Painfully Vivid Dreams

Totally forgot about this place for a while.

Had a super-painful dream yesterday. Wasn't lucid, though it was one of those things that seemed to carry on for hours. Seems like a couple days of dream time, wake up to find only an hour or so has gone by.

Anyway, the rough patch of the dream began as I was walking along a stream. I noticed quite a few large trout swimming about near an easily accessible area, so I went back to my car to get my fishing equipment which I oh-so-conveniently had with me.

Almost immediately, I hooked one. I wasn't QUITE ready. I'd been dangling my lure in the water while trying to set the rest of my stuff down on a rock. I pulled the fish out of the water, and noticed that it was already hooked by someone else. A young girl came along and I helped her get the lures out of the fish, which I was getting ready to give to her when she turned and started off... Her lure got snagged in my finger. The fish thrashed, I lost my grip. MY lure got caught in another finger. Losing my balance, I dropped the tackle box I hadn't managed to set down yet. IT popped open, my hand went in it. You see the theme develop.

This girl keeps right on walking, I have two hands filled with fish hooks, some being pulled here and there. I'm yelling for SOMEONE to just help me for a MOMENT. Nobody notices, too busy coming over to join in with the great fishin' in the area.

So, then came the long and excrucating process of pulling hooks out of my fingers/hands. I'm talking about -- Oh, ten or twenty minutes of just trying to work fishhooks out of my skin. Both hands ended up pretty badly mutilated/infected. It got weirder than reality as flesh started sloughing off my hands. Anyway, it sort of flashed forward to a game warden showing me how similar had happened to him once. I was missing a couple fingers, big section of tendon in my hand, getting ready to have surgery to repair some stuff.

THEN, I woke up. Both of my hands continued to hurt for a while after waking. (Normally, really painful dreams will wake me up in the process of BEING painful. This one stood out a bit as just -letting- me keep right on going in the dream.)