Sigh...I Really Need a Lucky Break!! (6.^) But Also...Weird Dreams!
I apologize for having only one update, last week. Looking for a job has just taken over my entire life, but I can't put it aside for later. Unfortunately, looking for work has to take precedence over the comic. Drawing the pages of ShadowFall takes so long and involves so much work that I simply can't do it, when I'm tired and stressed out, or I run the risk of producing shoddy artwork. I don't want to do that. I'm trying hard to keep up a certain level of quality in this series, and I'd rather miss a few updates than post artwork that has been rushed through, just to have an update. So I hope you will all forgive me if I'm sometimes late or missing updates in any given week. I'll continue to try hard to get the pages done, and I apologize again for the times I have failed to do so.
It's really been a depressing week, too. Things are going wrong, left and right, and I'm suddenly beginning to feel as boxed in as poor Genjiro. People all around me are trying to dictate my life for me, and I don't want that. My life is my own. My decisions are my own, and whether I make good or bad decisions is my own damn business. The consequences are suffered by no one but me. I am affirming for myself, right here and now, that I refuse to let someone else decide my fate for me.
That little bit of business over with, I'd like to share a dream I had last week with you guys. I've always had weird dreams (usually extremely violent, with me as the victim or proposed victim), but I particularly enjoy the weird dreams involving my deceased grandmothers.
I had only slept for two hours, when I had this dream. I was dreaming of my maternal grandmother (although at times, she seemed to be my late friend, Houlgate), and she was very thin and dying on a bed, in an upstairs room of a house that was unfamiliar to me. There were windows on a wall that was in another part of the room, separated from ours, and other people were milling around in there. The whole house was brilliant white. My grandmother was wearing a gauzy white dress with bright silver threads woven vertically through the fabric (white and silver are the colors my dream self often wears, so they must be significant colors for me!). My sister and I were both there, and grandmother told us "It won't be long!" before dying. I was upset, but my sister told me to remember that our grandmother had always said to be sure and look in her hands, after she died. Of course, she never said that in real life. But my sister opened my grandmother's left hand, and a bunch of little objects appeared there!
My sister took them out, and one of them turned out to be a big, beautiful, perfectly cut diamond. A flawless diamond, almost the size of a golf ball! Then we heard my grandmother's voice saying "That is for Kai-chan. It's my hope diamond." When I took it, it changed in my hand from a cut diamond into an odd amoeba-like shape, relatively flat, and became a bit more opaque, with little glowing, swirly things inside it. It had sort of the look of an opal, and I told my sister I thought it looked like it had a tiny galaxy of stars inside it. Grandmother told me I should use the diamond for what I needed. Then she appeared in ghostly form and hugged me, and said it would be my time, soon, and we could be happy. She also said that we had gone according to my plan, before, and I had punished myself enough. We were now going to go by her plan.
Then I saw her threading some large white beads onto a fine, translucent cord. She shoved some of them together, and left others apart a bit. They looked sort of like carved, ivory elephants, to me. I can't remember if she told me or if I just felt that those were her plans for my future. I asked her how to keep people from trying to take my diamond or coveting its power, the way people had tried to take other things from me in the past. She then told me that the diamond would stay with me forever. What was meant for me would cling to me, she said. She also told me to be patient, and what I needed would come.
When grandmother disappeared, my sister took the diamond from me and threw it on the ground, as if to break it, but it bounced and flew right back to my hand. Then I went downstairs with it, but I was looking for my grandmother because I didn't want her to go, yet. I couldn't find her, again, and I woke up with big tears streaming down my face! I was so upset that I couldn't find her, and I wanted her near me, again. After I woke up, I cried for a long time, and when I told the dream to a friend, that same night, I cried in the telling of it! I really hate crying. It feels terrible!!
In spite of the awful crying fit, that dream was much more pleasant than the one I'd had the night before. In that one, I was being sacrificed. Not at all a pleasant experience, and one I had to wake myself to escape from. I need more good dreams.
(^-^)
Kaichi
