Keene Short
Arachnophilia
non-fiction
I have spider dreams. Not always, but enough to notice. In some dreams, they’re a texture of my skin, in others peripheral. In some I feel them all over me until I twitch awake. I am knee-deep in a creek and clunky crab-like spiders latch onto my ankles. Or, I sit at my desk and a spider weaves a web above me, becoming larger each time I look up until the creature is the size of my head. Sometimes the spiders are red translucent strands attached to my body, as if my pores have sprouted their legs, and I rip them from my skin in the shower. Sometimes, half-asleep, I half-feel them sewing up my feet in silk. Sometimes I just feel them as little shivers on my thigh.
**
It’s a myth that you eat an average of eight spiders when you sleep at night. They don’t sneak into your mouth, slip between the warm, wet cavern of your lips, and slide down your throat the way they do when you wash them down the shower drain. They know better. Spiders are ancient. They haven’t skittered this Earth for 400 million years to become a late-night snack.
**
Much of horror, as a genre, is predicated on using the audience’s assumed curiosity. It’s built on titillation, relies upon an audience that wants to see something disgusting or terrifying, and often indicts the audience for that same curiosity. We enter into a horror film anticipating violence, and whether or not we are satiated, we cannot deny the curiosity to be made horrified, to be unable to react except with sounds, convulsions, little marks of surprise. The audience is turned into an active bystander, a participant whose options are to continue watching or turn away.
**
As a child, I was curious about spiders. I found them fascinating. I cherished Eric Carle’s The Very Busy Spider more than any other book in his menagerie, and later in grade school, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web reinforced my curiosity. Real spiders were strange and often scary, but that didn’t keep me from actively seeking out spiders on the playground or in the backyard, lifting up rocks and watching their legs scurry away. Once, I stood transfixed at an orb weaver wrapping up an ant in silk. They were mysterious, and I wanted to know their secrets. I accrued a lot of good luck in childhood catching them in my house between construction paper, and empty jelly jars, and releasing them outdoors, telling them not to worry, to be on their merry way.
**
Dream analyst Jane Teresa Anderson notes that spiders, far from universal, are contingent. She advises that people experiencing repeated spider dreams should place “that information in the context of [their] personal history” with spiders. Is my history with spiders personal? Is western pop culture and a fondness for horror movies a deep enough context? Here, I catch myself unsatisfied, wanting a more satisfying explanation, something more romantic or mystical.
**
I interacted with spiders often while growing up. They came and went in my home. My mother said casually whenever a spider ran across the floor that’s what happens when you live on a mountain. Once, an ambiguously shaped spider dashed up to me when I opened the door to a tool shed, stopping just shy of my feet, and looking up at me like a golden retriever. For years, every time I emerged from the shower, there was a spider on the wall. I ignored some and smashed others. I learned to shake my towel thoroughly after I watched a chunky black spider sprint down my wet leg from the towel I was using to dry my crotch, as fast as a drop of water down a cold glass. My legs, already hairy at an early age, have remembered the feeling.
**
In another life, I become an arachnologist. I photograph webs in the morning dew and know the Latin names of a hundred species. I get sent weird questions every Halloween. In the life I chose, I write about spiders as if they are mythological creatures. In this life, I’m the one asking weird questions, like Why am I dreaming of spiders? and What does it mean if some of those dreams are erotic? In another life, I satisfy curiosity, but in this life, it is never satiated.
**
During the Cold War, spiders were readily available low-budget monsters. Movies like Tarantula! (1955), Earth vs. the Spider (1959), and Horrors of Spider Island (1960) all feature spiders enlarged to nightmarish proportions, attributed either to chemical or radioactive influence reflecting anxieties about nuclear technology, or the spiders’ origins in tropical countries, coinciding with US military assaults on Korea and Vietnam and related Orientalist propaganda. The monster movie spiders I grew up with were less ideologically obvious. The 1999 Wild Wild West remake featured a cake of the White House covered in tarantulas and a Confederate veteran’s steampunk spider machine. Shortly after, 2001 brought Arachnid and a remake of Earth vs the Spider, and in 2002, Eight-Legged Freaks, Spider-Man, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (featuring Aragog and friends) graced the screens a year before I watched the giant spider Shelob wrap up Frodo in The Return of the King. As monster movies, they became campier, less engaging, fun the way that cheap beer is fun: Ice Spiders (2007), Arachnoquake (2012), Arachnicide (2014), Lavalantula (2015).
