Spider

In the interpretation of dreams, Spider is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as feeling trapped or manipulated, or the weaver of fate and creativity.

Common readings

Folk dream-books and Jungian readings alike take the spider now as a devouring or entangling figure, now as a patient maker and weaver, sometimes tied to a powerful maternal image.

The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.

What changes the reading

The details interpreters weigh are the web, the bite and the dreamer's position. A spider quietly spinning at a distance is commonly read toward patience and craft, while being caught in the web or bitten moves the reading toward entrapment and fear. Waking feeling matters here more than with most images, since arachnophobia is common enough that for many dreamers the spider carries dread before any symbolism begins, and an interpretation that ignores that plain fear in favour of a subtle one has skipped the obvious layer.

The spider entered the dream books carrying its waking folklore with it. European tradition holds the small money spider lucky and a spider at evening a good omen, and the older dictionaries read dream spiders both ways, industry and fortune on one side, entanglement on the other, the web deciding which. The weaver of fate is an old figure besides, and interpreters who reach for the Moirai spinning and cutting thread, or for Arachne weaving against Athena, are drawing on Greek story rather than on any dream manual.

Psychoanalysis took the image up in earnest. Karl Abraham, one of Freud's earliest colleagues, published a paper in 1922 on the spider as a dream symbol, reading it within his school's theory as a figure of the dangerous mother, and the spider has kept a place in psychoanalytic case literature since. The Jungian tradition reads the web rather than the spinner: a patterned structure radiating from a centre, spun from the spinner's own substance, which invites the gentler reading of creative fate.

None of these readings is evidence about spiders or about dreamers in general. They are the accumulated positions of distinct traditions, folk, Freudian and Jungian, and a given dream may answer to any of them or to none.