So I recently had my leg cut off. One of the things that can happen after that is called 'Phantom Pain,' which means your leg that isn't there anymore is still hurting your brain. Luckily I never had too much of that -- a spot here and there but it went away, and it wasn't that bad anyway, so awesome. But besides phantom PAIN, there's something else called Phantom Sensation -- which happens when your brain expects to feel something, so it does, even though there's no leg there to feel it with. Now this can be expressed differently in different people, because we're not all wired the same. I think in some ways, we do our own wiring, and then the environment does some, and of course your parents and your genetics get to work some of it out too -- anyway brains are unique. Whatever. So in my case, what I felt was like I could bend and move this 'phantom limb,' but it was like trying to squeeze a fist around a lump of silly putty -- really hard to move, really sluggish, but sooner or later, there's your fist. Well, I didn't really want that feeling -- because with phantom sensations, you never know if maybe you're opening up a wire panel in your brain and short-circuiting your way right into phantom pain, and once you've got that, there's no telling how long it could last. Hours, days, even YEARS. So I tried not to mess with it much, but it's hard to resist, you know? Not many people even get a chance to HAVE phantom sensation, let alone play with it, and so eventually curiosity overtook me (I was on some pretty heavy painkillers) and I started fooling around. I'd curl up my toes, point my foot up and down, bend that knee. Of course there wasn't any toe, or foot, or knee, but that's not important -- your brain feels it, and your body tries to do it. I could run a hand up and down the remainder of my thigh and feel the muscles squirming away at nothing. It felt like a ball in my quads, bouncing up and down as I wiggled the imaginary limb. Soon I started getting better at it -- where before I could just vaguely tell 'Uh, I'm squeezing my toes, I guess,' now I could bend each one individually, or at least I was aware that they were individual entities. Or would have been, if they were there -- it's a novel sensation, what can I say? But I thought, why stop there? If it's imaginary, then my imagination is limitless. I tried to picture myself with six toes. Then with an oppose-able thumb. I sort of expected it to hurt -- and I guess it did, a little, just trying to make sense of the signals. Usually your nerves talk to your brain, but with phantom sensations, your brain is stuck in a loop, telling itself what it should feel and then feeling it -- I was just hijacking that loop and making it behave in impossible ways. And on some level, my brain must have known that it was impossible -- but on another level, it didn't care. I was in charge, and for a few hours I let myself 'run' wild. At some point -- it was pretty late, and I was in bed anyway -- I finally got tired of the game. I let the dogs in for the night and lay back down to go to sleep. I marveled that, when I pulled on the covers, it seemed like I could still feel them rubbing over my toes -- but they were indistinct again, a vague cluster of 'normal' that was fading back into nothingness again, and I welcomed that. One of my dogs likes to sleep with his head resting on my shoulder, and the other one sleeps at the foot of the bed -- we share, it's cute, shut up about it. Anyway I drift off to sleep. I can't remember what I was dreaming -- only that it was very vivid, and somehow distressing. I woke up slowly -- it was the middle of the night still, and dark. I sat up a little -- sometimes I put on some TV to help fall asleep, and I guess I thought I'd hop over to the computer and start up a fresh hour's worth of white noise. When I looked down, I noticed that Kaiser -- that's the foot-of-the-bed dog -- was sleeping in the gap where my leg should've been. It was weird! But kind of.... touching, I guess, touching is a good word. I didn't want to wake him up, but he's a light sleeper, so there wasn't much I could do about it. As I started to right myself, he stretched out his back and yawned. I got this twinge of sensation, like he was brushing up against my toes -- phantom sensations. Cool stuff. I had the urge to twitch, like it tickled or something, and I wasn't sure if I knew how -- I mean, how do you twitch with something that isn't there? But I gave it a shot. Kaiser shot up, howling in pain. He tumbled over the edge of the bed and curled into a quivering ball. What did I do? There was blood on his fur. My god, what did I just do?