It happens from time to time
A rumbling, rainless cumulonimbus cloud crawls heavily over her. Pain splits like lightning behind her eyes. Thoughts boom like thunder. An electricity rises in the depths of her mind that, though she’s exhausted, jolts her back into wakefulness.
Familiar shapes formed in the stucco on the ceiling above usually gave her solace and acted as a sort of visual lullaby. Tired eyes breathe life into entire landscapes mapped in the rough strokes, elves wistfully smiling at each other, animals moving lithely through abstract white foliage.
This was a tactic her mother taught her when nightmares got in the way of her grades, “your mind is like magic. If you think of something long enough, you’ll dream about it.”
“Even cupcakes?”
“Even cupcakes.”
This served as her weapon. Beautiful, warm imagery could cut through darkness like the sun at dawn.
Mel’s dreams soon took on a new form. Though she retained the ability to “choose” what she dreamed of, other images would slip through her defenses and morph the scene into something much more sinister. A disappointed teacher, Her parents’ silence, her boss’s RBF, the utility bill - failure... All of this was fuel for her insomnia.
The storm in Mel’s head takes up so much space there’s barely any room left for her, and just like those outside, so too did this storm blanket the light and emphasize the dark.
Throughout my teen years, I'd suffered from anxiety, headaches, and insomnia. When I did sleep, my mind was always full of graphic discomfort. I transformed all of that into a comic that I could treat as a vassal to pour all my "faults" into, creating from the darkness an aid in figuring myself my life out. Every hardship I would face would from then on become something like a mental puzzle for the characters I created. Academic worries, toxic relationships, the fear of not fitting within the confines of looming adulthood - all became fuel for future dream sequences and visually interesting settings. As an adult I have much more on my plate, and am more interested than ever in the idea of sharing Mental health awareness through my stories and illustrations. So here we go - time to take these older images and breathe new life into them.
~
This will be the story of a girl who, suffering from self imposed insomnia, will inevitably fall asleep and find herself within the confines of a stranger's nightmare. No matter how hard she tries, willing herself awake isn't working - she has to fight through the nightmare and learn about this mysterious stranger in order to wake up.
