Date: 01-12-2020 

Introduction:

Last night was a tumultuous night in the dream realm. I had a few almost lucid dream experiences, but I couldn’t truly break free out of any of them. This resulted in some kind of dream inception, where I wasn’t sure whether I was dreaming still or had woken up.

Purple Widow:

This dream started in some kind of office space. The interior and decoration had a typical corporate feel; bluish green carpet, simple chairs, cubicles. I was there with my mother. We were both seated, opposing each other. She sat with her back towards a wide office window, which stretched from the floor to the ceiling. I could see a building through the window which I think stood on the other side of the road where our building was on. It looked like we were in a city. My mother was fighting something inside. She constantly seemed to make attempts to burst out in tears, but was fighting the eventual release. It was like she was trying to imagine where expressing herself this way would take her, but couldn’t follow through with it each time she got to that threshold of losing control. She seemed unable to truly let go, but she was experimenting with it, still, like something in her wished to just express her emotions.

In the office space we could sometimes hear strange voices. It was like they were talking over an intercom system, but there was no intercom. The voices were just everywhere. These voices were talking to me, every time they spoke, but they spoke in a language I didn’t understand. Though, I knew these voices were giving me instructions on what I was supposed to do there. But it truly sounded like gibberish to me, like complete nonsense. Then mom stopped what she was doing, and she tried to mimic what the voices were saying. Each time the voices spoke, she would try to articulate best she could. But just like me mimicking an Asian language, it probably sounded bad to a native speaker. It was annoying to me, as clearly she wasn’t copying the things said flawlessly, and I thought that whatever she was doing didn’t help me in trying to understand it.

To me it felt like she was trying to make it seem to me she did understand it, and tried to get agency over me through pretending she was with whoever was giving me these instructions. The more she tried it, the more she confidently made audible mistakes, and the more annoyed I got. Until I finally said something to her: “Stop it! You don’t speak that language!” But then something strange happened. There was a sudden change in the whole setting. I can’t really explain it very well, but everything seemed to change without anything changing. I just felt it. And my mom looked at me angrily and said out loud with the voice of my brother: “Dude, go to sleep!” And this woke me up! I woke up, but I was in the room I shared with my brother when we were little kids, in our parents’ house. The room looked exactly like it did back then, with our bunk beds and toys and all. It was the room as it was back then, and I was in my old bed, and my brother in his, but he was no kid. We were as we are now, grown young adults.

This didn’t alarm me. Sometimes things like this happen and I become lucid. Not this time though. I kept following the narrative of this dream, though wondered what had happened and how I got here. Apparently what I had said in my dream to mom, I had said out loud, and this had woken up my brother in this place. I knew something was off, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it as this place is intimately familiar to me. I turned and tumbled around in this bed of mine, trying to fall asleep again, but this bed was now much too small for me. The same for my brother, who is 5 inches taller than me, and thus our feet would sometimes touch as our bunk beds were connected on the foot end of the beds, oriented in a 90 degree angle to each other. Every time our feet would touch, both of us would tumble and turn, and mumbled things in annoyance, but we never spoke and just tried to get back to sleep. At one point I turned on my back and I saw one of the ceiling plates was missing above my bed.

I peered into the dark hole of where this plate was missing. This plate was missing in real life at some point because long ago I had a leaking aquarium on the attic, and water had found a way through the floor and onto the ceiling plates of this room. Though that happened long ago, it was actually when I no longer slept in the room with the bunk beds, so I never truly slept here while that plate was missing. My dad had removed the plate to estimate the damage, and because the plate had become soft and needed to be replaced. He had taken his time with that. So I peered into this dark spot, and as my eyes got used to the dark I noticed there was a spider hanging in a web above the other ceiling plates. But it was kinda big, and suddenly I noticed it had two bright yellow eyes. It startled me, and I quickly switched on the light so I could better look at it, exclaiming: “What the fuck!?” It was mostly black or dark gray, with dark purple pointy legs. It was looking at me with its yellow glowing eyes. It looked fake actually.

