The Good Spider

'Drink more water. Take less drugs. Get more sleep. Only some people are crazy. You will be ok.'

Hardly, if ever, true. Everyone is crazy all the time. They never stop. Look. The process of growing up entails many deaths - that is to say, you don't mature, you're merely cut down to size. Your soul is taken and molded and whittled. It used to be big. Pointy. It had bits. Now it's a delicate little thing, and utterly bland. I'm terrified of spiders, but I imagine that there must be a good one somewhere. It sits over a gigantic pool of water. A huntsman as big as a truck. Huntsman, the way they move, you know, so fast - it scares people, makes them jump, but the Good Spider is perfectly serene. It just sits over a pool of water, eyes gazing out into the forest where I imagine that this must take place. To find the Good Spider is very hard, but trust me, the journey is worth your time. We only think of knowledge as an abstract concept because we were born with the wrong kind of eyes. The Good Spider has eight eyes that can see knowledge like dust moving through the wind. It can tell you anything, so be careful what you ask; the Good Spider is very old, and you weren't meant to die so many times.

Vision

First I went to bed, and then I started to feel, overwhelmingly, that something was about to happen. Seconds later I found myself standing in the Savannah at sunset. Something was wrong. I knew that I was dreaming, but couldn't move. Or rather, I could move my real limbs - slowly, as if through some viscous liquid - but the ones I could see, the ones that were with me in the desert, were unresponsive. Something was wrong. The ground was perfectly flat, save for the odd rock or shrub, but I began to fall. Gravity reversed direction and I tumbled into the sky. Writhing, and staying still, I brought my hands - my real hands - up to my face. Blackout. I opened my eyes; the room was dark.

***

My head hits the pillow and the desert overtakes me like a tidal wave. My limbs are far away, and though I can feel them move through some sticky liquid, they stay perfectly still by my side. Something is wrong. A boulder tumbles past, but the landscape is featureless. The sun dips below the horizon; the ground has become a vast pool of water, perfectly reflective, and I fall, or sink, into the sky.

***

Something is wrong. Sand dunes roll over my bed and I am buried up to my neck in the desert at midnight. Gravity vanishes and I evaporate slowly, into ten hundred million rising grains of sand.