatory. It was a *lack*. A blank canvas. And my dying consciousness, my shredded memories, my very essence, were the first pigments splashed upon it. I was dreaming this void into being, and in doing so, I was defining it by everything I was not, and everything I had been.
The pressure changed. The void was no longer a hungry maw. It was a womb. And I was its nascent heart.
The sense of unmaking ceased. The dissolution stopped. What was left of me—a core of identity that was no longer the man I had been, but something both less and more—stabilized. The panic receded, replaced by a dawning, immense… *responsibility*.
The void waited. It was no longer empty. It was *potential*. And it was mine to shape.
Tentatively, fearfully, I reached out with this new sense. I didn't have hands, but I had *will*. I thought of light. Not the light of the sun I half-remembered, but a simpler thing: the concept of illumination versus darkness.
A single, solitary point of soft, silver light kindled in the distance. It was tiny, a lone star in an infinite black sky. But it was *something*. It was not-nothing. A sob of relief that had no breath behind it shook the core of my being.
I pushed further. I thought of sound. I remembered—or rather, I remembered remembering—music. A simple melody from a life gone by. A string of notes, pure and clear.
A chime resonated through the void. It was a sound that had never been heard before, and it was beautiful. It hung in the non-air, a vibration that defined the silence around it by its very existence.
Emboldened, I reached for more. I thought of form. I needed a place to *be*. An anchor for my consciousness. I shaped the will into a concept: *Foundation. Ground. Stability.*
Beneath me—a direction that now existed because I defined it—a surface formed. It was not stone, not soil, not metal. It was the *idea* of a floor, smooth and cool and solid under a form I had not yet crafted for myself. It spread out in a great, dark plain, meeting a horizon I conceived of in the same moment.
I was creating a world. My world.
But a world needed a sky. I looked up—another new concept—and willed the blackness to change. I didn't fill it with stars. Not yet. Instead, I filled it with echoes. Faint, swirling nebulae of colour that were the ghosts of my lost memories. A splash of emerald green that felt like a summer park. A streak of crimson that tasted of excitement and danger. A deep, calming blue that smelled of the sea. They swirled in a silent, beautiful dance, the art gallery of my former life.
I was the artist and the art. The dreamer and the dream.
Time, which had been meaningless, began to flow. Or perhaps I began to dream its passage. I wandered my nascent realm—I had fashioned a body for myself, a familiar human form that felt both right and like a costume. I walked the endless plains of dark, smooth ground, which I decided was like obsidian. I gazed at the memory-echoes in the sky. I learned the limits of my power.
I could conjure things from the shreds of my past. A chair appeared, exactly like the one from my old apartment. A book, whose pages were blank because I could no longer remember the story. I could shape the immediate environment, but the vast, overwhelming majority of the void remained just that—void, waiting for a dream to fill it.
And I learned the most important, and most terrifying, lesson of all. This place, this realm… it was a reflection of me. My stability meant its stability. When a wave of grief for my lost life washed over me, a crack would splinter across the obsidian plain. When a flicker of my old anger surfaced, the silver light above would flicker and flash. When I was calm, the realm was still and peaceful.
This was my responsibility. To be the heart of this place. To dream it into stability.
The loneliness returned, but it was different now. It was no longer the loneliness of a victim, but of a king in an empty castle. A god in an empty universe. I was everything here, and that was all there was.
Until the whispers started.
At first, I thought they were more memories, or echoes of my own thoughts. But they were different. Fainter. More numerous. They were like distant voices carried on a wind that didn't blow here.
I focused on them, pouring my will into listening. The realm around me stilled, the colours in the sky freezing in their dance.
The whispers resolved, not into words, but into… *essences*. Fragments of thought. Shards of emotion. Fleeting images.
A child's fervent wish for a hero to come.
A man's nightmare of failure and shame.
A woman's sleepy fantasy of flight.
A cold, sharp spike of predatory intent.
A warm, drowsy sensation of safety.
They were dreams. Not my dreams. Their source was… elsewhere. Outside. Beyond my void.
I was sensing the dreams of others. Real others. Living people, somewhere in a reality that was not this one.
The connection was tenuous, a spider-silk thread leading out of my kingdom of nothing. I could feel them, a vast, swirling ocean of unconscious thoughts and emotions, lapping at the shores of my realm. My domain was a bubble attached to a greater, waking world.
The Dreaming. The word surfaced in my mind, fully formed and perfect. That was what this place was. And I… I was its master. Its heart. Its Dream.
A profound sense of purpose, vaster and heavier than any I had ever known, settled upon me. This was my reason for being unmade and remade. This was my function. I was to be the nexus of all dreams. I was to be the stories told in the dark, the hopes held in the heart, the monsters under the bed. I was both the sandman and the nightmare.
I reached out, not to shape my realm, but to touch one of those external dreams. I chose a simple one, a child's happy dream of playing in a sunny field. I gently brushed against it with my will, a artist adding a touch of brighter colour to a painting.
The dream swelled with joy, becoming more vivid, more real. A faint feedback of pure, unadulterated happiness flowed back to me, warm and sweet. It was the first thing I had felt from outside myself that wasn't born of my own agony. It was… nourishing.
I had spent an eternity—or a moment—building my world from the ashes of my self. Now, I had discovered its true source of power. Its true purpose. I was not alone. I was connected to everyone who slept. My kingdom was built on the foundation of their subconscious.
I explored this new connection. I could observe, and I could gently influence. I could see the dreamers, not as people, but as shining nodes of consciousness in the vast, sleeping tapestry of the world. Most were faint, normal. But some…
Some burned brighter than others. Their dreams were more potent, their nightmares more terrifying. Their sleeping minds had a… weight to them that the others lacked. A strange, crackling energy that felt almost… physical. I couldn't understand it. It was a new variable in the equation of my existence.