**
It's a myth that you are never more than three feet away from a spider, but this depends on where you are. When working for the parks service, a seasoned forest ranger from Alaska told me it's bad luck to kill a spider. For centuries, spiders were storytellers, builders, weavers. They play a role in many creation stories. They give humans gifts, and they often symbolize good fortune. Outside of western pop culture, spiders are wise and compassionate. At the park, we were often tasked with swiping away cobwebs from the rental cabins, even if no one was staying in them that night, exchanging bad luck for our wages.
**
Most species are harmless to humans. One study of animal-related deaths in the US between 2008 and 2015 found that only 49 people died from spider bites in that time. I don’t think a fear of spiders is necessarily irrational, given the actual danger of some species, and I certainly understand the discomfort. But sometimes the discomfort itself is what I find enjoyable, an inexplicable quandary, like it’s a puzzle to solve.
**
One September, a jumping spider befriended me in my apartment, dancing closer and closer to me as I sat on my couch watching him move, fuzzy and big-eyed like a Disney sidekick. The spider jumped around my living room for a week, once crawling onto my laptop while I went to refill my coffee. Alison Hawthorne Deming describes the death of a wolf spider in her home quite beautifully: “The life had gone out of the small body that days ago had been so filled with the force of the ongoing. It had seemed then as big as a sheriff’s badge.” I never found the body of a jumping spider nestled gracefully in a corner. I don’t know how long he entertained the force of the ongoing in my apartment. I have no way of knowing what a good life for a spider is like. I don’t know if he trusted me enough to know that he was safe in my company, but he was.
**
One night, I dream of spiders on my neck, and the next night, my girlfriend uses the neckties in my closet to blindfold me and bind my wrists together, hold me down, tease me or slap me across the face when I’m bound up and can’t move except with sounds, convulsions, little marks of surprise.
**
Just like in my dreams, spiders are silent. Lacking vocal cords, they cannot yelp, let alone cry or laugh. Male wolf-spiders, though, get creative by rubbing their pedipalps together to produce soft vibrations that shutter through leaves and grass, attracting females. To humans, this produces a purring-like sound. Unless they’re squealing in pain from a hero’s flamethrower, the monster spiders in horror movies are silent, all dance and motion, walking vessels for meaning.
**
There’s an episode of This American Life about fear that begins with Ira Glass talking to a woman who overcame her extreme arachnophobia through aggressively direct exposure therapy. The audio features a recording of her confronting a tarantula, seemingly without any kind of buildup. The ten-second-long ghastly scream she emits was startling when I heard it. The scream went on so long I thought the audio was stuck. In horror movies, especially bad ones, I can take a lot of this, but knowing the scream was genuine left my stomach churning.
**
One particular lyric from How the Grinch Stole Christmas conveying the Grinch’s grinchiness goes “Your brain is full of spiders.” In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey calls Mr. Potter, a typical Depression-era capitalist villain, “nothing but a scurvy little spider.” In propaganda posters preceding both World Wars, spiders, alongside octopuses, were used to represent British, Russian, Japanese, and German imperialism as well as Nazi aggression. Sometimes they were representative of global conspiracy theories like “Judeo-Bolshevism” and the “yellow peril.” As recently as 2019, the Canadian journal Inside Policy featured a cover image of a racially characterized President Xi Jinping as a giant red spider wrapping up a terrified white businessman in a thick web.
