Reading some of your previous posts has provided some background information and context which helps to interpret this very upsetting dream more accurately.

For example and speaking generally, it’s overly clear you’ve had some very difficult experiences such as growing up without your natural father and later having a very poor relationship with your mother resulting in not seeing her for several years.

Such circumstances might understandably have reduced your willingness to explore life to its full in order to avoid additional excruciating pain.

If so, any such fear of life and its experiences might be symbolized by the dream in using something which you are terrified of in outer life, namely, a spider.

But the result of, say, avoiding earthy signals from your instinctive side of yourself in the form of hunches, natural reactions, fantasies, gut feelings and so on (which would potentially involve you more fully in life) could tend to be “killing” your overall potential self (the young woman).

Perhaps being cut off from your mother and an underlying sense of dread in not having a loving, reliable person to rely on is one of the main motivations for an understandable but too constant desire to avoid exposure to life’s dangers (i.e. your mother helps to kill the spider/woman in the dream).

A helpful way to find the meaning of the very unusual image of the giant spider which turns into a woman is to look at what people have thought about spiders over thousands of years.

That’s because these ideas, myths, folktales and artworks etc. which contain spiders come from the same source as dreams, that is, the psyche itself, so valuable parallels can be drawn from an outside image along with a dream image in order to help decipher the latter’s meaning.

Overall, the spider has been viewed as a kind of microcosm of nature and life itself.

For instance, some species of spider create beautiful round-shaped webs that shimmer with dew in the sun, but at the same time, these webs are meant to ensnare prey.

In this one simple image are contained the realities of “creativity” and “destructiveness”, just like Mother Nature gives birth but causes death in an unending cycle.

The image of a “web” can stir up all kinds of negative connotations, e.g. “a web of conspiracies and lies”; the World Wide Web lures us into endless sites of often unreliable data, doubtful sources of relationship as well as limitless perversions; “entanglements” with others can lead to all sorts of problems etc.; also we can fall prey to an inner web of defenses and illusions to ward off the harsher realities of life in general.

However, a round spider’s web has a “center” which is symbolic of a kind of wholeness which has absorbed and accepted both the lighter and darker sides of life by maintaining an ongoing, interactive balance between the two.

This might have been the essence of the message which your dream was trying to get across, saying something like “Yes, there are horrible frightening things in life but the wholeness of love can transform them into the natural and the beautiful over time”

If this way of looking at your dream seems to make any sense in your personal circumstances, you might like a book that I often recommend titled “Meeting the Shadow”, edited by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams. It covers the concept of the dark, emotional and instinctive side of human nature and of life that we may not be very comfortable with, and covers how to deal with it in detail. It's easy to read, being composed of many short articles by various authors inside and outside the psychological community.

Other books to choose from on this subject include “Owning Your Own Shadow” by Robert Johnson, “Romancing the Shadow” by Connie Zweig and Steven Wolf, “Make Friends with your Shadow” by William Miller, “Your Shadow” by Robin Robertson, and “A Little Book on the Human Shadow” by Robert Bly.

Anyway, I hope that these ideas can be helpful in some way.

Please feel free to make any comments or to ask any questions that you may want to about this particular way of looking at your dream.