Blue_Opossum

Morning of February 14, 2016. Sunday.

Dream #: 17,954-05. Reading time (optimized): 2 min.



In my dream, my wife Zsuzsanna and I are in a shed that may be a distorted version of our present home’s shed. There is also an unknown male character.

A trapdoor spider about four times bigger than a real one is near the doorway. It bites Zsuzsanna on her right knee, but she is soon a young version of the Erin Walton character (played years ago by Mary Beth McDonough), which puzzles my dream self in a way that alters my level of awareness.

The man holds her as she cries and sits down and he gives her an injection near her right knee with a hypodermic needle (a very rare dream prop for me), which contains the cure. It seems she will recover. I look in the doorway, and there stands the four-times-bigger trapdoor spider. I eventually understand that the spider is Kali. “She is the mighty aspect of the goddess Durga. The name of Kali means black one and force of time. She is therefore called the Goddess of Time, Change, Power, Creation, Preservation, and Destruction.” (Kali often has four arms and two legs, which makes her an “insect,” not a “spider.”)

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Zsuzsanna used to play with trapdoor spiders without knowing they were venomous (yet luckily was never bitten). Secondly, I associate Erin Walton with the petting of a deer (relating to a documentary feature about her that I saw years ago as well as the Waltons episode “The Fawn”), which was like a very similar image in a photograph Zsuzsanna sent me before we met of her feeding a deer.

Zsuzsanna’s right knee was miraculously healed (even though doctors said it could never be) when we first met and shared meditations. Although there are other layers, two are interesting and fit perfectly. One is a ghost story related to Kali as a demonic living statue (though I no longer have that comic book). On Thursday, February 14th, 1974, I saw “The Waltons” episode “The Ghost Story.” “Strange things are occurring at the Walton home. The family uses a Ouija board to ask questions about the happenings. A small boy staying at the home is to leave to meet his father. Things happen to prevent this.” The original newspaper summary: “John-Boy obtains a ‘spirit board’ which is reputed to foretell the future and to put its interrogators in touch with the psychic world. When the board appears to be delivering mysterious messages, Grandma and Olivia insist that the children stop playing with it.”

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The trapdoor spider in my dream seems associated with a Ouija board (which is dependent on the use of hands and which is what a spider also represents in some dreams in a negative context), also representing Kali, also representing “messages” in the liminal stages of sleep which have various transpersonal sources. Because my 1971 dream features doorway waking symbolism using Kali, it seems a relevant marker. On one level, it serves as a personal confirmation against so-called psychics, “dream interpreters,” or ideas from questionable sources.

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