Last night I had an invertebrate nightmare. The invertebrates were part of a larger dream in which I was a member of an underwater forensics team working in a flooded house. The only thing I remember about that gig was that in the submerged living room there was a dead rottweiler floating in the corner of a living room ceiling. The whole house was underwater, but the dog was floating there, like it tried to rise to the surface and the ceiling stopped it.
Later on, I was playing with a large scab that covered my entire left palm. It wasn’t painful, but it was large, crusty and hard. As I worked away part of it, I saw tiny, shiny, white balls and I thought (with revulsion even now) that they were eggs. Frantically I pulled the rest of the scab off and revealed a palm-full of tiny, tiny amphipods. There were far more than there should have been. I had apparently been brooding them in my palm. I can’t explain how gross this is. The more I think about it, the sicker I get. In the dream I wiped them all off my hand and they left behind a series of burrow tracks just below the skin of my palm. As if they had been crawling around under my skin and left little tunnels. I’m shuddering now, this is so disgusting. Freshwater amphipods aren’t parasitic, but in my dream I had become infected with them and they had laid their young in my hand and I had unwittingly raised them. Ew. Oh, ew. Damn, that is so awful.
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