Last night I dreamt I lost my leg. It was a sequential dream with full cause and effect – and I often have trouble sorting memory from imagination until there’s an obvious conflict. This morning there was an obvious conflict the moment I woke up.
I was unloading the car after a gig, parked across the street from the house, next to one of the sewer inlets. I generally avoid these – I don’t want to say I’ve got a phobia about them, but they invariably give me the shivers – and as I pulled a speaker out of the trunk my foot slipped at the entrance to the grate and my leg slipped down into the darkness up to my thigh. The pain wrenched me around, the speaker fell against me, and then something below me grabbed, tore, ripped. It wrenched me back and forth, slamming my balls into the asphalt, ripping my knee apart in excruciating jerks. I feel pain in my dreams, and this was something that upped my personal “10” (previously it was being eaten slowly by a dinosaur – this was displaced by being tortured slowly by small robots set upon my by my then-girlfriend – both of these made being stabbed in the leg down to the bone pale by comparison, which had replaced having a power drill go through my middle finger and shatter as my worst “real world” pain) – in any case, suddenly I felt the relaxation of pressure as my leg gave way at the knee and whatever it was vanished down into the sewer with my lower leg. I pulled myself into the gap between my car and the curb and lay there bleeding.
Later I was hosting my open mics, hobbling back and forth and playing at the end of the night, grown fat from lack of movement. A couple of late hangers ons stuck around to listen, more out of sympathy. I had trouble balancing the guitar as the doctors had taken my leg all the way up the waist, and for whatever reason a strap didn’t seem to be part of my arsenal. The medical expenses had kept me from getting a different instrument and the CA just slides around on my rounded, useless body. I never had money to change up my car either, and since I can’t drive stick with one leg I’m waiting for public transit, nonsensical. Rained on. Stared at. Came home alone. Kristen left. The landlord was letting me stay out of pity. I remember it being dark. I remember it raining. It was a long, long dream.
Walking to the gym, this sort of flashed back to me all in a rush and I stumbled as I stepped over a sewer grate and shuddered uncontrollably in the grey weather.
