Picky Dreams

I had a dream about picking last night.

***** : WARNING : GRAPHIC : MAY TRIGGER : *****

Strangely, it was a spot on my arm. I’m not really an arms/legs/body picker, owing to how I mostly only get spots on my face and back – and my back is awkward to get to, and not as ‘satisfying’ because I can’t see it. However. I digress. The dream.

I caught sight of this spot, on my right forearm, and it was a cystic monster – huge and red and tight and sore, with the head just starting to peak under the top layer of skin. Somehow in my dream I hadn’t noticed it before. It was beautifully ripe, and it wasn’t on my face, so I decided it didn’t really count if I picked it. I caught it gently, and pinched. It burst beautifully. An initial semi-solid flurry, and then a slower squeezing out of all the runny yellow gunk.

That yellow gunk just didn’t stop coming. At first I was pleased at there being so much, because it extended the moment of popping. Then I was midly alarmed, but couldn’t let go of the pinching. I had to get it all out – there being so much of it only made that need greater.

It finally stopped coming. It looked like a small mountain on my arm; I couldn’t see the spot beneath it anymore. Carefully, I wiped the gunk away with my hand, and there beneath it lay the wound, already healed into a large scab. I guess it was about the size of a large flattened grape.

I picked it off.

I don’t know quite how to describe what I saw beneath that scab. It kind of looked like one of those pits beneath a cattle-grid which is designed to let small animals escape – a forty-five-degree slope on one side, meeting a vertical drop on the other. Like a capital N with the left-hand line missing.

The wound wasn’t bloody, or weepy, or even moist. It looked as though someone had ripped a deep chunk from my forearm a long time ago, and my arm had been left to heal that way. The vertical-drop wall of the wound was pink and wrinkly like scar tissue, but the part which sloped down to meet it was smooth and pure, with hairs and freckles growing on it all the way down to the bone. In my dream, I was shocked and frightened. I was too scared to touch it. I just stared.

Right at the deepest part of the wound, where I could see a sliver of the bone of my forearm, it seemed as though the wound didn’t quite stop. The walls pressed together, but they weren’t sealed together, rather like some Freudian pseudo-vagina on my arm. As I stared at this monstrosity in horror, it seemed I was somehow, impossibly, able to look all the way down this wound, travelling all the way down my arm through flesh and bone, and spreading out in the palm of my hand like a disease, all straggly-edged. And inside my palm I could see, as if looking at an x-ray, the bones of my hand and fingers. Parts of the bone were missing and others were breaking off; I was quite simply rotting away inside my skin.

The last thing I remember before waking up in a cold sweat, is my dream-brain understanding that I had done this to myself.