Charcoal on Paper// 18x24"
Completed January 7, 2026.

This piece comes from a lucid dream of mine that I think about often...

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I’m running through a dark forest,  and I’m running for my life, and it’s one of those frustrating dreams where the entire time it feels like I’m running, but I’m stuck in place. And I hear screaming and I look up and realize there are other people there, shadow figures running for their lives too.

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And I’m panting, and I’m anxious, and I’m trying to run as fast as I can, when suddenly I realize that I’m dreaming.

I stop. And everything slows down. I look at the trees in front of me, their texture, their shadows in the night, the tangled trunks, the vines, the mess of it all. And I sit on a fallen log and wait for whatever it is I’m running from to catch up. As I wait, I watch the scene of shadows sprinting through the trees, still screaming, still afraid.

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Eventually, the figure appears - a faceless dark figure, and it asks me, “Why aren’t you running?”

I tell him, “I know I’m dreaming, you can’t hurt me.”

He sits down next to me on the log and I ask him, “Why do you do this, why do you kill people?”

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And he tells me, “I feed off fear. That’s why I’m not killing you. Because you’re not afraid.”

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A longer written reflection on this dream lives here.