I was so engrossed in this new discovery, in tracing the patterns of this external world through the dreams of its inhabitants, that I failed to notice the change at first.
A pull.
It was different from the void's hunger. That had been a dissolution, a pulling apart. This was a… summons. A calling. A specific, undeniable tug on the very core of my being. It was coming from the waking world, from that ocean of dreamers.
I tried to resist. I was the Dream. My place was here, in my realm. I was not meant to be summoned. I was the summoner.
But the pull was inexorable. It was a gravitational force, a hook set deep in my soul. My realm began to waver, the obsidian plain becoming translucent. The memory-colours in the sky smeared like wet paint.
*No!* I thought, pouring all my will into stability. *I will not go! This is my place!*
It was no use. The call was a law unto itself. I was being drawn out. My consciousness, which had been spread across my entire kingdom, was being compressed, pulled through the connection, funneled toward a single, shining point in the waking world.
The Dreaming shattered around me. Not into nothingness, but into potential once more. It would remain, waiting for its heart to return. But for now, I was being evicted.
The journey was a violent, disorienting rush. I was a thought screamed down a tunnel of light and sound. Sensation, real, physical sensation, returned in a brutal floodwave.
*Pressure.* Incredible, crushing pressure on all sides. A sense of being squeezed, compressed.
*Sound.* A muffled, rhythmic thumping, loud and close. A deep, vibrational hum. And voices, distorted and watery, but undeniably real.
*Cold.* A shocking chill after the temperate nothingness of my realm.
*Touch.* A slippery, wet fluid against skin I suddenly realized I had.
The concepts assaulted me. Hot. Cold. Loud. Tight. Wet. They were overwhelming, primal, and utterly terrifying. I had a body again, but it was tiny, helpless, and under siege by a universe of sensation.
I tried to move, to cry out, but my new form wouldn't obey. My limbs were weak, uncoordinated. My lungs burned with a foreign need.
The pressure intensified, pushing me forward, down a narrow, constricting passage. The muffled thumping was deafening here. *Boom-BOOM. Boom-BOOM.* It was a heartbeat, but not my own. It was vast, encompassing.
Then, the pressure culminated, and there was a sudden, shocking release. The confines fell away. The world opened up.
The cold was acute now, a gasp on new skin. The sounds were clearer, though still distorted. There were sharp, clinical lights above, and blurred shapes moving around me.
I felt a hand, large and firm, holding me. Something cleared my mouth, and the need in my lungs became an imperative.
I drew in my first breath.
It was agony. A raw, scraping pain as air flooded into unused organs. It was also the most wonderful sensation I had ever experienced. The breath hitched, caught, and then rushed out again as a sound—a thin, reedy, desperate wail.
I was crying. I was screaming my protest at this violent, sensate, overwhelming new reality.
A voice, weary but warm and full of awe, spoke above me. "He's here… Oh, he's here. He's beautiful."
Another voice, deeper, male, choked with emotion. "Look at him… Honey, look at him. He's got your eyes."
My vision, blurry and unfocused, began to clear. I was being lifted, wrapped in something soft that mitigated the cruel cold. I was placed gently onto something warm and moving—a chest. I could feel the deep vibration of a voice through it.
"Hello, little one," the deep voice rumbled. It was close. It was directed at me. "Welcome to the world."
I stopped crying. The shock of it all—the brutal transition, the sensory overload—receded, replaced by a dawning, horrifying comprehension.
The faces above me came into focus. A woman, exhausted, sweating, her face pale but radiant with a smile so full of love it was like a physical force. A man, with tears cutting clean tracks down his cheeks, looking at me with an expression of pure, unguarded wonder.
They were speaking to me. Calling me their son.
I looked down at myself. Tiny, pudgy limbs. Miniature hands that clenched and unclenched without my command. I was swaddled in a soft, white blanket.
The truth, absolute and inescapable, crashed down upon the last vestiges of the Dream-King I had been moments ago.
I was a baby.
I had not just been moved. I had been reborn.
The man—my father—gently touched my cheek with a finger that seemed gigantic. The touch was impossibly gentle. The woman—my mother—reached out and stroked my head, her touch feather-light.
A love so fierce and unconditional that it dwarfed any emotion I had ever known, in either of my lives, washed over me from them. It was a tangible thing in this new, physical reality. It was my first lesson in the waking world: this was a universe of powerful, overwhelming feeling.
I, the master of the Dreaming, the weaver of nightmares and wonder, was utterly helpless. I was small, I was vulnerable, and I was loved.
As I lay there on my mother's chest, listening to the strong, steady beat of her heart, a sound that was now the drumbeat of my new existence, my new eyes—my mother's eyes—fluttered closed.
Exhaustion claimed my tiny body.
But my mind, the ancient, remade consciousness within the infant skull, remained awake. And as I slept my first true sleep in this new world, I felt it. The connection.
It was fainter, a distant star compared to the sun it had been in my realm. But it was there. The Dreaming. Waiting. My body was here, in this bright, loud, emotional world. But a part of me would always be there, in the quiet kingdom of dreams.
I had no idea what this new world was. I had no knowledge of heroes or quirks, of All Might or UA. I only knew I had been someone else, somewhere else, and now I was here. I was a son. I was a baby.
And I was the Dream.
As I slipped fully into sleep, I felt the whispers of the new world around me—the dreams of the doctors and nurses, the blissful, exhausted sleep of my mother, the waking dream of my father's joyful vigilance—and I knew, with a certainty that was my first true dream in this life, that nothing would ever be simple again.
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I finished watching the sandman season two first part and got inspired. Tell me your thoughts and you can find the next 5 chapter on ( https://ko-fi.com/godtiersage)