By James Sharpsteen
(Taken from the book I Thought My Father Was God)
In the summer of 1972, I went home to visit my parents in Burnsville, Minnesota, for a couple weeks. I slept downstairs in the basement. Every now and then, a fourteen-year-old boy named Matthew would come to mow the lawn. Early one morning, as I was sleeping in, I heard him outside cutting the grass. I paid no attention and went back to sleep.
I dreamt that I was in the upstairs bathroom, standing in front of the sink and looking at my face in the mirror. It looked like my face, but at the same time there was something odd about it. I could see my black hair, my blue eyes, my mustache, but the shape of my face was different. I looked down at the sink, where the water was running in a counterclockwise circle down the drain. I held my hands under the water and started scrubbing my hands with soap. Again, I looked at the face that wasn’t my face. There was something different about it, but it didn’t really trouble me. I went on scrubbing my hands, but my left thumb hurt. The pain was fairly intense, and I wondered what I had done to make it hurt so badly. It felt as though it were sprained.
Then I looked down at the sink again, and there was blood running into the water, going round and round in that counterclockwise circle. “What’s going on?” I said to myself. Blood was gushing from my thumb, pouring out from the fatty part just below the knuckle, then running down my arm and dripping of my elbow into the sink. I grabbed my throbbing hand and said to myself, “What did you do, Jim? What did you do, Jim?”
I heard a voice calling out to me. “Jim! Jim!” I woke up and realized that it was my mother calling me out to me from the top of the stairs. She told me to come quickly. I threw on some clothes and rushed up to her. Matthew had hurt himself cutting the grass, she said, and she wanted me to go to the bathroom to help him.
Still half asleep, I walked into the bathroom and was astonished to see Matthew standing in front of the mirror and holding his left hand over the sink. Blood was pouring out from a gash between his thumb and first finger. The blood was running down his arm and into the water, going round and round as it flowed down the drain.