Have you ever had a childhood dream come true?

A nightmare, yes.

I was five, maybe six years old. At the time, I loved learning about animals--something I did by watching television, taking regular trips to the public library, and as a monthly subscriber to a children's magazine called Zoobooks.

Each month a new Zoobooks would arrive and I’d flip through the pages, learning all about mammals and fish and reptiles and, my favorite, amphibians. I loved Zoobooks. Except for one edition that came each year which I found seriously disturbing.

Zoobooks Spiders.

Want to lose some sleep? Google that line above. The front cover and every page from front to back featured zoomed-in portraits of God’s most terrifying abomination. I couldn’t help but imagine one of these thousand-eyed freaks--a very, very large one--charging at me and leaping out, as I froze in fear, to trap me with its outstretched legs and sinking its poisonous fangs into my neck while its lifeless eyes stared off, buzzing and dilating as the hellspawn fed on my liquefied insides. Spiders would come in the mail and I’d panic and hide it under my parents’ bed.

Back then my family lived in a split-level home in Billings Montana. My parents’ room--the one with all the creepy magazines under the bed--was upstairs, and my room was down in the basement. The basement level opened up into the backyard, but I rarely went out that door as, according to my parents, the yard was chock-full of wolf spiders. I never got a good look at one, thank god, but I did hear the disgusting tales my mother told of my father running them over with the lawnmower: spiders the size of your palm that carry their young on their back, a sick fucking joke and the primary reason I believe fullheartedly in Satan.

Speaking of which, he--Satan--had his way with me one night down there in the basement. I don’t recall the exact details of the evening, maybe we had a babysitter or something, but I somehow ended up watching television alone and Arachnophobia was playing on HBO. If you haven’t seen it, the climactic scene goes something like this…

The protagonist finds *the* nest of highly deadly, cross-bred spiders--which had hitched a ride back to the States from some jungle in a casket with a dead guy and had since been killing folks all across town--in his basement. He fashions a homemade flamethrower from an aerosol can and lighter and starts torching the egg sacks and babies. That’s when things get real. The mother spider freaks the fuck out. The guy tries to get her but the hairy bitch makes a run for it and ends up in the air vents running along the basement ceiling. You can hear her up there, the tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-ticking of eight legs skittering through the vents. The man follows the sound and waits at an opening with his torch.

It’s quiet.

And then.

Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick and the massive arachnid lunges from the black hole, legs sprawled and ready to wrap around this guy’s face and good god it scared the living bejesus out of me. You have to remember… I was in kindergarten.

As you might imagine, I had a pretty shitty dream that night. But it was a weird one. The dream was a single frozen frame: a neon green and orange spider (hey, it was the 90s) that just sat there right in front of my face. It didn’t move, and it didn’t attack me. It just floated right there, close by, all night long.

The next morning I woke up sweating. I surveilled the room. I looked up and saw the sunlight shining in through the high basement windows. It was daytime. Good. I noticed a pair of my shorts on the ground across the room. They were brightly colored like in the dream, neon green with a black drawstring. But there was something funny about them. They looked like the seams had been ripped out, thick black cords of thread sticking up and out in every direction from the bright fabric.

I crept over and took a closer look.

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