“You do not need Powers to make use of Dreams.”

“All you need is mental discipline and the belief that you can affect your Dreams.”

“Dreams aren't just some mystical bullshit. They are also our innermost Desires.”

“If you transform them from Desires into Goals for which to strive, you are making use of your Dreams.”

“And if you achieve your Dream, then just find a new Dream for which to strive.”

“Truth is, there will be no end to our Dreams, as there will not be an end to our Desires.”

Annals of History - Quote from our Ancestors. Year - Unknown Location - Unknown.

*

I may have made a mistake on which path to tread.

It was simple when the choice was still in front of you.

But after you have taken it?

Well… once taken, one must deal with the consequences.

The consequences for me were unbelievable loneliness and boredom.

The worst part is that it is not the path taken that made it so terrible.

No, it is the pride of success that made it so.

In one swoop of success washing my immaterial mind, I spent every single point of juice I possessed in favor of showing off to myself.

I had done it without bothering to think about how it would be, to be without any energy at all, even for a second.

At first, it was fine. I kept saying to myself.

Soon there would be an influx coming from my bonded companion. I told myself numerous times.

Once it comes, I will enjoy the heights of luxury that only Dreams can manifest. I chanted for my failing psyche.

The problem is, there always comes a point where the chanting will fail you, as there was no influx of energy for a long time.

I reasoned that the time was wonky in my minuscule Dream Realm, at least, when compared to the real world.

So I waited and waited and waited as my immaterial mind spoke to itself.

It simply did not matter if it was currently physical and made of matter or immaterial and made of Dream stuff.

It wanted to relive memories of the past as that is what it typically does when it has too much time on its hands. But all that stemmed from the fact that the mind had the necessary energy to perform the memory recall, no matter the form.

I, however, did not have Dream energy to give, and neither was there a physical brain made of matter to act as a substitute.

I could not recall anything from the past. All I could do was busy my mind with what I had, and that was about Dreams themselves, their functions, their purposes, and my potential future actions involving them.

The problem was that the topic only had so much to be contemplated. Without some kind of input to change and think about different outcomes, I was stuck with the same possibilities.

I went crazy during that time. I realize that now.

My sanity began its return when the first trickles of Life Essence came into my minuscule Dream Realm.

It was like a guiding light that brightened a path forward. At the same time, it became the nectar that soothed my insanity, I realize that now.

Drop by drop, I consumed them to return to the sanity of normality. Only when I had a decent amount, did I attempt to bridge the distance between the drops dropping into my immaterial mouth to the source of the Life Essence?

Little by little, I moved towards the source. When I reached it, an immaterial wall held me back.

On it, I found a tiny crack from which the Life Essence dribbled into my minuscule Dream Realm.

After many, many imaginative sweaty days, I achieved contact with the Honey Badger.

It was sweet to feel something else and even lovelier to touch it.

From that point on, I tried my best to have us become friends/buddies, for we were bonded, in a way.

It went poorly at first. But I kept at it. I craved that sweet interaction with something, even if a small eternity waited between those interactions.

Then in my anger, the silence got imposed between us.

It was a great folly on my part, but as I just realized, my sanity had not returned despite the interactions.

It took me realizing that fact that enabled forward progress, but now a new challenge awaited me.

It was the biggest challenge a man could ever experience, and I wasn't even of the same species.

Do I belong to a different species now? Am I even a distinct species now? Or was I an energy being of some kind? My incorporeal mind asked, but there was no answer.

I could feel the answer being stuck somewhere inside me. However, I could not reach it.

Once I tried to reach it, even for the most mundane reasons. I was left begging for the barely gathered Life Essence.

Since that point of emancipation, I unequivocally decided to leave it for the future when I have Life Essence in abundance.

Where was I? Ah, yes, to become friends with Alexander. It is the grandest challenge for any male in life, and now I have to help a different species at that, but it's kind of my fault anyway, I think.

Once I received the simplistic response from Alexander, it took very little for my mind to find the cause.

Contrary to what I imagined from the information I had obtained, there seems to be a natural instinctual psychic protection in the Quantum Locked Signature of a species.

It is obvious now that I had stripped myself of almost everything I possessed.

The initial Dream Craze that had kept me going had peppered out because of energy demands.

Only now, without the craze and the constant battle for my sanity, I realized the truth.

I had not been in a normal state of mind from the first point of reaching awareness of myself.

When I followed that line of thinking and clearly remembered everything that I witnessed during that tunneled view of the Dream Craze, it was easy to realize that the Dream Craze was a protection mechanism.

