In my dream I turned around and I saw a spider. It was gigantic. I was standing in front of him and his legs over my head looked like a skeleton of a huge umbrella with the fabric ripped off by time. He was looking at me with his multiple stare. No eyelids made his look piercing through. It occupied my entire attention. After a while I was not afraid anymore. I did not see his big jaws and a multitude of hairy extremities - those enormous ones seemingly motionless above my head and the small ones around his mouth that were constantly moving with incredible speed. My fear was gone. It was unnatural for I was always organically afraid of spiders. I was studying my face reflected in the perfect blackness of his numerous eyes. I was not scared. There were moments that I did not see the spider, but instead just the multiplied image of my face. Contrary to any laws of physics each of my faces had a different expression. The faces were changing slowly. Some of them looked older, the others were young as if from a high-school ID. I could not tell how I knew it but I was sure that he would start from my rib cage and he was going to proceed slowly by ripping pieces off me leaving my head for last. He was going to hold me facing him with his large extremities and not take another bite till he was done chewing the previous one. I knew I would not loose my conscience to the very end and I imagined the pain that awaited me. There was no way to escape.
His eyes were placed all around his head. It resembled a submarine that they use to explore coral reefs, with a multitude of round lights, cameras and windows spread out all over the front. Four of his colossal eyes arranged in a straight line looked directly at me and all the other ones located in seemingly random places helped the spider to form a three dimensional picture of me. They say you can see someone's soul through the eyes. His eyes however were filled with a dark abyss which you could not get in contact with. There was no thought there, no emotion, no soul. May be that was what made him so perfect, incorruptible, unconvinceable, unreformable, mechanical.
For him to make a mistake was unthinkable. Out of the question. His only enemy could be a coincidence faster than his instinct or beyond the physical limits of his organism. His actions were as perfect as the absolute functionality of all the elements of his body - simplistic and indifferent like a cube of hematite. The spider did only what was necessary. He could not act in any other way. Even knowing his goal that was transparent to me and that I should be concerned about it was impossible to hate him. I could not resist being deeply fascinated.
The spider was the perfect form. Despite his enormous size he did not produce any sound. It was logical to expect his joints to screech at least a bit under the weight of his body and the small extremities whirling around his jaws to make some noise. The spider however was infinitely silent. He also lacked scent, which seemed to be a natural consequence of being a predator. No scent at all. As a creature spending most of the time in some dark and dusty places he should have been dirty. He was not. The swollen semitransparent shell that held his liquid organism inside was firm and ideally clean. Each and every component of his body was a precise object made exactly to perform its function and nothing else. I saw a deep elegance in it and I could not understand for what reason evolution bothered to go further leaving such perfect product behind. The spider was a finished design, perfect, leaving no space for improvement.
I waited a long time to see this dream again but it never came back.
