Fairies, Folklore and Forteana
SPIDERS OF THE MIND
Yesterday morning, I woke after a very short night.
To my horror, when I turned to my stillsleeping wife, I saw that a long-legged, fistsized spider was walking across her face.
I’m not particularly keen on spiders but my wife fears them and she had, coincidentally, had a nightmare about spiders the day before. I made a grab for the spider, desperate not to wake her: I could imagine the screams if she were to come to with this monster on her cheek. But the spider vanished under her. I now shook her awake and told her that I’d seen a ‘tiny’ insect on her. She sat up, sharpish – she’s not keen on creepycrawlies – and I hunted, determined to remove the beast, preferably without her seeing.
The attentive reader will know what is coming. There was absolutely nothing there. I had had a hypnopompic hallucination. These are waking visions that come in the morning when – so psychologists tell us – the line between dream and reality becomes blurred. The spider was bigger than anything you would find in continental Europe: it also had impossibly long and dainty legs. The spider, in fact, reminded me of the ‘soot gremlins’ in that great Studio Ghibli film Totoro: it had a slightly cartoonish quality, particularly in its movements. I’d talked of soot gremlins the
HYPNOPOMPIC VISIONS COME IN THE MORNING WHEN THE LINE BETWEEN DREAM AND REALITY IS BLURRED
evening before while discussing the spiders in my wife’s dream. My subconscious had evidently broken through into the waking world.
That early morning encounter fascinates me because it felt so real. I’ve sometimes had very low grade visual and aural hallucinations where I was aware that no one else present would have shared the experience: i.e. it felt like a figment of my imagination as it was happening. This was not my impression here. I was anxious that my wife should not see the spider, which seemed absolutely physical: I grabbed at it. I said that the spider had a ‘cartoonish quality’: I was able to reason my way, subsequently, to its impossibility. But had I seen a smaller spider then I would have sworn in a court of law to its reality and argued that it had escaped.
I know from the Fairy Census how many people see fairies as they are going to sleep, in the middle of the night or in the morning as they are waking up. Ditto ghosts. Ditto aliens. As always with forteana, we are left with the impossible question. Are these encounters an artefact of our minds; or is there a moment where the scales that normally block our vision fall away? In this case, I prefer the former explanation; not least because I don’t want that spider to be real…
Simon has edited Sheridan Le Fanu’s Scary Fairy Tales: Four Tales of Fairy Horror (2020).