A few weeks ago I confronted a gargantuan hairy orange spider with a three foot wide web on my back patio. It returned with a vengeance in a dream the other night. I was at a horse race track with this guy who was desperately trying to convince me to lay down a ton of cash on a horse. I told him it wasn’t a good idea because I knew the horse wouldn’t win; I had a premonition. As we walked along this curving walkway around the outside of the betting area, I froze in horror. Draped across the ceiling and down one side was a massive web, the domain of the orange spider, now grown to the size of the fruit of the same name. It scuttled about, occasionally dropping from the ceiling and then returning to the web’s center where it deflated its body to a more compact form. A man standing near the web noted with amusement the spider’s proximity and then returned to his conversation. Only I seemed to think, “Aaaaahhhh! Aaaaaaahh! Look at that big spider!”

Then last night I found myself in some Midwestern field complete with decaying barns. I needed to get back to my car or something, but I realized that the field was full of small webs, each containing a large black spider at its center. It looked as though someone had gone nuts with the clone stamp tool in Photoshop. The webs and spiders were all identical. I’m not sure what I did to escape the field.