Curiosity and Fear

OR: how I fell in love with a nightmare.

Note: I’m about to talk a lot about spiders and other insects. There are no pictures. Cover image is by Hunter Desmarais, courtesy of Unsplash.

When I remember my dreams, they’re always about bugs.

Specifically, they’re about infestations of bugs, or swarms of bugs. Usually it goes a little something like this: I’m sitting on the sofa, doing something mundane, and I pick up a pillow. Clinging to its underside are hundreds of insects. I am then obligated to rid my house of the infestation, but I’m unable to contend with the sheer number of them. I wake up somewhere in the middle of a frantic struggle against this repulsive and irrepressible force.

I’m never frightened in the dream, not the way I’d be if I were being chased by an axe murderer. I’m just overwhelmed and horrified. That’s how I know this recurring dream— which I’ve dealt with for most of my adolescent and adult life— is a stress dream. There is no situation more stressful to me than this: unseen and ill-intentioned creatures filling all the empty cracks of my life, to be discovered at random.

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The origin of this is easy enough to pinpoint in my childhood: when I was a kid, we had an infestation of millipedes in our house. The pest control guy my mother hired told her there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot we could do about it: millipedes sometimes move in big swarms, and if your house happens to be in their path, the most you can do is caulk the living crap out of your exterior to force them to move around you instead of through you, and wait for them to pass.

Still, I avoided our basement for about a year. If I did go down there, there were always curled-up millipede corpses scattered along all the walls and in the corners. We kept the vacuum down there to suck them up as soon as we found them, but even my mother— my intensely neat, organized mother who has never met a label maker she doesn’t love or a tub she couldn’t find a use for— couldn’t stay on top of the sheer number of them. One morning, after caulking the living crap out of the exterior basement door, she woke up to discover a welcome-mat sized sea of them fighting to get into our house.

For the record, I still don’t like basements.

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Despite the fact that spiders, specifically, were never a huge problem for us (or any other bug other than that one absurd infestation), spiders feature regularly in my dreams. It’s because of how they move. Precise and many-legged, they appear to wiggle, but they’re faster than that word implies. There are few things as sudden as a spider.

I’m not usually a dramatic person. I’m comfortable with public speaking, when I get hurt I’m pretty quiet about it, and on one notable occasion in my adolescence, I rolled my mother’s Chevy Blazer on a patch of black ice and called her while upside down in the driver’s seat, only to inform her, levelly, that I was upside down on a nearby road and would need her to come pick me up.

But at the sight of a spider, I used to shriek, and shudder, and scream for my husband to kill it. None of this was melodrama— I was actually too afraid to do it myself.

In the summer of 2020, after we’d been locked down for months in fear of a virus we didn’t understand, as my wounded feelings about a book release thwarted by said lockdowns were starting to fade, I noticed a huge spider web stretched between one of our big planters and the arbor vitae tree next to it. It was wheel-shaped, with perfect unbroken lines of silk. Perched in the middle of it was a reddish brown spider the size of a black bean. It looked, I thought, almost like a crab.

(from 2020)

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Seeing it, I remembered with shame the last time I encountered this type of spider, in a similar web, between two trees that I regularly had to pass by on my way to the back door of our house. I was so unsettled by it at that time that one day I went outside with a bottle of bleach spray to kill it, thinking the bleach would offer it a swift death. That’s not what happened.

When I sprayed it, that spider writhed in apparent agony, and I, horrified, knocked it to the ground to kill it properly.

I later looked it up to find out what type of spider it was, and found out that it was a harmless Orb Weaver. Gentle. “Only bites if provoked,” Google said. I almost cried. I was okay with killing spiders, but I never want to torment an innocent creature, even if they do haunt my dreams.

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This one next to my front door was the same, and I had learned my lesson: I wasn’t going to kill this Orb Weaver.

