Spider who transforms into a person

To preface this, I am an intense arachnophobe. I woke up covered in hives and scratches after this dream because I freaked out and started scratching at myself in my sleep, so that may factor in.

Also, my mother and I no longer speak. I haven't seen or spoken to her in over 7 years. Our relationship is shot, and not likely to ever be patched back up. Our personalities are incompatible and she doesn't respect me as a person. Obviously, I no longer live with her.

I have very vivid dreams that play out almost like films.

The dream:
I woke up in my old bedroom, the one in my mother's old apartment. I took a shower and brushed my hair, got dressed and headed for my bedroom door, and across the entire celling in front of my door was a massive spider web with a huge orange spider (the body was probably 3 inches wide, never mind the legs). I froze in terror. I could feel my heart rate rising and all the sudden my clothing felt too tight and my breathing sped up. I realized I was getting close to a panic attack. Without taking my eyes off of it for fear that it would drop off its web and come for me before I could kill it, I felt around my room to find the bug spray. Finally, after what felt like forever, I found the spray, and on wobbly legs, I approached and when I was close enough, started spraying at it. It crawled towards the door, and with one arm, pulled a post it off of my wall, which it used as a shield while dropping to the floor and slipping under the door. As it went, I noticed it turn to a more peachy color.

I opened the door, and saw it getting larger and larger, and transform into a young blond woman in a sheer white dress and run into my mother's room. I followed her in there, still spraying the bug spray. My mother heard running and came up the stairs to investigate. I cornered the blond woman in my mother's shower and kept spraying her with the bug spray. My mother, surprisingly enough, came to help me, bringing more spray and didn't question my assertion that this was, in fact, a spider, and that the only way to get rid of it was to spray it or squish it. The blond woman started shaking her head "No," and tried harder to shield herself from the spray. She was soaked in it already, and she started to convulse, and as she did, her features became more arachnid. She began to turn more orangey and her extra limbs started to reveal themselves and while she died, she transformed most of the way back into the spider. I had to move to avoid being touched by the legs as they lashed out in my direction, and my mother was hitting at her with a broom. She still had some human features when all the movement stopped and I backed away, shaking like a leaf. My mother turned on the shower and pushed the dead, bloated spider creature down the drain and left the water on so I would be sure it was gone, and then went to take down the web in my bedroom because I wouldn't go back in until it was gone.



That's when bf woke me up, so I'm not sure if there was supposed to be more to it. The dream was simply bizarre, and in light of my phobia, very disturbing. I have to wonder if it means something because I haven't been able to get it out of my head all day.

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.