spiders

It is the middle of the night and I am going home. Home is my family home, where I have not lived for over twenty years. I am late and I know my mother will be worried; I hope she is not waiting up. I am walking down the street towards the house, urgent to arrive. As I approach the house, I can see that the lights are on. I check the letterbox and there is mail for me - a lot of letters crammed into the box, dated back months, even years. I particularly notice a hand-addressed yellow envelope and I am keen to open it. I go to climb the stairs to the front door, but there is a large spider in its web blocking the way. It is too dark to negotiate a way around the web - I am not certain where it begins and where it ends - so I make my way around to the other side of the verandah, to the other entry stairs. There is more light here and I can see more webs and more big spiders, blocking my way in. There are giant Gold Orb-Weaving spiders and spindly St Andrew's Cross spiders, all passive in their webs. I break a stick off a small tree in the garden and wave it around and around, winding the spiders into their own webs, clearing a path to my home. Later, once inside, I am holding the yellow envelope and I tell my family about the spiders. They notice a spider bite on my hand; I had not noticed it before. There are two punctures on my palm, quite large, most definitely from a spider. I do not appear to be poisoned.

averting disaster

I was in my bedroom, toying with what appeared to be a paper shredder. There was a long slot at the front designed to receive paper before shredding it and depositing it in a tray. I had pushed my hand into the slot and was now desperately trying to extract it, hoping my fingers would not be mangled. My brother appeared in the doorway, but he was many years younger than his real-life age; in fact, he was just a child. I called to him and asked him to help. He quickly checked that the power was off and then we pulled my hand free of the shredder. I picked him up (he was only small) and he wrapped both his arms and legs around me. I kissed him on the head and told him I loved him, rocking him gently.
The scene skipped forward and we were both in a giant building made of ice. We understood that there was a tremendous amount of water stored behind the walls and ceiling, and that, though safe right now, the situation was quite precarious. Someone was singing and we moved about the space, gliding around as though on an ice rink. Suddenly, the person singing punctured the ceiling with what I think was a knitting needle, cracking the layer of ice between the enormous body of water above and everyone below. Panic. Everyone wanted to get out of the building at once. My brother (still a child) and I rushed to the nearest exit and began sliding on our bottoms down the narrow corridor of ice, aware that the wave of water behind us was mounting. The line of people sliding with us started and stopped, people getting stuck in crevices and snared by ice build-ups. When I saw that my brother was struggling, I started to sing a song about letting things happen, allowing life to take its course and energy to flow. Somehow it helped him, and others around us, and we all slid effortlessly through the rest of the tunnel, emerging into the daylight, safe at the end.