The ghost in you, She don't fade · 12:55am March 22nd
And she don't fade
The ghost in you
She don't fade
Inside you the time moves
And she don't fade
- The Psychedelic Furs, 1984
I Had An Arm Ghost - a (possibly) infranatural tale
Nerve Block
Nerve blocks, or neural blockades, are procedures that can help prevent or manage many different types of pain. They are often injections of medicines that block pain from specific nerves. They can be used for pain relief as well as total loss of feeling if needed for surgery. - Johns Hopkins
When I went in for my wrist surgery, to break and re-set the cap of my right radius (the forearm bone that can be found closest to the thumb), I was given a nerve block. Several injections were made in my neck near my arm, to the purpose of completely terminating all signal transmission in the nerves of the entire arm. I was told this could last several days, if I was lucky, even as much as a week. The purpose was to get me past the worst of the pain, which is understandably intense - my forearm would be sliced open, the muscles and nerves and blood vessels pulled aside, then the bone carefully sawed apart, repositioned, and then a metal plate placed, followed by drilling to place metal screws directly into the living bone. Then stitches. I cannot imagine a patient surviving such a thing in the ages before anesthesia - truly this is a modern possibility.
The nerve block was total; my entire arm was dead meat, as disconnected from my awareness as if it had been amputated entirely.
This did stop the pain, for about two and a half days. It was also existentially horrifying. But something truly strange happened during it, and it is this strangeness I want to tell you about, because it was astonishing to experience.
The Ghost Arm
Waking or preparing for sleep, I had to deal with a (roughly, based on my body weight of 235 pounds) ten pound tube of meat and bone dangling uselessly from my torso. Near the end of it was a wrist and hand in a plaster cast. I had to protect that. A sling supported it generally, but when sitting or laying down, positioning the mass of meat was heavy and difficult. It was also creepy, because I still felt my arm - only not where the meat was. The two lined up not very often at all, and even then only through sheer coincidence or a conscious effort to line both up with each other. My ghost arm and the dead meat were decidedly separate entities.
To me, my arm - the arm I considered 'mine', as in part of me - floated weightless from my shoulder. It was neither cold nor warm, temperature was not an issue. But I could feel it, and I could move it. I could feel it move as it always had, albeit more smoothly than normal because it was weightless. In my mind's eye, I could precisely pinpoint the location; my proprioceptive senses were informing me of its position in three dimensional space at all times.
That had absolutely nothing to do with my actual, physical, meat and bone arm.
This made shifting my meat arm problematic. I would reach over with my left hand and grab my dead right arm, and try to haul it to a better position in the sling, or on my chest as I lay down, or to keep it from falling when I had to remove or adjust my sling, and I would naturally also try to help this effort by moving my right arm myself from inside. Then it would hit me that my meat arm had flopped to my side on the bed, say, while my actual arm, the ghost arm, was comfortably on my chest where I had moved it.
To say this discrepancy was unsettling is an understatement. It was, put bluntly, Code Stephen King Level Weird, and I felt a kind of 'over the peak of the rollercoaster' feeling in my stomach every time some version of it happened. My brain was telling me my arm was in a given place, I was certain of this, I could feel it, I could sense it, yet my actual arm, the meat arm, was somewhere else. It was dead and fell and dropped like the long-pork sausage it was.
Phantom Limb Syndrome
Phantom limb syndrome is a condition in which patients experience sensations, whether painful or otherwise, in a limb that does not exist. It has been reported to occur in 80-100% of amputees, and typically has a chronic course, often resistant to treatment. - National Institute Of Health (NIH)
The easy answer is of course phantom limb, or would be, if what I experienced matched it in any regard. Sufferers of phantom limb syndrome report feeling their amputated limb sometimes in pain, in cold or hot, or being itchy or stabbed, they may report the phantom limb curled painfully tight in impossible contortions. It is not a pleasant sensation.
More than this, phantom limb is related to the physiological homunculus, or internal body map hardwired into the brain. This map is mirrored - curiously - in the nerves of the face, such that it is possible in some cases to relieve the suffering by stroking or touching specific parts of the forehead, cheeks and jaw that neurologically correspond to the homunculus.
None of this applied to me - no amount of self face-fondling did anything for my ghost arm at all, and in any case I could move my ghost arm howsoever I wished. It was never in pain, it never itched or felt anything out of the ordinary. As far as I was concerned, my ghost arm existed in some neutral space, some empty zone devoid of gravity or temperature or anything annoying at all.
No, I did not try to see if I could reach my arm into and through my torso. I was already severely creeped out as it was. Also, it seemed to rest on my chest when I lay it there, as if my chest were a physical object to it. In retrospect, there are so many things I should have tried - I should have tried holding my own left hand with the ghost hand, I should have tried to touch my own face, I should have tried to lift a physical object in the real world, or even to try to feel such a thing with my ghost hand. I did none of these.
I was afraid, deeply disturbed about the entire experience, and just trying to get through the post-surgical horror. Until the moment came when feeling started coming back - then, driven by fear, I finally tried something, and it kind of worked.