**
Another dream analyst, Kelly Sullivan Walden, claims that because “everyone and everything in your dream is you, dreams of a spider [may] symbolize that you are connecting with the part of yourself that is strategic, methodical, enticing, and seductive.” The trope of the seductive spider, though, draws on male anxieties about powerful women. Black widow spiders got their name because the females often eat males, who are smaller and weaker, after mating. It’s the trope of the femme fatale making its way into zoology, which then emerges in pop psychology on the internet, and pop culture with Marvel characters like Black Widow or several horror thrillers of the same name, featuring women whose seductive power is too much for men to resist, conflating sexual independence with danger.
**
I used to wake up with a jolt when the spiders came into my dreams, but as I got used to them, they stayed longer, moving closer around me. Sometimes in my dreams, I pause and let them linger like a breeze on my skin, like a finger sliding up my thigh. I’ve never dreamt of being tied up or being eaten by a spider. They aren’t hostile, the dream spiders. They are often quite friendly.
**
Horror movies are more captivating to me than frightening, even at their most grotesque. Is it pleasurable to watch people squirm? To be the one squirming? I’m ambivalent. I enjoy sharing fear, just as I enjoy sharing pleasure. The spider dreams are neither horrific nor erotic, but sensual. If I am everything in my dreams, am I simply teasing myself with spiders? Teasing, being teased—the tension between curiosity and curiosity’s satisfaction—are among the sex acts I enjoy the most. Possibility, rather than fulfillment, is the driving force behind horror as well as erotica, which coalesce in the same structure with (mostly) different sensations. In that tension, new possibilities emerge, propelled by curiosity, which, at its most captivating, takes the shape of wonder.
**
Despite the tropes, spiders are not planners. They build webs through impulse and improvisation, rather than scheming. The nineteenth-century American naturalist Henry Christopher McCook wrote that those “who imitate the industry of that contemptable creature may, by God’s blessing, weave themselves into wealth and produce a plentiful estate.” They are mascots for the Protestant work ethic. Similarly, Karl Marx uses spiders as well as bees to make a point about production: “A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.” Spiders are productive by instinct, their plentiful estate as organic to their bodies as breathing—meaning that imagination is a key step in the labor process. Spiders build without motive, their creative process itself the force of the ongoing. Maybe this lends them their mystique. They are a species of artists, creative by nature. As symbolism, they are up for interpretation, and for a long time, those interpretations were driven by wonder.
**
Are the spiders a reflection of my wants more than my fears? Are these aspirational spiders? I don’t think I aspire to be strategic, least of all through seduction. When my girlfriend and I began experimenting mildly with BDSM, taking turns tying each other up, the spider dreams continued unabated but were more removed from my body. They stopped crawling on my skin and stayed on the walls. Experimentation had its limits, or maybe it was we who had the limits. We slowed down for a while, realizing that the pleasures of domination are in the sensuality of surprise and trust, about reacting to touch without hesitation, a sturdy trust that can take a long time to build.
**
The spider dreams are fading. I’m having fewer, remembering fewer details, remembering them less viscerally. Although the dreams might be on their way out, the spiders themselves have returned. In the span of a week, a daddy longlegs perched on my window for a while, a pregnant spider hung above my glassware in my cabinet, and a wolf spider slunk past me while I sat on the toilet. Most recently, while working the circulation desk at an Idaho public library, I watched a single spider descend in front of me from the large blue CHECKOUT sign hanging above my computer. The spider perched like a ball of lint above the instructions for applying for a library card. This was just a week after children’s book author Eric Carle passed away. Just moments before the spider descended, I had checked in a copy of The Very Busy Spider. The library’s online maintenance system let me know that a patron had placed a hold on the book, and I printed out the sheet and slipped it between the pages, seeing Carle’s big, bright rendering of the spider’s progress inside a brown square of a fence, the web growing and growing with every turn of the page. When I looked up, I could see the strand the spider had descended on. I watched as the spider swerved from left to right before taking decisive action and descending to the floor on another long strand, falling while not falling while not really flying or climbing, but floating in a gossamer cliff dive, before darting beneath the desk like a jewel thief, vanishing on impulse.
Keene Short writes in Spokane, Washington. He serves as the managing editor for Atticus Review. Find more of his work at keeneshort.com.