![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillI had a dream last night that I was at a convention and one of the smaller rooms had needed to be closed off because "a guest was ill". Turns out it was converted to an impromptu surgery theater. I accidentally caught the surgeon as he (quietly) left; he decided for some reason that I was okay to talk to, and said that he had removed nearly five centimeters of "pik dik" from the guy's internal organs (maybe his heart). Apparently pik dik is a fibrous organism that battens on to human flesh and lives parasitically... after I woke up I realized it was probably my mind riffing off of dodder. He showed me the extracted stuff, white and sort of filamentous and cobwebby, with lots of side branches. It didn't grow fast, he said, but it was tenacious.
Fast forward to me handling the sample (how and why, I don't know) and getting a bit of it in contact with my skin, where it immediately adhered. Attempts to get it off only made it spread to other parts of my hands. So I had sometimes small fragments stuck to my skin, hard to see, and very hard to get off even by scraping off the top layer of skin. Ugh ugh ugh.
A Google search for "pik dik" turned up nothing but mathematical/logical equations, which makes me feel better. I don't think there is any such thing. Dodder is creepy enough, thanks.
Fast forward to me handling the sample (how and why, I don't know) and getting a bit of it in contact with my skin, where it immediately adhered. Attempts to get it off only made it spread to other parts of my hands. So I had sometimes small fragments stuck to my skin, hard to see, and very hard to get off even by scraping off the top layer of skin. Ugh ugh ugh.
A Google search for "pik dik" turned up nothing but mathematical/logical equations, which makes me feel better. I don't think there is any such thing. Dodder is creepy enough, thanks.