A Dream About Spiders

This morning, before one of the times I woke up, I dreamed of spiders.

Now, I'm not phobic about spiders. The standard little ones I sometimes see in my house I'm usually content to let go on about their business. Beyond a certain arbitrarily-applied size limit, the consequence for a spider of entering my house is--if I'm feeling benevolent--capture and outdoor release or--if I'm feeling less benevolent--death. I have no desire to own a pet tarantula, and I'm not crazy about creatures with more than seven eyes (thank you, Maurice Moss of The IT Crowd), but I'm not phobic about them. If you are, you may wish to stop reading now. Or at least to skip over the description of the dream to the analysis (the paragraph that follows "That's when I woke up").

In my dream, I was in my house and I walked past the open door to my entryway coat closet. I saw movement inside, and when I looked in I saw a group of spiders on the floor. They weren't huge, but they were bigger than the standard household spiders--their bodies were probably an inch long. Immediately these spiders began to move very quickly in my direction. I grabbed a can of ant spray (it was what I had handy) and sprayed them. To my relief, the spray stopped them dead in their tracks.

And then there were more. And more. And more. I kept spraying, and they kept dying. I couldn't believe how many there were, or how aggressively they came at me. I didn't know what kind of spiders they were, so I didn't know how important it was to keep them from biting me. Erring on the side of caution, I decided to make it very important that they not bite me. I moved all around my living room floor, dodging their advances and spraying them as I went. Soon there were no spots left on my living room floor that weren't covered in spider carcasses. And still the pile kept growing. Dead spiders collected like snow on my floor, several inches deep. 

I kept wanting to get to my phone, so I could access Google to look up what species they were so I'd know how venomous they were, but there was no opportunity to do that because so many kept coming at me. Apparently, the thought of leaving or of calling for help did not occur to me. But it was a dream--don't expect rationality.

Eventually the spiders figured out (again, it's a dream; don't question the "logic" too much) that they could tunnel underneath the drifts of bodies of their dead companions, and I could see trails appearing in the pile of dead spiders like Bugs Bunny's underground travels in the cartoons. I had to be quick and spray these spiders as they emerged from the pile into the small clearing at my feet in order to kill them before they were on me. 

And then I began to run out of spray. The can sputtered and fizzled, and I knew I was in trouble. Somehow I made a break down the hall and got to my bedroom, but I knew that would be only a momentary respite.

That's when I woke up.

With input from a friend, and upon reflecting on how I've been doing and feeling lately, I think each individual spider was one of the little aspects of my psyche that I judge as counterproductive, or as a failing or shortcoming. I confront them, one or more at a time, and apply the tools I've learned (the ant spray--interesting, perhaps, that I was using a tool not designed for the specific purpose for which I was using it) to deal with them. But, in the opinion of my Inner Judge, more and more and more and more of these little nasties keep turning up and keep coming at me, taxing my ability to deal with the speed, ferocity, and magnitude of their onslaught. Soon I can't dance around them anymore. Then they figure out how to sneak past my defenses. Finally, my strategy for dealing with them is exhausted and then I'm really in trouble. That's the position in which I've seen myself lately more often than I wish were the case.

So if I am to mollify the Inner Judge's harsh verdict that so many aspects of me are bad--creepy, sneaky, aggressive, fast-moving, potentially lethally toxic, and worthy of being destroyed using a tool that was never designed for the purpose but that can prove effective (if easily overwhelmed) in the short term--and to accept, love, and welcome these aspects of me as beneficial when properly directed, how exactly do I do that? How do I shift from seeing them as creepy, poisonous nasties coming to attack me to seeing them as helpful little fuzzies coming in for a cuddle? That strikes me as a pretty major shift of perception.

Even if I were to look at each one individually, see how it's currently attacking, figure out what it really wants, and redirect its energy toward something productive, that seems like a tremendously daunting task, considering the number of "spiders." And it seems that I'd have to endure an awful lot of spider bites from the ones I haven't gotten to yet while I was converting each one to a cuddly fuzzy.

Maybe there's a way to do what never occurred to me in the dream: to address the root of the problem. It seems to me that one way to do that might be to get the Inner Judge to lighten up generally. I won't say he's a bastard--that would just be him applying his overly-harsh judgment against himself--but in his over-zealous attempts to protect me he winds up getting in my way a lot. 

Hmm, maybe he's not my Inner Judge after all. Maybe he's my Inner Secretary of Homeland Security.  

It's time to take him out to a party, show him a good time, and get him to loosen the hell up.