Now I wake up mostly with only my right hand numb, my left hand just slightly tingling. My wrist is beginning to hurt. I can feel a definite line of separation. I think maybe next time I wake up my hand will just fall off.
Thinking about that this morning and rubbing my wrist, I remembered a dream I had. Though I wrote the dream down at the time, I no longer have that journal. I destroyed it about six months ago. It took a while to remember when I had the dream. Since I had shown it to a friend at work, it means it was after Jos. and I had split up, and at least more than a year after I started working where I do now. I have such difficulty with time. It slips by me mostly unnoticed.
Here is what I recall of the dream: I was asleep in my bed (I hate dreams where the reality is my bedroom). I was awakened by a soft, eerie sound like gentle scratching. I saw a hand severed at the wrist.
It was bigger than an ordinary hand and it was ash grey. It was creep-ing along the floor toward my bed.
That is all I now remember. Did I chase it away? Did I wake up?
I don’t recall. I did associate the hand, at the time, with the story of Frodo in the barrow. But I never really searched for the meaning of the dream. Today I looked up the story again. In the barrow, when Frodo sees the hand, his first thought is to put on the magic ring and escape. But, bless his little heart — and that would have been the end of the story — he protects his two friends by cutting off at the wrist the hand that was about to bind them into darkness forever, and the spell is broken.
There is a sentence from Tolkien’s Fel owship of the Rings that resonates in me: “The night was railing against the morning of which it was bereaved, and the cold was cursing the warmth for which it hungered.”
I also had a dream this morning that may just follow that thought.
Nov. 22, 1998 (Dream)