This morning I had a very strange dream, but very lucid. It definitely felt like it had a deeper meaning. Fortunately, I remembered it long enough to write some of it down.
In “Love and the Time of Cholera”, Marquez mentions several times a Spanish galleon that had sunk carrying five billion gold pesos. The main character tries to dig this gold up for his beloved, in order to finance their life together.
In my dream, a space satellite equipped with instruments for detecting gold discovers the exact location of this galleon. As is supposed by the leading lady of the story, it is hidden very deep in the bay covered by several yards of sediment.
I enlist the help of a friend to dig up this galleon, just as Florentino Ariza does. Since I know the exact location of the gold, and the fact that it is there, all I need to do is dig it up.
Although the galleon is under water, nothing that we do takes place under water. I remember a picture of holding out my arm, and a cut is made laterally, against the direction of my veins. The opening of the cut becomes a passage way leading down into the floor of the bay. Through this passage I (and not my friend, because he always stays above) find a room. Each time I discover things: things in the room, old things that I had lost, things from my past and remote memory. But it is never deep enough to actually reach the galleon. So I come back up, and it is decided we must make the cut again. The old cut has almost healed, and cutting again will open it up, but this is the only way to get down there. I open it again and again, going ever deeper, but never quite reaching the galleon.
At the second to last level in the dream, I find myself in the room of a domestic house. The room is deserted, and apparently so is the house and the entire neighborhood it’s in. There doesn’t seem to be anything around but very old furniture and toys in the room. It is quite depressing; the sensation of “emptiness” is very real.
After coming up and making the last cut, I descend to the bottom-most level reached during the dream. Although I never find the galleon, I get the impression of going very far down. My feelings say I was perhaps three quarters of the way to the galleon.
At this level I find an old, dark town. There is really no one here except a few people. The place is very dark, almost like the scene of an old nightmare movie. While I am searching in the house (again, it is another house), I see a small black spider. It moves quickly, but I kill it. Then I come out of the room, and find another spider. Apparently each room has its own spider. I run outside and get into a car, but I discover the spiders are everywhere in the town. None of them are massed together, but every here and there along the road and in the houses is another black spider. They have bodies resembling black widows.
As I look at the people in the town, I realize somehow that they have been taken over by the spiders. They are no longer people. The spiders have entered their brains, and now sit in the middle, controlling the mind and body as if they were drivers. At some point I am forced to kill some of these people in order to escape certain situations, and that is when I see the spiders in their heads.
I reach near the edge of town, and then realize it is hopeless. In order to continue the dream – that is, in order to advance my situation in any positive way – I must go back and confront the spiders near the first house.
Driving back, more spiders appear. I enter the house, and go back to the kitchen, where the stairs lead down to a basement area. As I near the basement, there are more and more spiders. They never attack, but I can sense their malice.
Somehow, my friend joins me in order to fight the spiders. At some point, I discover they are vulnerable to carbon-dioxide, as sprayed from a fire extinguisher. It freezes them and they die. Stepping on them no longer works (there are too many), so I begin shooting them with CO2.
As the spiders die, I head down to the basement. Here there are more and more. The intelligence of the spiders is becoming a tangible thing, and I can “feel” their collective intent to dominate. They scurry about the walls and the floor. Many die as I spray everywhere, and several times I have to exchange my canister for a new one. There are more than I can kill. My friend backs me up, and sprays many of the ones that I miss.
The basement is very large. It is modeled after a basement from my youth. The steps lead down to the right side, and then a separator gives way to the left. The floor is stone, and the walls are wooden boards with insulation material between them. There are also cement sections of the wall (which is different from the actual basement in real life).
As I make my way toward the center of the basement where the divider is, I see egg sacs on the ceiling, with many spiders streaming out of them. They are reproducing at an amazing rate! The spiders are also differentiated between the very young, the normal ones I had seen before, and some that have a special characteristic: a sort of redness that glows in their eyes. The intelligence of the spiders seems concentrated in these.
