I have had many dreams throughout the years about discovering things growing out of my face. Things such as lumps, bumps, carbuncles, devil's horns and on one memorable occasion, snail antennae.

These dreams are usually so realistic that I end up having to go examine myself in the bathroom mirror to make sure I'm not, in fact, mutating.

Well all I can say is one's obviously come true at last, because by the look of the eructation on the bridge of my nose this morning, I appear to be expecting a unicorn horn at any moment.

When I dream, I go to a different place.

Very rarely have I dreamt of a place that I know in the waking world. When my dreams are set in real and familiar surroundings, they're usually nightmares.

I'm often driving, in my dreams, but not on roads that I know or recognise from reality. The roads, woods, cities and fields in my dreams are places that are familiar only because I have dreamt of them before. Some areas I know equally well (or even better) than any place I've ever visited awake.

I used to think that the geography of my dreams was based purely on a distortion of the environment I knew; even though I didn't recognise it, I assumed that my brain was simply transforming familiar places as a stage on which to play my dreams.

But when I moved from Sussex to Yorkshire, I found that the usual geography changed, and I began walking, asleep, down roads I had never seen before. I could not understand where I was.

Over the six years I have lived here, that geography has become more familiar to me, and I find myself losing the shape of the older lands. Only a few things are retained: the huge fallen tree that serves as a bridge; the steep switchbacks leading up to the Ridge; the circling roads with trading tents pitched at the centre.

Now I visit a different dream country. There seem to be more structures in this land - there's a dilapidated house with a rusted tin roof and waterstained floorboards that I visit regularly, and a pub in a clearing of woods called the White Rose (tellingly, the symbol of Yorkshire.) There's a whole city, in fact, whose name I can't ever recall on waking.

What gives me pause here is that when I visit the south, I never dream of my "yorkshire" setting - but I have dreamed instead of my older lands. And conversely, I've never dreamed at home in Yorkshire of my old dream haunts. This apparent division only affects the landscape of my dreaming: the people I meet in dreams are, where known, from any period of my past.

Does the land sleep? Am I the dreamer, or the dream?

As most everyone who knows me is aware, I hate spiders. I mean I really fuckin hate them. I don't know if I'd classify it as a phobia (after watching a few episodes of The Panic Room recently, I'm rapidly reclassifying what counts as a phobia and what doesn't) but they scare the piss out of me.

In my bedroom, I have my old office chair by my dresser, to serve as a putting on make-up chair. The kittens use the chair as a jumping-off point onto the dresser, where they run around during the night and knock things over. So before I go to sleep I move the chair to the other side of the room. (It actually occurs to me that since bringing the chair upstairs two months ago, I have not ever sat on it, so perhaps I should just move it into Simon's room and clear the space.)

Last night, I was just settling down to sleep, so I leaned over the edge of the bed, grabbed the back of the chair, and rolled it across the floor (it's not heavy.) As I did so, a perfectly HUGE brown spider ran out from underneath it and came to rest by the wardrobe door. 

Immediately, my usual reactions set in - heart rate kicked up a notch, clenching of the entire pelvic region (why does this happen? It's not as if a spider is a probable candidate for a rapist, surely?) and every non-pubic hair on my body rising to attention, accompanied by little crawling sensations on my scalp as if the horrible thing had already run up the wall behind me and launched itself onto my head and was building a nest in my hair.

Of course, the phobic's first line of defence in this situation is Get Someone Else To Deal With It. So what with being a thoroughly modern and independent person who needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, I shouted for the kittens. Only Sarah responded - goodness knows where Scamps was - but unfortunately I was unable to make her understand that I wanted her to savagely attack and get rid of the offending arachnid. It probably didn't aid comprehension that I was attempting to point to the spider without actually getting off the bed or get my arm within 5 feet of it. And to be fair, I'm not sure she could have fit it all in her mouth. Yeaaauuughhhh!

After a couple of minutes it was clear that feline help was not an option. I would have to Grit My Teeth and Deal With This Myself. Thankfully, the vacuum cleaner was upstairs. I pulled on a t-shirt (which I had left at the bottom of the bed - thank goodness I had been slobby and NOT put it in the wardrobe) and my slippers and went to fetch it. Lucikly, the flex is quite long, so I was able to plug it in and get the nozzle attachment sorted out on the landing, all the while keeping an anxious watch on the door.

I trundled the vacuum into the bedroom, half-convinced that the spider would have disappeared, which would have been way worse - I'd then have been convinced that it was hiding, ready to climb out and leap on me as soon as I laid down to sleep, and then in the morning I'd have been dreading opening the wardrobe door in case (you guessed it) it leapt out at me. But it was still there, lurking in front of the wardrobe door.

So I switched on the vac and sucked that motherfucker up. Yeah! I'm tough, I'm mean, I can totally do this! Except I then spent 5 minutes holding the hose in the air to make sure it really had gone into the vacuum and wasn't clinging on to the sides ready to leap out next time I used the vac.* (I also switched off the vac, removed the nozzle extension thing, and flung it across the floor in case it came creeping out of the end. After two minutes of nothing coming out, I figured it was safe to pick up and put back on the vac.)

So after all that I was quite keyed-up and didn't get enough sleep; hence I am knackered today and perhaps hence my odd dream.

This is now a serial dream since I've had it two nights in a row; not a recurring dream, since it's different every time, but the same places and people.

Basically, I went to a brothel looking for a shag but ended up working there. Also, for some reason Pat was there (not as a customer thank goodness - he was looking for me to give me a message or something) but at least he wasn't there in last night's. 

The women working in the brothel appeared to be cast from Saturday's episodes of Doctor Who and Casualty. 

The brothel was on a very steep, cobbled street. Not a place I recognise from the waking world.

I also spent a lot of time driving around in my car. Perhaps I was taking some of the working girls to appointments. But there was a defined geography, as there is in so many of my dreams. I'll have to make another post on dream geography once I've pulled my thoughts together on it.

Anyway, that is my first spider-dealing experience since I moved into this house 8 months ago. If I don't see one for another 8 months, I'll be very happy. 

I've spent most of the weekend doing nothing, really. A very lazy weekend with really no productivity to show for it. Been playing the demo of Geneforge 4 and got to the end of the demo, so I'll probably buy that tonight and unlock the rest. 

And now... must do some work!

*OK, you can laugh, but here's the thing: I've known this to happen. Back in the day when I was living in the flat with Paul, we only used to vac up about once a month. One night I'd spotted a big spider under the dining table, and Paul had Done His Duty with the vac. He didn't much like spiders either, and it was a real big one, so he shoved a piece of scrunched-up newspaper into the end of the hose, just in case (I think the socket on the vac that you're supposed to put the hose back into must have been broken.)

About ten days later, as Paul was leaving for work one morning, I asked him, "I know it's silly, but I want to vac up today - could you take that piece of paper out of the nozzle? I'm a bit wussy about doing it!" He gave a little "Ahh bless you" chuckle and removed the paper. The spider, which was not dead at all, immediately dropped off the paper and started running across the hall directly towards me. Paul, thankfully quick-thinking and not the total wuss that I am, stamped it dead. It was such a big bastard that I actually heard the crunch. 

So since that day I have never trusted spiders to go into vacuum cleaners and die like they're supposed to.