Burning the Poison

I believe I started out with Em (wife), and her parents were there, and there was a big hubbub about the Tysabri (MS treatment). I don't remember the specifics, but there was a point where Em and I were in a kitchen of some house that I don't recognize, but it was supposed to either be our house or her parents'. Her mom was going around and hounding us about something related to the Tysabri. Whatever it was, we basically just kept trying to shrug it off and ignore her.

We got tired of her mom behaving this way, so we wound up leaving. I found myself at a different house, and Em was no longer there. The house was in the same city as the other house I had just been in, but it was in more of a downtown area that were like a bunch of townhouses. I was just inside the front door of this one townhouse, and I was with a black family. There was a girl that was about my age, a mom (who I know was there, but I don't actually remember seeing her) and a dad who had a bit of grey hair and was a doctor.

I noticed that I had a huge scab the size of a 50 cent piece on the shin of my right leg, and I remembered that it was from a bad case of poison ivy I had had a few months previous. The dad was telling me that there was still poison in a little pocket under the scab, and I had to open up the wound and burn out the poison.

For some reason, burning out the poison didn't sound terrible to me, so I proceeded to pull my knee way up close to my face and hold my shin horizontal while I picked off the scab. After having the scab off, the wound was oozing a clear liquid that I knew was the poison. The wound was actually deep enough to act as a little "cup" to hold the oozing poison as long as I kept my shin horizontal and facing straight up.

I believe I was trying to move around while holding my shin up in the air, and I wound up outside. While moving around, the poison started sloshing around in the hollow of the wound. I was trying to be careful, but it kept sloshing over the rim of the wound and washing down across my leg. I knew that allowing this to happen was going to cause the poison ivy to spread. At one point I made a sudden movement and the poison shot up towards my knee. Since my knee was still by my face while I was keeping the shin horizontal, I felt that in order to keep the poison from spreading, I had to slurp it into my mouth and hold it there.

It was shortly after this, while I was out in front of the house, that the father/doctor finally came over and said he would burn away the poison now. I worried about it burning me, too, and he must have seen it on my face because he told me not to worry because it would actually feel very cool. I nodded and he brought out what looked like a small Zippo lighter. He clicked it and there was a tiny flame on the top that was less than a quarter of an inch long. He reached over and touched it to one of the wet spots on my leg where the poison had run over. Immediately every place the poison was lit and burned for a brief moment as a faint blue flame, almost like a propane fire. It disappeared after just a moment, and then he repeated the process.

I noticed during this time that the fire actually did have a cool feel to it. In the dream, it seemed to have something to do with fire pulling the heat out of the poison, making the poison colder, and therefore cooling my leg. This happened both times he set the poison on fire.

After he was done, even though I still had a mouth full of poison, I asked him what to do with the poison in my mouth. Should I spit it out onto my leg and let him flame that, too? Should I just spit it on the ground? He just said, "No," but after almost making his way back into the house while I was asking him, he turned around, I spit it out onto my leg, and he lit the fire for the third time. This time didn't seem to burn as cleanly, having a lot of yellow tongues of flame show up because of the spit that was mixed in with the poison.