Dream: The Girl with the Pasteur Pins
Dream 20080222, 2:30 AM: The Girl with the Pasteur Pins
I saw this image from Pasteur’s Etudes Sur la Maladie des Vers a Soie, and apparently the image of the long steel pins really stuck in my head.
I’m a little girl, and I live in a facility that is a cross between an orphanage and a hospital. I have two or three of these pins stuck in different parts of my body, particularly my hands; I don’t know how they got there. The areas surrounding the pins look a little swollen and red, but not nearly as bad as I would expect – it’s like I’ve lived with them for a long time. I remember a nurse pulling one out of my shoulder, and rubbing the whole area with alcohol – I don’t know why she didn’t take the ones out of my hands.
Somehow I get out of the hospital. I want to get back in, and I think that if I have a bunch of the pins, they will surely take me back there for treatment. I don’t remember where I got the pins, but I put them through my arms and hands and shoulders. They are dark steel, with slightly ragged ends and look sort of hand-cut. On my fingers, they mostly go long-ways, the direction of the bone, but through the skin, so that the joint still moves. They hurt, but not terribly. I remember flexing one finger, and watching the pin sort of sliding in the flesh. I am found and taken back to the hospital/orphanage. I don’t remember all that happened there.
(real life) I woke up, and realized that I had somehow thrown off the covers, and my arms and particularly my hands were stiff and sore from the cold. I’m in a pose that looks like I’m recoiling in horror, or like I’m Nasferatu about to feed on someone; hands are held claw-like in front of my chest. I have minor arthritis in the joints of my fingers, and they didn’t like being held out in the cold, apparently. I got back under the blankets and warmed up, and was fine.
Funny how dreams can translate real life happenings like that, but translate them so…oddly. (I was thinking that perhaps you had a cat using it’s claws on you while you were sleeping!)
Wow, that’s very interesting! I like how the pins have become a part of you, very symbolic.
I just wish the arthritis pain hadn’t become part of me… that’s no fun.
Aw, that’s true. :::hugs:::
I get pain dreams too. Also nausea dreams.
None of them good. Yours very imaginative, I must say. Sounds very Victorian novel-ish.
For some reason, those pins just really got under my mental skin, as it were. I think because they look like they’d be sharp, but not nearly as controllable or neat as our little brass pins.
I get celiac dreams often… very rarely about being sick or having pain, but quite a lot about eating something wrong, or not being able to eat, or eating something and finding a crust on the bottom, etc.
In the dream, they looked like what would happen if a blacksmith made extra-large sewing pins… or very thin, brittle nails.
That’s how my pain feels.
Actually like the blunt pins are attached to the inside of my skin and the points into my muscles. So moving causes the pins to move within the muscle and that what hurts.
I hate nausea dreams worse than pain dreams, because nausea dreams involve images of rotting rubbish and maggots etc. Not to say that pain dreams are a good thing. The M.E. virus damages the hypothalamus so we have very vivid dreams. It can be great fun, and then again, not.
Oh my God, I didnt see the word >Dream< so I thought someone was leaving this note on your blog. I kept re-reading it in horror. I know kids that cut themselves and it give me the chills. I have nightmares sometimes that I wake from frozen, sick, feeling not safe.
Glad this is a dream and not real. Perhaps too many silk worms were dissected and pinned apart and they are speaking to you in your dreams.
A thought, but not a pin.
E.
Yeah – it used to be All Dreamwork, All the Time, but I got into so much fiber-arts stuff and enjoyed putting that in the journal… so now it’s kind of weird to have the dreams in there along with the spinning and the silk.