Getting Back Inside
On the afternoon of my third day post surgery, I noticed that I was beginning to feel something from my otherwise dead meat arm. A slight sensation of touch was beginning, both near my neck, and in my little finger. I could move nothing, but as time progressed, I became certain sensation was returning.
I tried to move my fingers, which remained still. I became afraid - what if my arm was permanently paralyzed? What if I could never move it again? Sensation continued to return, more and more - I understood that, at some point, this would also mean pain, but the fear of paralysis was worse for me - and so I kept trying to find the 'switch' to move, well, anything.
It dawned on me that my ghost hand wasn't near my meat hand. Maybe that was the problem.
I worked to superimpose my ghost hand into the mass of my meat hand. It was difficult - I could not see my ghost hand, I could only feel where it was in space. I first succeeded with my little finger, I got it to twitch. Then, in my excitement, I moved my ghost hand away, and lost the twitch. So, I kept trying.
Eventually, I could move my little finger and my ring finger, barely, in small twitches and jerks. My ghost hand seemed stuck to those fingers - glued to them. But my thumb and index finger were not aligned, so I couldn't move those at all. It was like putting on a glove I could not feel. Over time I got my ghost fingers into the meat, and finally, after much more effort, superimposed my thumb correctly. Once my thumb finally twitched a few times, the entire hand was 'glued' in place.
The weird pseudo-phantom-limb experience was over. My ghost arm was bound, now, to my meat flesh. No amount of imagination could bring back the bizarre sensation. It was over. I could only try to imagine what it had felt like, the actual experience of it was finished.
The Easy Explanation
The easy and simple explanation is, of course, that somehow my proprioceptive sensory system had been unnaturally routed through whatever structures in the brain that make lucid dreaming happen - perhaps as a side effect of some strange neurological reaction to the chemicals of the nerve block reaching my brain through my blood stream - and this sent and received signals from my motor control region to create a tangible illusion of a ghostly arm. The brain is a strange place, and if the wrong circuits speak to each other in abnormal ways, anything can happen. This is the basis of every psychedelic experience, and a nerve block is done with drugs that, unsurprisingly, affect nerves.
Perhaps some interaction with the internal homunculus also was added in, only in an unconventional manner unlike normal phantom limb syndrome. This is the rational, simple, obvious explanation. Case closed. Wasn't that a strange hallucination? Yes, yes it was.
The Real Explanation
I don't have one. I've never heard of this, though surely it must have happened to someone else. Maybe it happens a lot but isn't talked about much. Maybe it happens all the time but nobody is as single-minded as me to focus on it and be completely freaked by it.
I don't have any answers to give you. I don't know what it says about anything. It just happened to me, and I found it interesting enough to share. It was very weird, and curious, and in an odd way, perhaps even a moment of wonder and awe. I hope I never have cause to experience it again - I don't like surgery, and I am no fan of needing surgery, or nerve blocks.
But, that said, damn.
What an experience. I'll be thinking about it for a long time - likely the rest of my life. So, that's the story.
- Chatoyance, 2024
That's fascinating!
I've been told many times that 90%+ of what people think they're directly experiencing is only mental constructs (hallucinations) based on a little bit of sensory input and their brain's world-modeling capability. Seeing is believing? Maybe, but often, seeing isn't reality.
yeah, very strange sensation, indeed! Thanks for sharing your memory/thoughts with us! I think our medicine vs biology (as limited as it is) still very much like 50 years old mechanic's toolbox vs biomechanical dog in (iirc) " Going pony". I really wish you relatively uneventful cyborg time ahead.
My explanation:
Your spirit partially disconnected from your body. During incarnation the spirit takes the form of the body, often called a spiritbody. Although it’s a very broken analogy, you could imagine pincers around key points of the body that wrap around your spirit holding you to your body. The nerve block disabled the “power going to the pincers” so that part of your spirit simply slipped out as it had nothing to hold it in place.
Sleep paralysis is basically the same thing. I am so terrified of pain that the few times I’ve been disconnected have made me feel very comforted. No hot, cold, cramping, weight, and best of all no feeling of waiting/apprehension/anticipation - that unique discontent that permeates every second in corporeal form.
I have some suggested reading for you. Larry Niven wrote a whole series about Gilbert Hamilton or 'Gil the ARM' about a man born in Topeka (about 40 miles from here) with psychic powers related to a phantom limb. I believe they're on Kindle. (checks) Yep. I've got the whole series in dead tree format, but it could take me all day to sort through my collection in the basement.
An interesting story!
I'm glad you've finally gotten back in touch with yourself.
I wonder what other missing parts we all have that we just don't know where to feel.
The psychedelics comment is an interesting one.
Having a number of experiences there, I have always found it a bit, mm, hard to accept the belief it is just my brain firing weirdly. While I know it is rational to say / do so, the nature of experiences I have had makes it a...more dubious prospect to me. I simply have a nigh-impossible time believing my brain simply spontaneously generated everything. It was...too cohesive, and too...orthogonal to my existing experience set to have me believe it's that simple.
Which is to say, it may be woo-woo but I'm inclined to go for 'Yep, something WEIRD happened to ya there'