GU JUN YUE: It was during the week that I stayed at the hospital after I got injured at work. First I stayed nine days at the factory where I worked, then I was transferred to a hospital. During my first night in the hospital, I didn’t know when I was dreaming and when I was awake. I wasn’t able to tell what was dream and what was reality. But I had one dream that made a deep impression on me. It was about my hand. When I was operated, the doctor said that my hand would probably suffer some complication later on. The night after the operation, I dreamt that my hand had disappeared. In the morning I asked the doctor about this and he said that he might have to cut off the hand, so maybe in my dream I had anticipated that.
    This dream made me think a lot. I thought: What shall I do without my hand? How shall I live? How can I continue my life? After all, I still have a long life ahead, but it would be meaningless without the hand, at least only half as meaningful. A human being has two hands but the left hand is not used as much as the right hand, so if a person loses his right hand, he also uses half of his life. The right hand is the one that is in contact with things, no matter what you do. I thought about all these things in the dream itself. When I do the housework I need my right hand, it’s unavoidable. But in my dream, my hand was gone.
    I had another dream during that time. I dreamt I had been operated and somehow I was at home when I woke up after the operation. My grandmother asked me to do something but my hand couldn’t do it, so my grandfather said: “Now you don’t even have a hand anymore, you are of no use here at home, you should think about finding a way to manage your life on your own.”
    I think this dream is very realistic, in real life people often look down on you when you are disabled because of a bad injury, because you are no longer a complete person. Sometimes I ask myself whether a disabled person can only live in a lower class of society. I always think a lot, but anyway, reality is reality and I have to face it, there is no other way.
    When I was in the hospital the doctor said... I remember it literally, he said: “This is the wound made by the machine, from here to there, but it is too short, I will make it longer. ” He was suturing the wound and each stitch costs money, so why would he need to make the wound longer? I was under narcosis so maybe I only dreamt this, I probably only dreamt it. When I thought about it, I wondered why it would be important to make the wound longer? I didn’t ask him, but I wouldn’t do that if I were a doctor. He said he needed to make the wound longer, so the wound was short originally. But I am the person who pays for the treatment, the operation etc. So just think about why he said that the wound was too short.
    I will have to spend a lot of money for medical treatment and rehabilitation, to try to make my hand function again, to cure it. But this is not a doctor with a good attitude. There was some piece of flesh sticking out of my hand and he put it back in with his finger. He just slammed the flesh back in, he didn’t want to do more work. That was in the emergency room, I was not yet on the operating table. The operation was almost exactly like in my dream. I was scared when I lay down on the operating table, with the lights above me. The operation lasted half an hour and my hand was sutured with thirty-nine stitches. I couldn’t see my hand during the operation and afterwards it was wrapped in plaster in order to stabilize it.
    That night I dreamt that my hand was missing. I woke up all sweaty because I was so scared. I wondered what I should do if the hand had really been cut off. It would be very hard to face my family, my relatives and friends, and it would be difficult to get married. I thought about these things in my dreams, but it was like thinking during daytime and I remember everything very well. After my accident I started thinking a lot in dreams, and it felt very real, often I couldn’t distinguish between dream and reality. The doctor said: “Your hand may have to be cut off”, and then in my dream the hand had already been cut off. I was very scared when I woke up but then I saw that my hand was still there, wrapped in plaster. I couldn’t move my hand inside the plaster and I had to maintain it in a certain position while sleeping, without moving it. The plaster was used to fix the joints because the machine had squeezed my bones and they had become loose. My five fingers were inside the plaster, the mold held them together to stabilize them. After this dream, my hand has always been the same in my dreams and in reality. The only difference is that it didn’t get cut off as I had dreamt. I’m very happy that I still have my hand. Other people always ask me about my hand. The second day in hospital, the patient I was sharing the room with asked me: “Your right hand got injured at work, it was squeezed by a machine, now it is disabled. What is your opinion about that?” I said: “I don’t have any opinion. ” Many of my colleagues ask me: “Your right hand was injured, you cannot use it anymore, what do you think about that?” I say: “Nothing.” I’m not a person who laments the loss of something that is gone. After all, I once had it, so I feel no regret. In my dreams I said to myself that if one day I lost my hand I wouldn’t regret it because I once had a healthy right hand, I once used it. I said this to myself in my dreams. When my friends and relatives asked me what I would do if I lost my hand one day, I said I would do nothing. It doesn’t matter if I lose it because I once had it. I’m that kind of person. When I begin something, it doesn’t matter so much to me if it will end or not. I once had a right hand and I used it, so I’m satisfied. In my dream, my hand had been cut off, but when I woke up I saw that it was still there.
    I actually had a premonition of this accident, but I didn’t think that the accident would happen to me. I’m usually a very happy person under any circumstances, but during the three days before the accident I was in a particularly good mood. Then one night I dreamt that a colleague of mine got injured in an accident. A screw got loose and fell off its place, he tried to put it back but his arm got trapped in the machine and his bones and joints got broken.
    In my dream, the accident happened when my colleague tried to put the screw back in its place. Since the dream was about another person, I didn’t care much about it. I didn’t think this could happen to me. Three days later, on 8 December at 8 o’clock, we started our shift as usual. I went to a machine and took off the cover. The screw on the coupling lever was loose. The coupling lever has an infrared ray and a sensor below it. The infrared ray must hit the centre of the sensor, then the machine can function properly. But the screw was loose and when the machine started working it got untightened even more. The company doesn’t take enough care of security and there is not enough protective equipment. They want to produce as quickly as possible to earn money, so they don’t care much about security. The accident happened because of the loose screw. The screw held the sensor in place, so when the screw got loose the sensor started moving around and the infrared ray no longer hit the centre of the sensor. So the machine couldn’t receive the right orders and the accident happened. That’s when my hand was injured.