Spidey...

Staring at the ceiling while my good wife reads her soppy novel before bed, I can only but wonder what in the world that odd little dot is that keeps appearing at the same time of night in the same place on the ceiling, night after night. Is it a beetle? Or is it a spider? It must be some kind of bug… oh well.

This is great and well, seeing it, wondering what it is and then rolling over and falling asleep. But the “oh well” turns into a “holy crap!!!” if that little dot so much as moves an inch.

I am convinced that if that bug were somewhere else in the house, say the lounge or the kitchen, the reaction would be exponentially less adrenalin filled. I am quite convinced that the reason is something that forces us to protect the place we sleep, the place that we will be so totally vulnerable in for a number of hours. If your house is burgled, the main place to protect is the sleeping area. When a security company does the assessment of your home, they will almost always separate the sleeping areas from the rest of the home with a portcullis type gate, heat seeking missiles and into-personnel mines. The truth is we are vulnerable when we are asleep and so inspect the integrity of our sleeping area before we doze off. Now that area being invaded by that most stealthy of predators…the arachnid…unacceptable!
Did you know that a person, on average, will swallow eight spiders while they are sleeping, during their lives? I wonder what little Spidey would hope to find in there. Perhaps the leftovers of your soup supper that contained a fly. The fly which you asked your waiter about? Perhaps there was more than just the one that you saw?

What is this weird phenomena that something so small can stir such unease in one person that they are forced to stealth out of bed, choose a badly selected piece of weaponry and smash said bug to smithereens?! I think most of us are convinced that the spider, with it’s ninja-like skills and complete lack of fear and sense of self preservation will just launch itself at your face just to spite you. Will he do this just to laugh at your terrified face as he free-falls towards it? Highly doubt it……but who knows, he might……

Sleep tight!