The Dream Craze somehow blinded my perception. It narrowed down my thoughts and focused them on one point. That point made everything feel less solid than it should be.

With such a tunneled view of Reality, it allowed me to do as I want, as long as I believed and desired strongly enough.

It also made sense how I had escaped that spider and the griffon, but now I was in unfamiliar territory.

There was no more blind ignorance to protect me, only pure facts. And the fact is, that in my blind ignorance, I created something incredible by using strange leaps of logic that somehow made sense but slipped from my current state.

I knew where the answers lay but first was to figure out how to get to them.

But to get to them, I had to give dating advice to Alexander, the Honey Badger.

I am fucked, unless I do this the smart way.

The wise thing would be to figure out how Honey Badger's dating rituals worked.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

That leaves me with only one path toward the future. I have to personally witness how Honey Badgers, and particularly, how Alexander does his stuff.

But I can't witness anything it does out there in the real world, currently. Meaning, that I have to do it here in my minuscule Dream Realm. But I can't do that if I dont have the necessary energy to simulate a scenario with him in the first place.

That means I am down to the same initial problem as before. I NEED MORE ENERGY.

Still, there is a huge difference from before. The time for clear thinking has arrived.

*

With returned sanity, I began to sift through my realizations about Life Essence and soon came to a simple understanding of what it was.

If Consciousness is created out of Chaos, it requires Chaos to grow.

The problem is that a newborn Consciousness can not maintain its sense of self when confronted with Chaos, and it would just cease to exist.

Therefore it needs a downgraded specialized version that feeds and maintains the steady growth of a Consciousness, hence Life Essence.

Three requirements were needed to cultivate Life Essence.

The first was Consciousness. It acts as a magnet and attracts Chaos to itself.

The stronger the Consciousness, the stronger the attractive effect.

The second was a natural physical body. It acts as a sponge and absorbs the free-flowing Chaos of Reality.

The biological cells will absorb said Chaos and transform it into Life Essence. The more biomass the lifeform has, the more free-flowing Chaos it will absorb.

The third was the exclusion of any other type of Power.

Otherwise, Chaos will infuse into said Power, dilute the Chaos into a different form and lose the juiciest form of food for Consciousness.

In truth, there was a fourth one. But that one only applied to biological Lifeforms that have enough individual cognitive intelligence to sense, influence, and actively refine the physical-biological vessel, for the best synchronicity between Biology and Consciousness.

With all that cataloged, it was easy to see my problem.

I am aware, thus I have a Consciousness.

But I have no biological mass to feed and grow my Consciousness.

Therefore, I need to rely on Alexander. Making me a parasite and not a symbiote at the moment. Therefore I need to make Alexander realize his potential before I can help him bang his girlfriend.

*

Done with writing down the basics, I had to figure out how to help Alexander when a minor realization came to me.

I took a slice from Alexander's Consciousness, making him weaker. That action of mine diminished his active pulling force hence the speed by which he generates Life Essence also diminished.

With Alexander recovering what he has lost because of me, it explains why I was receiving but a trickle of Life Essence.

Mir, Mir, Mir. Remember, even if you were muddle-headed by the Dream Craze, it wasn't enough to blind you from the long-term benefits.

Shaking away the short-term regret, I focused on the here and now.

Outside of actively meditating on one's recovery, the easiest way to gain more Life Essence is to eat things that have already absorbed and refined Chaos into Life Essence.

I am sure Alexander is already doing it, meaning he will recover in time, even without my interference.

That still leaves me with only one option, To teach Alexander Life Essence refinement.

What would be the most attuned refining process for a Honey Badger?

It needs to be simple.

It needs to be easy on the mind.

It needs to be something that he was already doing.

It needs to be something that he will not doubt me as I try to help.

Whatever it was, my immaterial mind doubted that a Honey Badger's mind could compute complex things without a good guide, and then, it came to me.

.

.

.

Oh…OH, I pity everything that stands in the way of this Honey Badger and his desire to get laid.

*

With the initial plan settled, all that was left was to execute it, but planning and executing were two different things.

One could plan all one's life and not achieve the things one wants without executing the plans in question. The first roadblock for me is to find the right timing, meaning I had to know when Alexander was eating.

To find the right moment, I partitioned the little Life Essence I possessed and began to flare my presence to Alexander.

Only this time, I did not speak. I listened to the echoes its little mind gave off.

In the same manner, as before, where I needed to refine the connection between us to understand each other actively, I had to find the best way to listen to him passively.

