#Inktober2018: Days 27-31

Here are the last few days of my drawings for #Inktober2018, plus a short spooky story for Halloween.

To see all my #Inktober2018 drawings, see this folder in my DeviantArt gallery.

Day 27: Thunder

From a photo reference (here).

This drawing is a tribute to Patricia "Trick" Tillinghast, one of my characters from a long-running Buffy/Angel RPG campaign.

 

Day 28: Gift

Drawn from a photo reference (here).

Eva Amurri Martino was "cast" as my character, Patricia "Trick" Tillinghast, in a Buffy/Angel game many years ago. The drummer in my "Thunder" drawing was a tribute to Trick, so I decided to draw her again today.

Day 29: Double

Day 30: Jolt

Day 31: Slice

The oldest dream that I remember was also one of the scariest. It was before we moved to a new, larger house during my kindergarten year, so I must have been 4 at the time, or possibly 5. My room was tiny, with barely enough room for my twin bed, a small desk, and a dresser. In my dream, I woke up in the middle of the night, and looked around my room. It was the middle of the night, but in the moonlight coming through the window, I could see a pile of letters and papers on the floor between the bed and dresser. While I looked at them, the papers stirred, swirled around like a miniature whirlwind, then rose up to form a roughly humanoid shape. This thing grabbed me and held me up in the air with an arm made of letters and envelopes. Its other arm ended in a blade made of paper, and it began to cut slices off of me, starting at the toes and working its way upward. I could see each piece falling away, looking just like when a cartoon character gets chopped up into steaks. I couldn't move or scream--at least, not until I woke up just before it reached my neck.

To sleep, perchance to dream...

The new job that I started in February is at a university, so the past couple weeks have been the busiest since I started there: the beginning of the school year means a ton of registration changes and admissions documents to process. That work load has not left me enough free time and head space to prep a regular blog post this week. (I usually aim to post on Wednesday or Thursday.) However, my subconscious has apparently stepped up to help by giving me a very bizarre dream last night, which begs to be used as a part of a surreal modern-day horror adventure, so I'll share the highlights of that with you.

It started mundanely enough, with me being back in the part of central Indiana that I grew up in. I was there for a high school reunion, or something similar. I ran into a couple of the women who had been among the pretty, popular girls in school, but now (despite one being extremely pregnant) they looked old, and their husbands (who I didn't know) were even older and grayer.

Everyone was staying in rooms in a sort of delapidated industrial tower that had been built and abandoned since I lived there as a kid. It reminded me very strongly of Isengard or Barad-Dur, but in a quaint, comical way, so I decided to spend some time exploring it and taking pictures with my camera phone.

I went up to the roof, but couldn't find a way to look down over the parapets at the surrounding countryside, or to get into the handful of boxy turrets that went even further up. Then I noticed that I could see mountains. (Mountains? In central Indiana? Even immersed in the dream as I was, I could tell something very weird was going on here!)

Up here, the structure looked even more like a castle than before, and that impression was further reinforced as I went back inside to find someone to talk to about it. The hallway I took crossed a short bridge over a stony channel that had water flowing through it. It was rather dark here, but the channel was dungeon-like enough that I tried to get a picture of it. As my camera tried to compensate for the dim light, I suddenly saw three shapes running/swimming/splashing down the channel towards the bridge. They made me think of merrow or Deep Ones--and they were big, so I didn't wait around to find out what they were or what they wanted. I ran--

--and woke up.

It's been a very long time since I remember being scared awake by a dream--and even longer since I could remember so many details of a dream this clearly.