"Welcome to my Nightmare"

So I’ve had this recurring nightmare over the past ten(ish) years.  I haven’t had one of them in a while and I’ve never made a dream journal (which I’ve always wanted to do but, frankly, am too lazy to keep one), so I don’t recall exactly when I had them or what precipitated each one, but it’s the only theme that I’ve had on a recurring, albeit sporadic, basis.

Those of you who know me, know that I have a touch of arachnophobia.  Those of you who don’t know me, should know that “a touch of” is a blatant understatement.  Spiders freak me out.  Seeing one gives me goosebumps, sends my heart racing and makes the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand straight up.  When I see them outside, I make a very wide berth when getting around them.  When I see them inside, I call on whoever I can to kill them for me – I’ve interrupted my boss from work when I spotted one on the moulding above my office door and I was afraid to walk underneath it to leave my office (bet he never expected to have an employee buzz him on the phone and frantically say “omg there’s a big creepy spider in my office and you need to come kill it now!”).  I’ve also called my sister and made her drive across town because there was a *huge* spider who made itself at home in the bush on the corner of my front porch, and I had to run past it to get to my front door (in my defense, you could see that sucker from the street).  Then there was the time, around 11:00 p.m. on a school night, when I went into the garage to get my drawing pad and a huge spider dropped out of it and landed on the metal part of the doorway separating the garage from the hallway.  I could not jump over it to get into the house because the irrational part of my brain couldn’t comprehend the rational possibility that the spider wasn’t likely to leap straight up and attack me two feet off the ground (and yes, it was still alive).  So I stood trapped in the garage and yelled upstairs for the kids to come down to help.  What ensued was an assessment of the situation by the kids (“geez! That’s an UGLY spider!”), confirmation from me (“yeah, no shit!”), and a lengthy Destroy (spider) and Rescue (me) Mission that involved an air soft rifle, a shovel (because no one wanted to pick up the dead spider with a paper towel) and cell phones (because the kids, of course, wanted to document the mission).  Anyway, you get it now.

So in these dreams, I am about to move into a new house – my dream house.  The exact details, floorplans etc. of the house are always a little different but the house is always big, very spacious with lots of room, and rooms.  I’ve always dreamed of having a big house.  But in these dreams, there’s always something that prevents me from moving in, and it’s always spiders; the dreams then turn into breath-stealing nightmares.  In one, as soon as I opened the front door and stepped through, the entire living room was overrun with huge spider webs dripping from every inch of the ceiling, several feet in length.  The room was dark, spiders in shadows created by their own trappings, and the air was thick with fear.  I couldn’t breathe and in fact, was jolted awake by my racing heartbeat.

Another time, I was about to move into a very cute two-story house.  It was the middle of the afternoon, a beautiful day with a warm, shining sun.  I entered through the back door into the kitchen, a beautiful, white and inviting room.  Then off the kitchen there was one of those pull-down ladders, which led to a small bedroom loft upstairs.  As I was climbing the ladder I envisioned warm sunlight streaming through a cozy window.  Instead, the room was filled with spiders and I practically fell down the ladder rushing to get down.  I ran out of the house, terrified to go back in.

The other time that I can recall off the top of my head, was the dream where I was moving into a huge house – I mean crazy huge: multiple floors and in each central hallway, there was a door that opened up to a different hallway and more rows of doors.  It appeared never-ending and there was so much of the house that I wanted to explore.  There was one “clean” floor, but when I stepped out of that doorway and looked up toward the rows of floors with their closed doors, all I felt was this intense, heavy trepidation.  I couldn’t venture up to any of them because each one of those floors all had an ominous vibe coming from them, and I knew without looking that they were all dark, spider- and web-infested chambers.

 Welcome to my nightmare. 

 I suppose in real life, there’s some correlation between the spiders and my elusive dream house.  The spiders represent a deep fear of something (other than actual spiders, though that fear is real enough) and I don’t think the “dream house” actually represents a house in the structural sense.  Some other ‘dream’ or goal, perhaps?  What does it really mean?  *shrugs*  I have no idea.  But I imagine I won’t be contacting a realtor anytime soon...

 

 

This was written for Blogophilia:

 Blogophilia Week 4.8 Topic:  In Shadows

Bonus Points:

(Hard, 2 pts)  Incorporate a recurring nightmare

(Easy, 1 pt)  Use a lyric or quote by Alice Cooper

(“Welcome to my Nightmare”)