Dreams of the Missing

Stand clear of the closing doors.
This train is going down a one-way track,
and no amount of sorrow
is gonna bring it back.

-- Joyce Anderson, "Stand Clear" (The Great Sad River, Harvey Reid and Joyce Anderson, 2001)

In dreams, my leg has not grown back, though my sad, lost mother and all my dear, departed prior cats live again.  I dream that I walk in my prosthesis only very rarely.  Mostly I walk on a column of pure energy and will, and the people in my dreams either take it for granted or consider me the highest yogi guru for mastering my own resources in this very cinematic way.  Sometimes, you see, the energy is visible as an ephemeral cloud of golden sparkles in the shape of my missing leg.  Often it's invisible.  Either way, I walk with the same feeling and body mechanics I used to employ with all my original parts intact.

The other night I dreamed I had a new prosthetic, one that was made of plastics but that turned to flesh that blended seamlessly with my flesh when I put it on, and then reverted back to being obviously hard plastic when I took it back off again.  Problem was, because it was new, I was having difficulty getting blood to circulate into it while I was wearing it, so the foot and ankle were always kind of blue and necrotic looking.  Also, I could feel them while I was wearing them, and they hurt because they had such poor circulation.  I was told to wear the thing for a few days without walking on it in order to get it "broken in," but I wanted to walk, needed to run, and couldn't sit down, so I suffered and risked killing/breaking the whole priceless apparatus.

My dead cats are usually happy in my dreams, though often my dreams about them are about protecting them and not being able to because of their nature to try for freedom and their own choices.  Sometimes I merely get to watch them from a distance, with no indication that they know I am there.  I see danger coming and cannot intervene.  Sometimes, though, I get to hold them, and it is the sweetest thing except when I realize I am dreaming or when I wake up, and then I grieve all over again, weeping into my pillow even before I return to consciousness.

My mother is more complicated, coming into my dreams and needing like a child yet demanding like a parent, controlling and out of control, never a safe haven but always loved and sometimes welcome.  I spin through my dreams of her with sorrowful hysteria racing through the chambers of my heart while I sleep then awaken exhausted, always sure that what I have dreamed is exactly how it was when it was all real, even while sunlight and reason force me to dissect each narrative and find all the holes.

As I wake I can warm my phantom foot from the arch outward just by thinking about it, a tingling burning that is neither unpleasant nor the warmth of life.  I can even move the phantom toes, just, in shallow glissandi, first one way then the other.  But I know better than to try to put my weight upon any of it.  I know there is really nothing there but memories of flesh and wounds.

Comments

[alphabitch]

This reminds me of visiting my uncle in the hospital after his leg was amputated; it was his first stretch of coherent, conscious time since the surgery, and he was very angry about the procedure, and the hospitalization, and would I please take him to the smoking lounge (hospitals still had them then). He said the the leg, though he knew it was gone, hurt more than it had in years. There was no convincing him that the fact that he couldn't feel anything going on in the leg was part of the reason it'd had to go. But his aura, vivid and sparkly on account of how angry he was, extended the full length of the phantom limb. I remember that it made sense to me at the time that I could see it, and I hadn't even really thought about it until you said that about how "Sometimes, you see, the energy is visible as an ephemeral cloud of golden sparkles in the shape of my missing leg."

His wasn't an ephemeral cloud of golden sparkles, though. He wasn't that kind of guy. Thoroughly disagreeable man.

[TheAmpuT]

Wow, Sara, that was great.

In my sleeping dreams, I still have two legs (only 1 dreams in almost 4 years now, and it about being in a wheelchair). But in my waking state, when I imagine my leg being there (either intentionally, as for dance...or unintentionally, as in phantom presence), it feels *exactly* like your graphic. Except midnight blue with silver sparkles. What a trip to see that image captured.

*kiss*

[Sara]

Ladies, that is a trip. I wonder how many other people experience the sparkles one way or another after amputation?

Alphabitch, could your uncle "see" the leg, too, or just feel the pain? Poor guy. That is one of the most awful aspects of this particular experience, that there is no guarantee that anyone will actually feel better afterward. It's really the luck of the draw blended in some as yet not completely understood way with the skill and care of the surgeon and the specific pathology of each sick limb or limb-costing trauma. Lots of people who lose limbs traumatically feel the injury that robbed them of their parts for the rest of their lives, incessantly but for when they sleep, and sometimes even then.

AmpuT, trust you to have such lovely, stylish sparkles! :)

[alphabitch]

You know, I don't know if I ever asked my uncle if he could see it. It was enough to know that he could feel it, I guess. Plus, I don't generally go around telling people that I see auras. It makes them nervous.

[Sara]

It just makes me jealous. ;) I've never been able to see them, myself.

It also makes me wonder. While you're exploring different career changes, have you thought about massage therapy, qi gong, and stuff like that? I don't know what your physical strength is like, but being able to see auras seems like it would come in quite handy.

[alphabitch]

I have in fact thought of that -- funny you should ask :)

I took a massage therapy course way way back in the mid 1980s, before there was any such thing as certification, at least in Minnesota. So I'm not certified, but in any case, I realized early on that I don't have what it takes to massage just every person who shows up. And nowadays, it's kind of a moot point, as my hands, wrists, arms, elbows, shoulders, etc. are so shot that I can barely make it through a single full-body massage in a day.

I still do give massages now and again, though, usually for athletes training for something, or in exchange for music lessons, yard chores, etc. And only for people I know.

I'm not sure how handy it is to be able to see auras; I've never known quite what to make of them. I'm not sure they provide any information that isn't apparent in some other way.