It took many trials and quite a few little eternities to recover from before I succeeded in this endeavor.

When I did, I realized how simple a mind can be, yet complex in return.

In a moment, the echoes were speeding through his mind, and the next, they stood still before another rapid exchange.

The rapid exchange belonged to its instinct or reflex.

The echoes were fine-tuned by years and years of evolution as well as practice Alexander had done in his life.

Once I had figured that out, I turned my attention to the pauses between the echoes. They were sluggish in their speed and lengths, as the longer they existed, the longer it took for something to be decided.

The best part of all this was the amount of time I could spy on Alexander.

Every time I had talked with Alexander before, all it would take was a short talk from my side to spend any essence I had.

However, when it came to listening to his echoes, it was far more impressive.

Yes, the information wasn't as easy to understand, but you give and take in life.

So giving my all I began to catalog the echoes and the pauses between them.

I continued to do so until I recognized the echo best suited for my purpose.

More observation of it told me of its habits, and the more habits I recognized, the more I knew my plan had a good chance of working.

So it went until the time I was super confident I could do this.

Stopping for some time to gather enough Life Essence for my purpose, I selectively infuse it with the simplest but the most suitable Intent.

That done, I waited for the correct pause and shoved it inside.

*

Alexander, the Honey Badger, who had yet to realize that he even had a name, had been biting, ripping, chewing, and swallowing snake meat when the presence inside him flared.

That it flared wasn't a surprise. It had been doing so a lot even though no sound followed it, but this time it was different.

“Hunt, Eat, Focus, Absorb, Grow.”

Alexander understood every single one of the sounds that he received, but just as his little mind registered what it received, the presence inside him subsided.

However, what was left behind did not vanish.

“Hunt, Eat, Focus, Absorb, Grow.”

This time the sounds came not from the presence inside him but from his mind.

They occupied all of his attention as nothing had ever done before.

If Alexander knew what a trance was, then he would realize that he had currently entered one, only this one was special.

This trance presided over one thing. To take what was offered and implement it as best as possible. If it had to ignore all but the basic instincts to live, meaning the heart and the lungs, it would do so.

Minutes passed as Alexander stood still.

Despite his beady eyes being wide open, there was no focus in them. All outside information failed to reach his mind.

When the snake he was eating dropped from his mouth on the ground, it got ignored. There simply was no space to process anything other than what it was already processing. It left him completely vulnerable, but as luck would have it, he was hidden by a bush.

Ignorant of Reality, Alexander's mind pondered on the sounds it was given, alongside the Intent infused in them.

Hunt was simple. Alexander had done it all his adult life, but this was different.

The Intent separated his thoughts and memories, and his little mind began to link everything it knew regarding hunting into that specific Intent.

Once it was done, Hunt was branded in his mind, never to be overlooked.

Eat was even easier. Even before hunting, Alexander had drunk milk produced by his mother.

Once more, Alexander’s mind separated and correlated everything it knew and branded Eat into his mind.

Focus was not new to Alexander's mind. But it had never realized what focus was in the first place. When it wanted to do something, that was what it was doing.

Now, his mind would always know what Focus is as the brand would always remind him of it.

Absorb he knew, but at the same time, he did not. Everything before this moment he knew was that by eating moving stuff, he grew larger, and his hunger vanished.

From this moment on, he would always know what Absorb did, and he would learn even more in the future as the Intent gained clarity.

Grow was another thing that he knew but never actually concerned himself with.

To Alexander, it was simple, eat then grow bigger. But with Grow branding itself, he would learn that there is more to growing, especially as time passed and the Intent made him aware of what else he could grow.

Still, only after all five Intents were processed and burned into his little mind did they come together and become something greater than the sum of their parts.

They became a Mantra, upon which he would center all his future thoughts and actions.

However, all that was for the future. As the Intent implanted in Alexander's mind was but a tiny little seed, that would gain form, clarity, and purpose as time passed.

At this moment, however, the difference was small, as Alexander returned from his trance.

Slowly Reality began to reach his mind, as the senses he had honed all his life began telling him what was what.

After everything returned to how it was before the trance, Alexander realized that the snake he had been eating had somehow dropped to the ground.

His paws and claws grabbed the fleshy bits, and his teeth began ripping, chewing, and eventually swallowing.

Once it was in his stomach, his mind reminded him of what he was doing, and from that point on, he began repeating the same actions he had done all his life, only now he was far more conscious of every individual action, and their purpose.