The Myth of the Bloody Palms

('Myths' refer to all dreams, memories and fantasies.)

Of the many dreams I had when I was young boy, this dream and experience stood up the most.
It's morbid nature was of course not lost to me but what was often concluded that I had since blurred the surreal dream with reality, which resulted in a complete denial in learning to swim.

While I cannot remember explicitly the contents of the dream, the reality was that I had childhood eczema and asthma; the combination proved to be crucial to my childhood psyche. I often attempted to compensate my shortcomings by insisting that many things could still be done and I was better off alone to do everything else. However, on the surface, I enjoyed the attention I get elsewhere. The things I did had indirect relation to my medical condition, ultimately because if I could not swim, I had to be better on land.

The dream, however, was a stark reminder that on land, I was no better. Since young, the motif of blood have always been the main image of the unconscious. My gums bled often. My palms bled when I swam. I cut my finger with a scissors. And more recently, the blood motif was replaced by the scar motif. However, it was not just blood that was the only image, but the blood had to cover the entire palms. The dream or image, was stamped into my mind. I remembered how I (the dream self) turned my palms to reveal bloody palms and 'I' showed myself (the dreaming me) those palms. I forgot how that came about but that image was definitely fed by the few instances when I did go to the swimming pool and soaked myself in the pool, only to cause my skin to inflame and with the skin peeling, started to bleed.

It is not to say that I experience stigmata, but the image of the bloody palms was not lost to me. The importance is not where the blood came out from, but blood has always been of importance to me. Nevertheless, the association of this image to the Christ symbol was a recent thing. The consequences are, however, the ongoing dilemma between the personality that wants to escape with the excuse of bloody palms, but at the same time, ashamed and lonely that I could not be like the rest of my class.

I believe the therapeutic act I did to resolve this was my first few blood donations. The bags of blood were, each time a moment of relief that my blood was important to someone else, instead of being an embarrassing feature of my body.