Does anyone know what a whip-wish spider is? I hope not, because the only exposure I have to the term is that it yarked up from my unconscious during a dream over the weekend. I actually like spiders, at a respectful distance, but this particularly creepycrawly was more insect than spiderlike — so flat as to be almost two-dimensional — and was, in the dream, fished out from beneath the top layer of my clothing by a friend who identified it gleefully and then put it back on me. (The real-life individual involved has been forced to reassure me repeatedly that he would never, ever do any such thing.) Some of my dreams have a Salvador Dali cast. This was one. It ended with my arriving at the County Board room — a place I know tolerably well, from my misspent forties – and finding that the early arrivals for a public meeting were being led in calisthenics by the Board secretary, a cheerleading schoolmarm type in a sensible short haircut and twinset.
These are the dreams from which you wake wound in the bedclothes and exhausted as if from sprinting.
It must be the allergy drugs. Not only do my eyes itch, but after I spent most of Monday afternoon operating an industrial-size hedgeclipper, half the hedge fell out of my sport bra when I undressed, and the next morning I had furiously itching hivey spots where it had all stuck on. It was either kick-ass antihistamines or the kind of scratchfest that makes people look at you funny.
Most of it’s gone by now. I keep peeking at the welts to make sure one of them isn’t in the shape of a whip-wish spider.
Sixteen Tons 
the ‘whip-wish spider’ triggered an early memory. google to the rescue. a flickr site photo:
and some words on the whip spider (scorpion-esque):
http://www.earthlife.net/chelicerata/amblypygi.html
and yes. i’d be waking up in a fierce sweat screaming if that was in a dream…
Gaaah!
I had the weirdest morphine dreams after my first op last May. They were so “real” that I still remember one in which it felt like I was never going to be able to leave the dream … scared the heckity out of me.
After the next two ops I asked them to disconnect the morphine as soon as I was awake and coherent. I would rather deal with pain than fear.
Hope you’re feeling better. Half a hedge in one’s bra is no laughing matter (so I hope you don’t mind that I laughed).
I don’t mind, but the hedge is looking huffy and insulted. Serves it right.
There’s only one thing worse than foliage in one’s underwear, and that’s spiders in one’s underwear.
It may be partly my OCD, but i always check and double check my undies for spiders before putting them on in the morning.
Now i’ll be sure to look out for these two-dimensional whip-wish spiders, too.
Fricken Mother Nature…
“Fricken Mother Nature…”
Yep, seriously overrated. I come from Canada. I know of which I speak.
Um… are spiders in underwear actually a known problem in Oz? I really only see them in dusty corners hereabouts…
Whipwish spiders? Are they like brown recluse? I love spiders, even up close, but I still shake my robe every time I take it out of the closet to put it on just in case a brown recluse has decided to move in over night.
I never figured out in the dream whether the spider involved was poisonous or not. It was flat. Like a decal. And three-segmented, which spiders are not. I had the feeling it came from some slightly skewed dimension of reality. There was nothing whippy, or wishy, about it either. But my companion in the dream seemed to know exactly what it was.
Oh, I see now. A dream spider in a dream where everything seems to make sense until you wake up.