Dream: The Numerological Spider

Dream 20030310, 3:50 AM:

I’m walking through a building; it reminds me of a building in a zoo designed for reptiles or something. Inside each of the large glass-walled display rooms there are large plants made of leaves shaped kind of like jade plants or ginger root clumps; they are brownish and gray-green, they don’t have a lot of color. The spaces seem like they might be habitats for some kind of desert reptile, but they are actually devoted to the plants themselves. Some of the plants as I walk along are shaped like animals; I know that they aren’t trimmed that way, they’re engaged in some kind of natural camouflage, looking like animals for safety. One that I remember is a rhino.

I look into a classroom, and a woman professor is talking. I see a fruit-colored suitcase; it has stripes of bright colors.

Then, I’m walking down a hallway, looking for a bathroom. It seems like I’m in a college dorm of some kind; there are several rooms that open off to the sides of the corridor I’m in, and they have stuff in them like people have been getting dressed – clothes draped on things, mirrors with sinks in front of them with cosmetics and such. There is a group of people with me. One of them sees a plastic enema bottle with a weird rounded top, and holds it up and everyone laughs. There is something about a bird cage, and one of my friends is trying to tell a woman there how to put the seed in for it, and she spills it and makes a mess. Mark P. is here, and someone says something about boys, and he asks, “Are any of them really cute?”

Then, I’m getting ready to go. I look up in a corner of the room, and see that a spider has made a triangle-shaped web that looks solid, almost like a doily attached by strings to the wall and ceiling. There are numbers in it – I remember that they were arranged, but I don’t remember the sequence. All the ones that I remember seeing were multiples of 10 – 20, 40, 30. The detailing on it is incredibly precise. I ask somebody how I could take it down to keep it, and they suggest a piece of black fabric or a pillow. I ask for black paper, but there isn’t any. I see a pair of black nylon swim shorts and pick those up and put them behind the web, and gently lift it forward. I look at it in my hands, and it is made of tiny threads, thicker than real silk, but still amazingly intricate. At this point, it has a golden sheen, like gold silkworm silk. Then, I have a pillow cover that is pieced of different kinds of fabric in a design; I transfer the web to it, and start looking for pins to secure the fabric over the top of it so that it won’t blow away. It is shaped like a Valentine heart now. It is not sticky at all, nor is it flimsy. Mom is here, and helping me get it secured; she says something about how she thought I might say Daddy died. I want to make a shadow box to keep the web in.