Spider Dreams

Two nights in a row, I dream of spiders.

Sunday morning I wake after dreaming about opening the pantry and confronting a horrible fat-legged mass the size of a starfish hanging on the wall above the flour and sugar. The only thing spider-like about it is the way it wriggles to the corner below the shelf as I stare and then slowly close the pantry door. The dream me learns that the species is not indigenous to North America and thinks it must all be a prank. The real me wakes up and shuffles to the pantry, the scene of a recent unsettling moth infestation, to make sure all is well.

That night it is a black spider, smaller but still palm-sized, suspended by a single thread above the fireplace in the living room. An ambiguous character scrawled in red on its abdomen only confuses the question of its toxicity. Returning with my wife, the tips of its legs are red as well. One of us swats at it, misses, it drops, we don't know where. It's gone. Dead? Probably not. It ends sometime in the dark of morning and I roll back to sleep, perhaps dreaming of other things that I won't remember as clearly as that light outlining that ominous shape slowly rotating its red-marked body in the living room air.

I wake calmly from both dreams, no sweats, no thrashing or sitting up abruptly, no gasping for breath, not even feelings of panic or alarm. Only a milder, more sinister sense of unease and a quiet lingering fear that all is not right.

The real-life spider in the shower this morning whose webs cross from the ceiling to the shampoo bottle and around the corners of the windowsill is real and causes more panic than its dream-siblings. It is also vanquished more easily, squished on the shampoo lid and rinsed down the drain. The nearly-invisible threads remain.

Results to my Google search about spider dreams offer a variety of options: a controlling female figure, hostility towards a spouse, feeling like an outsider, misfortune, manipulation, deadly force, or feeling trapped. Bingo.

Friday, the email from the Vice President of Marketing brought a real disappointment: they were going with an external candidate over me. The primary reason? They believed I had all the competence the job required, but they didn't think I would be happy doing it. They liked me too much to give me a job that they expected to make me miserable over the next three to five years. As a result, I'm dodging awkward office encounters with old team members while trying to overcome injured pride and dashed hopes. That's the outsider part.

The VP says "You are one of the most talented writers I have ever worked with. You can succeed at anything it is you want to do." She's not the first--people have been telling me that my whole life. But what do you do when you don't know what it is you want to do?

Check that. What do you do when those things you want to do don't seem to pan out? What happens when the things you want to do turn out to be unrealistic? What happens when everything that feels rewarding, valuable, and beautiful turns out to not be sustainable as a lifestyle? Or worse, what happens when everything you thought you wanted becomes uniformly unappealing for one reason or another? What happens is you find something that will do; you pick up something that works and you are afraid to let go of it. Some days you hate it; some days it is not bad; and some days you experience victories. You find good in what you have in spite of the bad bits. After a while, you start wishing for something better, something different, but what? What will you find that you can do for the next thirty years without feeling discontented at some point or without compromising some of the things that you want? Afraid that nothing will pan out, nothing will be as good as it seems, and nothing will ever be good enough, you don't do anything.

What happens is you start dreaming about spiders.