A Conversation Without a Body
Last night I had a dream I cannot shake. A melody was playing, a kind of music I have never heard in my entire life on this planet. And in front of me, floating, was a hand.
We spoke without words, mind to mind. “Do you know who I am?” it asked. I told the truth: I had no idea, apart from the fact that it seemed to be playing with my brain. “Bingo,” it said. “We are getting somewhere.”
Then it made a strange claim. It was not a stranger. It was my own hand. I protested that I already had a hand and did not need anyone else’s to prove I existed. “Then show it to me,” it said. I looked down, and there was nothing. No hand. No arm. No body at all. Only my thoughts, my memories, my sense of being me.
I have spent my life with numbers, proofs and evidence. I am not easily frightened. But in that moment, I was.
The Riddle
The hand told me I was in my astral body, not my physical one. I asked if I was dead. “Not yet,” it answered. “Your time is not over. You still have a lot to accomplish.” When I begged for my body back, it set one condition: “Tell me what the HAND stands for.”
I am a math teacher. When I am cornered, my mind looks for structure. So I answered the only way I know, by breaking the word into its parts.
HAND: Help for Appreciation, Not Depreciation.
I did not plan those words; they simply came. Yet I recognize myself in them. Depreciation is a term from accounting: the slow loss of value of something we own. We apply it to cars and machines. Without noticing, we also apply it to people. A spouse we stop thanking. A parent we stop calling. A colleague whose work we no longer see. Nothing dramatic happens. Their value in our eyes simply erodes, a little each year, until one day it is gone.
Appreciation is the opposite movement. It is also a financial word, meaning a gain in value. The hand seemed to be reminding me that our hands exist to help, and that the first help we owe others is to notice what they are worth.
The Second Answer
“I am impressed,” the hand said. “Can you give it another try?” And again the words arrived on their own.
HAND: Help Against Neglect and Decay.
The moment I said the word “decay,” I woke up. My heart was pounding. I lay in the dark, with my body back, and asked myself why that word, of all words, had thrown me out of the dream.
I think I know. The first answer was about value. The second was about consequence. Neglect is quiet. It makes no noise and asks for no decision. We simply stop tending something: a friendship, a garden, a school, a public institution, a planet. Decay is what neglect looks like once enough time has passed. It is never sudden, though it always feels sudden when we finally notice it.
As a teacher for 23 years, I saw both sides. I saw students flourish because someone kept showing up for them. I also saw what happens when no one does. The difference was rarely talent. It was almost always care, given or withheld, one day at a time.
What the Hand Asks of Us
I do not claim to know where dreams come from. I only know what this one left me with: a question I now ask myself every morning. What are my hands doing today? Are they helping something grow in value, or letting something slip into neglect?
The hand is the oldest tool we have. It builds, writes, heals, holds a child, and reaches out to a stranger. It can also hang limp at our side while things fall apart around us. The choice is made in small gestures: a phone call, a thank-you, an hour given, a repair not postponed.
In the dream, I promised to keep writing. This essay is part of keeping that promise. The dream belongs to a larger story I have been writing for some time, a novel about a day of reckoning far in our future. I was afraid to continue it. I am less afraid now.
Perhaps that is what the hand was really asking: not that I fear the future, but that I take care of the present. If each of us did that with our own two hands, there would be far less to fear.
What does the hand stand for, in your life?
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