In your dream, you applied a temporary fix to something, thinking you’d sort it out later, but this was not good enough and you had to take more immediate and firm action. Does this sound familiar? Where, in your life in the day or two prior to your dream, did you try to patch up a situation without success?
A helpful approach to interpreting a dream is to start by summarising the dream in one sentence including the word ‘something’, and then asking yourself where this applied in your life in the day or two before the dream.
Now let’s go deeper.
These spiders got into the space between the skin of your heel and the flesh. In other words, they got ‘under your skin’. Dreams use word play, so this is another clue. What, or who, recently got ‘under your skin’ and irritated you?
More than this, that situation that got ‘under your skin’ was focussed on the area of your heel. Again, dreams use word play, so think ‘heal’. This is about a sensitive area or issue that you’re trying to heal by applying a temporary fix.
This issue was not only getting under your skin, it was getting right underfoot, perhaps affecting your understanding or your ability to take a firm stance.
At the start of your dream, you were in the shower, a place of cleansing. That’s when you noticed the small hole in your heel. The start of a dream often states the theme, or issue, a dream is addressing. Your dream was addressing an issue where you were cleansing yourself of a situation that you thought you’d healed, only to discover a ‘small hole’ in your healing. This suggests that your strategy for dealing with a certain conflict is not working – instead of being healing for you, it is leaving a ‘small hole’ or space for irritation to get right under your skin again.
No wonder the temporary fix in the dream didn’t work! It was like papering over a crack. The way you are dealing with a conflict in your life is still leaving you open (small hole) to invasion. You’re compounding this by taping over the hole, instead of fixing the hole itself.
And, in the dream, you figured you would sort this issue out later. Where, in your life, do you keep putting off sorting out an invasive irritation?
By now, you will have identified the issue your dream is addressing. All the elements will be sounding familiar.
The irritation, the thing that’s getting under your skin, is represented by tiny black spiders. So tiny, perhaps, that you can hardly see them until they gather en masse. You said, “see the spiders gathering in there.” This gives you a further clue. This is about something that is so insidious that you don’t see it at first. The irritation is composed of tiny, almost invisible irritants – but they gather and add up to something significant. Have you tended to ignore the tiny things, perhaps hoping they’ll go away, or maybe even not noticing them anymore until they build up enough to annoy you?
You were annoyed by your husband not seeming to care, so annoyance is what you are feeling somewhere in your life. This thing not only gets under your skin, but annoys you. What has annoyed you recently?
In your dream, you are annoyed about someone ‘not seeming to care’. Is this true in your waking life, or is it more true to say that it is YOU who doesn’t seem to care enough about this irritation that gets right under your skin? People in dreams represent aspects of the dreamer, so your dream suggests you are not caring enough for yourself, not caring enough that there’s an issue that’s stopping you from healing.
In your dream, you get so annoyed about this that you decide to “sort it out for myself” and you “stood down hard” and squashed the spiders. This is how your dream resolves the issue.
It’s time to sort this issue out once and for all, to take it into your own hands – or feet! It’s time to ‘make a stand’ or ‘stand on your own two feet’, to ‘squash’ this insidious irritation once and for all. There’s a possible play on words here, as you “stood down”. Does sorting this out feel like ‘standing down’ on something – standing down from a previous stance on an issue?
To stand up for yourself, to care for yourself, to find a permanent healing fix so that you don’t feel this under-the-skin invasive annoyance, you may need to ‘stand down’ on an issue.
So it’s about standing up for yourself in a new and healing way, instead of in the old, non-healing way.
Consult me confidentially about your dream.
Visualisation:
Do this visualisation while standing up with your weight equally distributed through your bare feet. This dream alchemy practice works at transforming the dream symbol of your foot/heel, combining a visualisation with bodywork to add extra power.
As you stand, feeling your feet and the ground firm beneath you, visualise white healing light dancing around your feet, sealing the gap between the skin of your heels and the flesh of your foot, closing the small hole from your dream. Notice how whole (not hole), healed, strong, and calm your feet feel, and how powerful you feel as you stand there, able to sort things out for yourself whenever you wish.
How often to do this:
Do this visualisation 20 times a day for a week, ten times a day for the second week and twice a day for the next month.
How does this work?
This practice ensures that change occurs for you in the best possible way – a positive healing transformation. Your dream expressed your waking life situation using dream language – the language of your unconscious mind. By reliving the dream with changes, or by transforming one of the dream symbols (or by reliving and intensifying the dream in the case of a dream with a positive ending) you are using vision and feeling to reprogram your unconscious beliefs.
Jane Teresa Anderson
