Chekhov the Spider

[davidn]

I woke up at half past six from a dream about a monstrously giant spider. I remember being in a bedroom, watching a fly buzzing around and then being caught by a larger insect which held it between its pincers... and after waltzing around the air for a while like that, they were both ensnared on a hairy tentacle-like thing, which drew them into a black lump on the ceiling.

After devouring them in a way that wasn't clear to me, the lump unfolded its eight legs and scuttled across the ceiling. It looked at this point like a tarantula, but it slowly grew even bigger as it came down the wall, and by the time it reached the floor, it was a hulking mega-spider, the size of a small dog with eight legs, black with two rows of white spots going down its back. At this point I remember I thought about the usual spider removal method of a glass and piece of card, but you wouldn't have been able to do the same to this thing without at least a cleaning bucket and a broadsheet newspaper.

I backed away from it and realized that it was following me - not in a threatening way, just as if it wanted to encourage me in the direction I was going. So I led it down the stairs (the location having transformed into a half-correct mis-memory of my parents' house), aware even in the dream that this was unusual behaviour for a spider. As we got near the back door it got much faster, and I opened it to let it outside, but in its enthusiasm it missed the gap and ran right into the door. Its disguise fell off from the impact, and revealed that it was actually Chekhov, our ex-cat, who had dressed himself up because he didn't think that he was getting enough attention.

When I got out of bed in the real world, I opened the door to the landing and saw a small spider crawling across the ceiling. It remained its normal size.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've ever had a dream do so sudden an about-face from terrifying to completely adorable. :) (Though, they've probably gone the other way...)

Also, it's interesting to note how relative "monstrously giant" is.... when you said it was the size of a small(!) dog, I was relieved, because I had assumed it was the size of a car...

[davidn]

I know, it sort of... negated itself as one of my usual nightmares at the very end!

And things do have different scales for such descriptions - a... pimple, for example, wouldn't have to be very big at all before it was 'monstrously giant'. I think I found this spider more frightening than I would a car-sized one, though, because... I could see the spider in the dream as an exaggerated version of something I recognized (actually, now that I type that, I remember comparing it in the dream to one of Hexen II's psychotic spiders), whereas the building-sized B-movie ones are more obviously in the realms of fantasy.

[kjorteo]

http://media.photobucket.com/image/minecraft+spider+/trednis/minecraft%2520screenshots/2010-11-01_215909.png

[davidn]

Right... not playing that, then ;)

[kjorteo]

The giant spiders aren't really the problem--in fact, they're stupid enough that all you need to do is build something really tall directly above a place you're going to be (like on the roof of your base) and as you walk around, their "must be on top of you" impulse (like in that screenshot there) will sometimes compel them to scale it and then leap to their own deaths if you're on [under] the other side. Good way to farm string, which is useful for bows, which are basically the only safe way to deal with creepers.

Now the creepers, those are what you need to worry about. And the skeleton archers. And, okay, I guess the spiders can be more problematic when they have skeleton archers using them as war mounts, but that's very rare.