My brother was very annoyed I had turned on the lights, but when he saw my frightened face he had sat upright in his bed and was curious about what had scared me. The spider on its turn I think felt “detected” and had crawled out of its web, came out from its hiding place, and walked away from me upside down on the white ceiling plates. I rushed to the back of my bed, cause its size became more apparent with its dark colours on this white background. It was easily the size of a child’s hand. But as it was getting away, it seemed to grow in size. It grew and grew as it got further away from me, and before it reached the wall it had grown to the size of an adult hand, with an abdomen the size of a tennis ball. But its skin was smooth and shiny, like it was a plastic toy spider, but animated. Its strange cartoonish yellow eyes added to that experience, and now it even had grown a mouth with doglike teeth. It truly looked like a menacing plastic kids toy, which had come to live through magic or something.

The creature crawled towards the wall in between the two sets of doors of our clothing closets – which were built into the wall – while I said to my brother: “I find this creature scary as fucking hell.” M remained mute and just kept his focus on the spider, which had now reached the wall. Before it crawled on the wall it dipped its abdomen on the ceiling and attached a silk thread, like a safety cord. Now it crawled downwards. I saw a chance to go back to the front of my pillow and blow a gush of breath from the side of the spider so it would lose its grip on the wall. As it would fall I could then cut the silk thread and it would no longer be able to crawl back to us, I thought. Writing this down it makes absolutely no sense now, but in the dream this was sound thinking. But as did this my plan totally backfired. I blew on the animal, which in a reflex pulled all its legs inwards, and dropped itself to the floor. But in that fraction of a second as it did so, its silk safety line acted as a bungee cord, so as it almost reached the ground it bounced back upwards and landed on the far side of my bed where my pillow was.

I had rushed all the way back on the foot end of my bed again, cowering my torso and legs under the blanket, on the little wooden plateau at the end of my bed. M was there too but as the animal started walking he rushed to the other side of his bunk bed. The animal began to pace towards me over the blankets. Panic set in and I tried to kick and push the creature with my hands and feet from under the blankets to hinder its progress, but it was to no avail. It kept anticipating my every move. I cried out one last time: “I’M REALLY SCARED!” as this thing launched itself at my neck, where in a fraction of a second I felt its soft smooth abdomen come between my shoulder and cheek when I suddenly woke up in my own bed. As this had been the second time that I had woken up in this sequence of events, I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was truly awake now. If I wasn’t, the dream had become lucid this time. I waited it out a while, but it seemed this was the reality I would consider the real one.

 

Analysis 17-02-2024:

I wrote this analysis years later after translating this dream to English for this journal. This was one of the more bizarre dream experiences I had. Prominently present were my brother and mother. I think this dream was about the dynamic between us. It ain’t good.

I was getting instructions in a language I do not understand. The idea of receiving instructions at all is unpleasant. An office space to me is also an unpleasant place. I don’t think those instructions were anything good. I think this depicted perhaps some system trying to influence me.

Though I couldn’t understand the language, I did somehow intuitively knew they were instructions and that these instructions were meant for me. So whether I understand the instructions or not, the force behind it still knows how to influence me.

As my mother tried to mimic the voices without understanding what was said herself either, she tried to get influence over me. It didn’t work. Perhaps this depicts that the force that was trying to influence me was working through her. Perhaps this shows that through my mother’s desire to have influence over me, she is inviting a certain evil to influence her own behaviour.

Me reacting to her the way I did perhaps illustrates how I have distanced myself again from her, as I have in the past, but that through distancing myself from her with the purpose of distancing myself from her, I am still expressing a reaction to her attempted influence, meaning the influence is still influencing my behaviour in a way. Maybe not the way it wants, but an influence nonetheless. To truly distance myself from her I must no longer do it for the reason of wanting to distance myself from her. I need to find a way to forgive her in my heart.

My mother spoke with the voice of my brother. This is very interesting, considering recent events. Though I am not entirely sure if the date of this dream is right, as I recall telling it to my brother. I could be wrong. Perhaps I edited the dream at the date it is now listed. But considering where things are now between me and my brother I think that I heard his voice when she spoke means something. She spoke through his voice, or they both used the same voice. “Go to sleep!” Evil would like that, wouldn’t it?

I am not afraid of spiders in real life. I’ve kept and bred tarantulas and various other large arachnids. This spider in this dream might very well resemble my mother. She is now indeed a widow. I shouldn’t poke her. She is vindictive. She is prone to retaliate.