This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.
The most obvious image for me is the image of the severed hand. This comes directly from my having watched the film Blue Velvet, by David Lynch.
The movie's plot basically begins driving forward when the main character of the film, Jeffrey, finds a severed ear in a field. Jeffrey takes puts this ear in a paper bag and takes it to the police station.
There are a number of views of the ear throughout the film. The ear looks pale and bloodless. I think that's why the hand in my dream appears, even though layers of skin keep getting peeled and peeled away, never to get down to a level of pink flesh. I'm sure that the paper bag in the film translated into the plastic bag in my dream. But I'm not sure why.
I think part of the reason the severed ear was translated into a severed hand was due to the fact that I was reading about Aimee Copeland, the woman who has been in the news recently because of her fight against a flesh-eating bacteria. Aimee Copeland lost both her hands to the illness.
In the dream, the severed hand is exhibited in connection with a disease where a person's body burns up from the inside. Actually, in the dream disease, the heart locks up -- stops functioning altogether -- and then the body burns up from the inside. I'm not sure about the heart locking up. But the burning up from the inside sounds a lot like a description people give of what happens to a person on the drug bath salts, which has made the news a lot recently.
The biggest bath salts news seems to have been a case in Miami where a man has been accused of chewing off a large portion of another man's face. The man was originally said to have been on bath salts. However, when I looked up "bath salts" in the news just now, I was surprised to find that the man accused of this crime appears to have tested negative for the bath salts drug. It appears the only drug he was found to have tested positive for is marijuana.
Whenever I read the news and I find stories about people who've just gone completely crazy and committed all kinds of weird crimes, I tend to obsess over it. I wonder if I'd be capable of doing those kinds of things.
And when I overexert myself, I get really way too touchy and irritable, to the point where I sometimes wonder if I'm going a little insane. A few of my recent dreams have dealt with the subject of overexertion and being overly irritable. I also think this trait has been at the top of my mind because the book I just finished reading, Future Shock, spends a lot of time talking about the overexertion people of the present day might feel by being in a world of accelerating technological development.
I'm pretty sure that the weird images I had, first of flying in the air but not really being in a vehicle, and then of driving through the street but not really being in a vehicle, came from my reading last night in the book The Ship Who Sang, by writer Anne McCaffrey. In this book the main character Helva is born with serious birth defects. Like the many other people born like her, Helva is put into a mechanical shell and wired up to a spaceship. Helva is, in effect, the spaceship.
I think that my dream is kind of a way of imagining the flight of a vehicle like a spaceship or a car, from the "point of view" of the vehicle, as a way of trying to understand what the character Helva may have felt like. But I'm still feeling my own body -- which is why I'm having a hard time doing things like holding on to my notebook and so forth.
What I also find interesting -- even though I have no idea where it comes from -- is the recurring image of gossip in my dreams. I'm not sure why that appeared so strongly. I don't seek out gossip in the news. But I always tend to read sensationalist news. And that's kind of the same thing as gossip. So maybe that's what it is.
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