Crisis

I had one last night. A crisis. To tell you about my crisis, I should first tell you that I am horribly afraid of spiders. It is shockingly unmanly how afraid I am of spiders. The unmanliness is made much worse by the fact that my wife, Polly, has no trouble with them at all. On the other hand, she is afraid of mice and my mother, neither of which bother me a bit. So perhaps we are well suited.

But my unmanliness is not the point right now. Ok?

Polly had fallen asleep on the couch. I fell asleep in bed with the light on (I was reading, I'm not afraid of the dark). I was having a rock-'em sock-'em dream, the kind where everything nice seems to be happening at once. My boss gave me tickets to Die Fledermaus, there were 11 new laudatory comments on my latest blog post, Juliette Binoche was offering me M&Ms. It was just lovely. Then I woke up and saw a great big spider hustling across the ceiling right above my head. It was a light reddish brown and spindly, the kind that's mostly leg. I jumped out of bed (see above, re: crisis of masculinity to be discussed later) and went searching for my glasses so I could get a better look at the bastard. I got my glasses and was all set for some arachnicide, when...

...the spider was gone.

It was horrifying. He 'd been scurrying at a pretty good clip, but I couldn't imagine where he'd gone. It just didn't seem possible that he could have found somewhere to hide so quickly. Then a thought crept into my head. What if I hadn't actually woken up and seen a spider on the ceiling? What if I had dreamed that I saw a spider on the ceiling and had woken up?

I couldn't get back to sleep. The Juliette Binoche dream was long gone, I wasn't sure if there was a huge spider in my room, and my existential crisis was in full swing.

I still don't know if I am a man who is afraid of spiders who dreamed he saw a spider or a man who saw a spider dreaming that he is making too much out of a little uncertainty.