(Warning: some graphic violence) R wrote in comments the other day that he had heard that every person in your dreams is you. I just want to say, sort of in broad daylight, that I don’t think that is true. There are many reasons for saying that. One is the nightmare series I had last time I went to sleep. When I woke up, in fear, trembling and sick to my stomach, I said, “They weren’t me.”

I dreamed that someone sliced me open vertically and, as I watched, they peeled back my skin. Someone, I don’t know who, commented on something I no longer remember. But it was about the under-the-skin where, peeled back, there were rivulets or channels or something that made the underside look like a flocked brocade…

Then I dreamed there was a man kneeling or something but he was half above me somehow and he took a knife and struck down not at an angle but jutting towards something. And he pulled out a fully grown baby, with no difficulty in getting the babe out at that angle, impaled to death on the knife/fork he was using.

I don’t remember now but there was something else that was grotesque, though not as frightening as the man and the baby…

I woke up. “They are not me.” I am not the kind of person who would celebrate or even calmly remove a baby, dead or alive, and certainly not on a knife or fork. I am not the kind of person who could cut someone open, at least not while they are awake, and comment on the mess of their insides. Yet that is what I dreamed.

After I woke up, after I calmed down a bit, I thought these three things might be related to my hysterectomy. Maybe I was more awake than I thought. They were being very careful not to give me too much anaesthesia. Maybe, sometimes, they gave me too little. Or maybe this is my mind re-creating my fears of what might have happened.

It is true that, from the doctors’ perspective, at my side, the cut was vertical. It is true that there was a massive amount of adhesions. It is true that there were problems. So, perhaps, my mind is trying to deal with those by re-creating for me how they happened. How the doctors looked and saw and what they might have said.

The baby on the knife or fork or whatever was a nightmare of what could have been and not something that actually happened. I have had my tubes tied. I was on birth control. But even so both R and I were concerned with the possibility that a baby had been missed. I worried about it beforehand. Now I am worrying about it afterwards. Not consciously, but in my dreams. I had meant to take a pregnancy test before the surgery, but I forgot. Our minds are so strange sometimes.

I don’t even remember the other thing.

But I know I don’t want to go to sleep. It wasn’t fun. It took me a long time to recover. And I don’t want to do that again.