Woke up in the middle of the night with a cold, relaxed hand grabbing my face. A very scary moment. The hand of a dead man, cold and motionless, right there in my face. I grabbed it and wanted to throw it away as a reflex.
While I was asleep, my entire right arm had decided that it was not asleep enough and went into the ultimate asleep state. My right hand, being at the end of my now asleep arm, was probably almost knocking on heaven’s door. Good thing that it decided not to entirely walk towards the light but was nice enough to come back to give my face a good cold good bye shake.
The feeling of this foreign, cold hand reminded me of one of Oliver Sacks’ reports, in which a patient throws out a dead leg out of his bed, just to realize, in surprise, that he is attached to this particular limb.
So what was I to do? Finding myself talking to my own hand in the middle of the night? I immediately got up and began to wake up my hand, by hitting it against things, the wall, the floor. My Hand thanked me by hurting me back. Each nerve in my arm decided to call home at the same time now, which translated into great, unavoidable, swelling pain. I knew that I had to jump start the circulation, so I kept hitting a little more, hitting the cold stone floor in the bathroom with the back of my hand, making quiet sounds of pain, i must have looked like Frankenstein’s monster in the dim lit Bathroom.
My hand eventually came back. I got up from the floor, looked into the mirror to make sure that the man inside there was still me. I had not changed the color of my skin to green and there were no screws protruding out of my forehead, otherwise, there was this blurry me, slightly annoyed for having been woken up. We brought my right hand to the mirror and shook it one last time, before returning to bed.
My hand is still not 100% this morning. (My head is the wooden kind too.)