When Beasts Attack

The other morning I discovered that my back was covered in scratches - some surface scrapes, some gouges, and a set of long, impressive scratches that had drawn blood and beaded up. After a mental check that I had not likely woken up in a fantasy universe in which I had a dream about being attacked by a cat only to find that my injuries were real (I had not dreamed about any kind of animal or assailant), I was pretty confused about where they came from. Robert suggested I had done it to myself overnight. OK, that did seem plausible in a sense, but (1) am I really capable of doing this sort of damage to myself without noticing (esp. since I am a very light sleeper and did not sleep well at all the previous night), (2) I wasn't really able to reach some of those scratches easily or at all, and (3) since I have fairly blunt fingernails and not claws, how did I mimic an angry beast strike? It was also kind of odd that there weren't visible scratch marks anywhere else.

So I did what anyone would do. I scraped at my back and waited to see what would happen.

Although I did not draw blood, I did replicate some of the medium-damage scratches. It seemed in retrospect like it should have hurt more than it did, given the amount of injury I had done. I mean, wow, I wouldn't normally scratch myself like that. Oh...duh. When a person is taking moderately serious pain killers, they don't feel the amount of pain they otherwise might. And I remembered that one of the side effects of these pain killers is my skin feeling really itchy and that I had not applied lotion the previous night, which would have made me itchy anyway. Over the next couple of hours, I kept finding myself starting to scratch various parts of my body, only noticing it, I believe, because I was sort of on the look-out for this kind of behavior.

Sometimes the beast that attacks is the beast within. Etc.

I wonder if this will leave scars.