Dreams

Over the course of my life I can remember two instances of dreams that I revisited over several evenings. Each dream was triggered by specific events in my life.

The first instance happened when I was about seven years old. While playing at my grandmother's I was bitten by a black widow. Several hours passed before I or anyone else realized what had happened. That evening I was sleeping when my mother came into check on me. She found my arm swollen several times its normal size. She took me to the ER, where my arm was lanced and the poison removed. Upon testing they realized that I had been bitten by a black widow.

About a week later I had a dream where I was laying in bed asleep. I opened my eyes and found that my room had become filled with spiders. The walls and ceiling were an undulating mass of legs and fangs. There was no escape as even the door was covered. At that moment the realization came to me that this army of spiders had already devoured my family and I was next on the menu. I shut my eyes and when I opened them I saw that the light fixture was covered by a large black widow the size of a beach ball. As I looked on in shock its large glowing red eyes stared right at me. Than by some unseen signal they all began lowering themselves by their webs towards my bed eyes wide with hunger. At that point I always woke up screaming.

The second instance occurred when I was thirteen years old. My grandfather had recently passed away after a long illness. His passing was my first real exposure to death.

About two weeks after his funeral I began having the following dream. I found myself sitting in a railroad car. The train appeared to be traveling across the old west. There were several people in the car none of whom I recognized. In the center of the car was a coffin. Everyone kind of looked at each other but none of us looked into the coffin. A few nights later I had the same dream. Only this time there was one less person in the car. It took until the third appearance of this dream for my dream self to gather the courage to look into the coffin. Sure enough the person missing from the group was the person in the coffin.

For about a month after that night I had a very bad case of insomnia. I somehow convinced myself that if I kept having this dream the night would come when I was in the coffin and that when that occurred I would fail to wake up. Fortunately for my sanity I came to a somewhat reluctant acceptance of death before sleep deprivation drove me insane.