Dreaming about spiders

• Concealed threat, on the same axis as the snake but smaller and closer.
• Being trapped, via the web.
• Patience and craft. The weaver reading, which is old and widespread.
• Feminine creative power, in a striking number of unconnected traditions.
• Entanglement. Being caught in something you helped make, much the most reported web reading.

Web dreams without a spider are reported with genuine appreciation: dreamers describe intricacy, dew, morning light, and a sense of something well made.

The weaver reading has real cultural depth behind it, and dreamers with a craft practice report spider dreams noticeably more warmly than the general pattern.

Spider dreams in people with arachnophobia are, unsurprisingly, among the most distressing dreams they report, and there is no interpretive work needed there beyond noting that phobic content appears in dreams.

The two recurring distressing forms are spiders emerging (from a wall, a mouth, a ceiling) and the unnoticed web, walking into something you did not see. The first is about multiplication; the second is about having been caught by inattention.

Threat-simulation applies at least as well here as with snakes, and possibly better: spiders are a near-universal phobia object with a plausible evolutionary basis.

Jungian readings attach the spider to the devouring-mother figure, which is worth knowing about and worth treating with more scepticism than most Jungian symbol assignments. It is one of the least well-supported specific claims in that tradition.

Continuity is important here in a practical way: people who have recently seen a spider, cleaned a shed, watched a nature programme, or live somewhere with large spiders dream about them more.

The spider has an unusually rich and unusually positive global tradition, which sits oddly against its dream reputation.

• Anansi, the West African and Caribbean trickster-spider: one of the most widely told story cycles anywhere.
• Arachne, the weaver punished for her skill, in Greek tradition.
• Grandmother Spider figures across several Indigenous North American traditions, associated with creation and with bringing light or fire. Named as belonging to those specific traditions rather than as generic symbolism.
• The spider as a good omen in a range of European folk traditions, spinning fortune, and money spiders.

Spiders are over-represented in dream content relative to waking encounters, consistently across content analyses. This is one of the more solid observations in dream research.

Phobic content appears in dreams and nightmares at elevated rates in people with the corresponding phobia, which is well documented and is the correct first explanation for most distressing spider dreams.

Beyond that there is nothing supporting a specific meaning.

• Are you frightened of spiders while awake? If so, most of this page is secondary.
• Spider or web? Genuinely different dreams.
• Was it moving towards you, or minding its own business?
• How many? As with snakes, quantity changes the category.

Recurring spider dreams in phobic dreamers tend to be stable and unremarkable. Recurring web dreams are less common and more interesting, where they recur, dreamers frequently report the web growing or becoming more intricate, which they usually connect to a situation they describe as increasingly complicated.