I spray and spray, making my way across the separator. Every ounce of my spray is now killing thousands of spiders. I step across the divider, and see a shocking thing. Looking back, toward the stairs, there is apparently a hole in the middle wall that lead into an underground space (this could not possible be, spatially). In these spaces the air is thick with black spiders, and the intelligence and malice toward humanity glows from them. The eggs sacs are being generated from here. I pour spray into the openings, and yell back to my friend that I need more: that there are more of them here than I can kill.
This is where the dream ends. What interests me about it is the concept of cutting into my arm to descend the bay, at the bottom of which I expect to find a boundless treasure of gold. Also, the age and darkness – almost primitiveness – of the surroundings as I dig deeper and deeper. There is always a sense of approaching, but I never quite make it during this dream.
Also, arachnophobia is my only unnatural fear. But in the dream I was not really all that scared of the spiders themselves. I knew they had to be destroyed, but each individual spider did not unnerve me as much as they would have in real life. This could signify “facing my final fears” in a way. The gold represents the true worth of my nature; I am descending in the darkest parts of my self to uncover it. Standing between me and it, however, is this dark, unknown place where a great evil lies: a malevolent evil that is growing and attempting to take power.
The weapons I have are quite effective, and at all times I sense that I am “winning”; that I have discovered their whereabouts, and now it is only a matter of using enough spray. There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of the spray – I just have to keep asking my friend for more.
The vision granted by the satellite also assures me that what I am looking for is indeed there. There is no doubt that it is under the floor of the basement, in that location. I simply must dig far enough, but am assured of a profitable result if I continue.
Each level down into my flesh (i.e., the bay) reveals darker and more mysterious things, all taken from personal characteristics and older memories. At times I feel that I am “finding” things, like the things in the old room in the deserted house. These are things that I had forgotten, or hadn’t seen in a while, as if they were all there all along and now I am finding out where they were hidden.
The companionship of my friend is very important. Although it does not factor in significantly to the dream, I can tell that the feeling of ultimate triumph and of safety is coming from his presence in the dream. Since I am not alone, there is really nothing untoward that can happen to me. But this figure has a very secondary role, and stays out on the surface until the very last level where he backs me up in the fight against the spiders.
The “fight” isn’t really even a fight since the spiders never quite attack. At the beginning some of them move toward me, but they are killed very easily. In the basement, although they could have defeated me by sure numbers, they seem unable to leave the walls. There are never any spiders on the floor. If there were, they could have just crawled my legs, and overcome me that way. But they stay on the walls and the ceiling, where I can easily shoot them with the extinguisher.
The central grouping of the spiders also feels like it is near the heart of the evil, although the evil is not located there. Perhaps the next step would have been to clear out and enter the spaces created in the middle wall, since they seemed to lead backward, and down.
I am writing this down because of a strange experience when I got home this evening. I looked at the wall over my space heater (because it is across the room) when I turned on the light, and saw an earwig bug. I don’t like earwigs, because they look so strange. Then I turned my head to the left and saw a very large spider crawling up the wall just above my pillow. The very odd thing is that the spider was located just at where my eyes fell when I turned my head, just as the earwig had been right where my eyes were when I turned on the light.
Then, as if to test the reality of all this, I turned my head back to the kitchen. Surely enough there was yet another large black bug crawling on the tile near the wall. This all had the feeling of having stepped into a dream, and not quite a pleasant one. I killed the spider, then the earwig, and then let the potato bug (in the kitchen) out the door.
This was all too weird, and I cannot convey the strange feeling that the room had when I turned my head from bug to bug to bug. But it reminded me very much of the meaning of my dream, and perhaps that is why they were there. The dream was about exploring to discover hidden treasure – and an incomparably enormous treasure. Maybe now it is time for the next step. Aloneness seems to be burning away many of the palliatives which I had resorted to to cure the pain of facing my bare self, but perhaps now it is the time for that. We shall see.