Give the Little Lady a Hand

A few nights back I had an icky dream. Or really, a dream snippet.  Hands were breaking through the ground, hands covered with what looked like rivulets of blood or perhaps red vines snaking around them.  Dear Husband says this is a direct result of the movie War of the Worlds, even though I didn’t watch it. It just seeped in. The one image I did catch was of a city covered in red vinous stuff.  So, yeah, I guess there’s a connection.

On the other hand (ha!) some of my most vivid nightmares have featured hands.  When I was 5 or 6, I experienced a series of nightmares that I can still vividly recall:

Nightmare 1:  I am in our living room (of the house I grew up in) and there are dismembered hands and fingers lying on the sofa, end tables and chairs. There are no evident signs of violence, no blood. The room is well-lit; there are no shadows.  It is very quiet, and eerie. My father comes in and begins putting the hands and fingers into a brown paper bag. My mother is there, too, but she does not seem to be paying attention; she is staring off into space.

Nightmare 2:  I see an expanse of desert covered with hands, as if there were bodies buried there with just the hands showing. On the horizon is a man dressed in dark robes, on horseback.

Nightmare 3:  I am in a neighbor’s bedroom (a teenage girl who lived next door). On her dressing table is a hand. It looks something like a mannequin’s hand. It “stands” on its wrist, all the fingers extended, as if its purpose were to hold rings and necklaces. The hand has long, red nails. I go up to it and touch it, and it grabs my hand.

So, why do I dream about hands? Do they have a symbolic significance? Dear Husband thinks they are related to the ability to act. So I guess following that thought that severed hands indicate impotence. That does have a nice Freudian ring to it.

Would anyone like to play armchair dream analyst?