The setting was my old school, but only in essence. The architecture had been completely transmuted: the corridors and classrooms were now structures of an impeccable, clean, and highly developed modernism. I was there, demoted once again to the position of a student, attending the first class of the day.
The environment, however, was toxic. I was forced to share the space with people whom, in my waking life, I deeply repudiate. The tension quickly escalated into a futile and empty argument. Mental exhaustion hit fast. I decided I wouldn’t play that game. I abandoned the interaction, stood up, and left the room, leaving all my belongings behind.
The Biological Decline and the Dungeon
It was in the corridor that the sensation began. It wasn’t an emotional anguish, but a purely physical decline. A deep and visceral discomfort, as if my own biology were failing, warning me that I was, second by second, slowly dying.
Guided by this malaise, I looked for a restroom. And that was when the architectural contrast of the dream revealed itself brutally. Amidst that ultramodern school, the restroom seemed to have been torn straight out of the 18th or 19th century. It was dark, rustic, surrounded by heavy iron grates and stones, like the bowels of an ancient prison.
I wasn’t there for physiological purposes. The discomfort in my abdomen reached its peak and, in an inexplicable and grotesque manner, I felt something detaching from inside me. Pieces of my own interior began to come out. I recognized what appeared to be guts and something very similar to a pancreas.
But the oneiric terror didn’t stop there. Along with the viscera, I expelled a human hand. It was completely mangled, split open, with the skin dissected and separated from the flesh.
Despite the scene worthy of a body-horror nightmare, the dream’s logic remained unshakable: I had the absolute certainty that those parts were undeniably mine, and that their absence was exactly what was killing me.
With a morbid calmness, I carried the viscera and the flayed hand to the sink, washed everything carefully under the water of that dungeon, and bagged my own organs.
The Clinical Verdict
At the door, I met a doctor who was on his way out. Desperate from the continuous sensation of imminent death, I stopped the man and asked for a recommendation for a pancreas specialist. The doctor’s rush vanished instantly, replaced by an intense clinical curiosity.
He asked to see. I opened the bag and revealed the washed organs.
Fascinated, he called the other doctors in the sector. In a few moments, I found myself in the center of a circle of white coats, reporting my case while they analyzed the pieces that had fallen out of me. When they examined the flayed hand, the medical board seemed to reach a consensus. One of them murmured in a tone of technical analysis, as if it made all the sense in the world:
- “A human hand… it seems he has always used the hand incorrectly.”
The bizarre and accusatory diagnosis echoed in my mind while the physical discomfort became unbearable. Life finally seemed to drain through the empty space those organs had left behind. And, at the peak of this sensation of slow death and hollowing out…
I woke up.