Instead, I checked on it every morning when I let the dog out, watching it grow from bean-sized to nickel-sized to quarter-sized, so I could see the markings on its back. I looked it up and learned that it remade its beautiful web every single day, so each day it would be a slightly different shape and configuration. It became part of my routine: let dog out, check on spider, let dog in, make morning tea, eat breakfast.

I later learned that spiders are surprisingly clever, especially considering their pinhole-sized brains. Though we know they factor in a wide range of variables in building their webs— temperature, humidity, wind, silk supply— and make adjustments accordingly, we don’t know exactly how they make these evaluations. A spider can also navigate a maze.

They also use hydraulics to move. Their bodies are full of a blood-like substance called “hemolymph,” the varying pressure of which extends their legs or, receding, lets their legs naturally contract. This pressure is regulated by the cephalothorax (the “head” of the spider). The creepy wiggling that made my skin crawl was actually a marvel, the cephalothorax acting as a bellows to push fluid, lightning-quick, to the places where its pressure was most required.

Later that summer, I noticed another orb weaver on our back porch, right over our door. Instead of killing it, I trapped it in a glass and carried it to the arbor vitae. I was trembling the whole time.

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I’ve seen a few different kinds of spiders around our house. There’s a zebra spider that lives near our kitchen sink, no larger than a grain of rice. I ushered a yellow sac spider away from our toilet the other day. Last week I watched a delicate cellar spider cross my path in our basement while doing a dead lift.

When I see them, I usually talk to them. “Well, that’s not a great place for you to be, is it?” or “Come on, let’s get you somewhere out of the way.” I catch them in glasses or try to get them to crawl on an old magazine so I can put them outside— or I just eyeball the one that lives in the corner of my shower, hoping it’ll stay where it is, because at no time is a spider more intimidating than when you’re naked.

It’s been years since I’ve knowingly killed a spider. I used to make fun of people like me, who escorted arachnids outside instead of just stomping on them. “This is my zone,” I used to say. “I’m fine with them if they stay in their zone, but the second they come into mine, it’s fair game to kill them.” I sneered at our neighbors when they said they got rid of the spiders behind their house by spraying soapy water.

So after a lifetime of “bug dreams,” as I call them, the only way I can explain this change of heart is with curiosity.

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That pivotal spider summer, 2020, was a hard time. Weeks of watching the Covid death tolls climb and wiping down my mail with antibacterial wipes turned into a restless summer of protests and, for me, a heightened awareness of injustice in our society and my place in it. I’d spent months living my entire life on a computer, doing regular Zoom calls with my aging parents, visiting a friend’s island on Animal Crossing, and trying my best to promote a book on social media that no one could actually go into a store and buy. I was an exposed nerve, too aware of myself and the darkness of the world around me, and too uncertain about the future to feel anything but dread.

So when I saw that Orb Weaver next to my door, I think I just couldn’t bear to be harsh toward it. Instead, I decided to be interested in it. Curiosity yielded to wonder, as I marveled at these small, smart creatures that populated my yard and the century-old house that I live in. And wonder turned to a warm fondness. I can’t get rid of the primal instinct I have to recoil from them, which I think is probably a survival skill buried deep in my animal hindbrain. I’m not out there catching them in my hands like they’re fireflies— for one thing, that would scare the shit out of them; for another thing, it would scare the shit out of me.

But curiosity makes you gentler. And as I grow older, I think more about how easy it is to let your heart harden into a diamond, unchangeable and unassailable. It’s a protective instinct, like my fear of spiders— it helps you to survive the harshness of the world around you. But while it may serve you some of the time, it will also keep you from growing, from marveling, and from falling in love with something new. And that cost, in my opinion, is far too high.

So it feels like a small miracle, to soften toward something, to open myself up to it, and to let myself change.

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A few weeks ago, when it was still warm, I noticed a spider web above our back door. “A spider friend,” I said to my husband, which is what I call them now. When we walked inside, he flipped on the porch light. “To help attract bugs for him,” he said.