Tangled Webs
Sep. 21st, 2006 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyspriteI'd feel a lot better about falling asleep tonight if I could at least figure out why my subconscious has decided to repeatedly barrage me with nightmares about spiders biting my arms. Not just spiders, not just spider bites, but very clearly and specifically large spiders hiding in crevices and piting my forearms until they sting and ache and raise hard round bumps. The scenery changes from dream to dream - sometimes they're hiding in libraries, last night they were weaving webs around the crumbling cemetarial grounds of a beautiful old gothic mansion, but the important details of the dream have been the same.
I'm used to nightmares; that's not the part that bothers me. And the spiders themselves don't disturb me too much - while I'm mildly skittish about them, I've had much creepier nightmares. It's the recurrent nature of the dream that's got me on edge. I haven't had a recurrent dream since I was five years old and an unfortunate combination of my mother's penchant for B-grade schlock SF movies and a rather odd Breyer's Ice Cream commercial left me dreaming every night for two weeks that the president of the United States had been replaced by a giant alien bug who was forcing everyone to eat magic beans that turned them into locusts.
Unfortunately, the origins of this dream are more obscure. I have absolutely no idea what it could possibly mean, unless it's just a sign that I'm winding up asleep in such odd postures that my arms are falling asleep, which is unlikely since I haven't been waking up with stiff, achy, or pins-and-needles arms. I suppose that it could symbolize the complicated web of my life, but while my life is complicated, it's not particularly web-like or sinister - and even if it were, while that might explain the spiders, it wouldn't exactly explain why they're only biting my forearms.
I'm sure that if I hunted down a dream dictionary, it would have some clear, precise, and utterly ludicrous obscure explanation. Maybe it means that relatives wearing white will arrive on a rainy day with news about money, or that my poor housekeeping and lack of dusting has led to enough bad feng shui that my elbow chakra is blocked. Or maybe it just means that Fox has decided to retire as my totem animal, and that the spiders aren't happy about taking on the job.
I wonder, does this mean that I'll get the proportionate strength and abilities of an imaginary dream being? And if it does, what exactly would they be?
I'm used to nightmares; that's not the part that bothers me. And the spiders themselves don't disturb me too much - while I'm mildly skittish about them, I've had much creepier nightmares. It's the recurrent nature of the dream that's got me on edge. I haven't had a recurrent dream since I was five years old and an unfortunate combination of my mother's penchant for B-grade schlock SF movies and a rather odd Breyer's Ice Cream commercial left me dreaming every night for two weeks that the president of the United States had been replaced by a giant alien bug who was forcing everyone to eat magic beans that turned them into locusts.
Unfortunately, the origins of this dream are more obscure. I have absolutely no idea what it could possibly mean, unless it's just a sign that I'm winding up asleep in such odd postures that my arms are falling asleep, which is unlikely since I haven't been waking up with stiff, achy, or pins-and-needles arms. I suppose that it could symbolize the complicated web of my life, but while my life is complicated, it's not particularly web-like or sinister - and even if it were, while that might explain the spiders, it wouldn't exactly explain why they're only biting my forearms.
I'm sure that if I hunted down a dream dictionary, it would have some clear, precise, and utterly ludicrous obscure explanation. Maybe it means that relatives wearing white will arrive on a rainy day with news about money, or that my poor housekeeping and lack of dusting has led to enough bad feng shui that my elbow chakra is blocked. Or maybe it just means that Fox has decided to retire as my totem animal, and that the spiders aren't happy about taking on the job.
I wonder, does this mean that I'll get the proportionate strength and abilities of an imaginary dream being? And if it does, what exactly would they be?
no subject
Date: 2006-09-22 03:32 am (UTC)I think, however, you're going to need to have a sit-down conversation with your unconcious, since it clearly is trying to flag you down and otherwise get your attention.
Random thoughts: Your spiders keep biting you on your forearms? In a recurring dream which is giving you a feeling of dread? It was Jung or Freud who pointed out that the unconscious often speaks in puns and word games: Perhaps your spiders are trying to make you fore-warned about something, so that you are fore-armed.
I'm not asking you to answer such a question in public, but you might want to ask yourself is there something some part of you might be dreading (or might think you're not dreading enough) in your future?
Another thing to ask yourself is whether, if it were possible for you to interrogate the spiders and say, "Hey, what's this all about?" whether you would want to -- or whether you'd rather not know and have them bite you.
Usually when someone's unconscious keeps nagging them about something, and they just can't for the life of them figure out what it is or make heads or tails of the message, it's often because they fear the message is something they really, really don't want to know; and that is what it's doing (whatever it is), shoved into the closet of the unconscious, in the first place. It got relegated to the unconscious because the conscious rejected it; but now the unconscious is sending little creepy-crawlies under the door.