My Therapist is a Giant Psychic Dream Spider [Short Story]

I want to live with a giant telepathic spider. I’d sleep underneath the spider while it weaved its gleaming, metal web on the ceiling. I want the spider to be my therapist while I slept. It’d take me through the rooms of a spaceship and ask me what the famous french psychologist Jacques Lacan meant when he tried to describe “The Real.”

And while I’m on an alien autopsy table, I’d speak: “The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.”

The spider would say, “You stole that quote directly from one of Lacan’s seminars.”

I’d say, “Lacan is outdated, psychoanalysis is dead, and he has no concept of basic biocentrism. The real isn’t something separate from our sensory perception.”

“Biocentrism isn’t an accepted scientific fact, it was a concept developed in 2007 by an American doctor named Robert Lanza. It it no way has been able to be held up to scientific rigor.”

I’d say, “Why are you arguing with me, giant telepathic therapist spider?”

The aliens start probing my chest with giant, electric needles. Because it’s a dream, nothing hurts and yet I’m screaming.

“I’m not arguing with you. You’re arguing with you. I enter your dreams so that you can have an exterior representation of one side of your brain’s argumentation and end up resolving your cognitive dissonance. Get it?”

I paused. The aliens stopped stabbing me. I can’t see what they look like - they’re more shadows than physical entities.

“I just realized, you’re a giant telepathic therapist spider and I should be horrified.”

**

Giant psychic therapist spider has determined that I’ve made what they call in the spider therapy business a “backwards breakthrough.” Other terms for it are: The reverse enlightenment. The unraveled epiphany. Agnosis. Lightning retreating back into the sky. To use a spider colloquialism: Undoing the spiderweb. Psychic therapist spider disapproves of my lucid dreaming technique. She says I’ll never learn to walk through walls at this rate. The fear of not knowing what’s beyond the walls keeps the wall from transience. I keep getting bruises in my dreams from hitting the wall. I keep breaking my legs thinking I can fly. At one point I could do anything, the lightning struck me and someone tossed me a flashlight while I was running through the shadow of the valley of death. Aha, I said, I know what I need to do. I need to stop seeing my human therapist. I need to break up with my fiance and move back to Texas. I need to work more on my art. I need to focus less on entertaining other human beings, caring what people think, listening to my music at low volume, and thinking of myself as fundamentally broken. I needed to drink more beer and smoke more weed and play more video games. I needed to learn how to live with myself.

But I’ve forgotten a lot of this, I think, which is best relayed to the spider by my inability to extinguish the Great Northern Amygdala Fire with my mind.

“Tell me more about the mirror phase as described by french psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan,” I asked my giant psychic therapist spider.
“How about you shut the fuck up instead?”
Okay, she’s pissed at my inability to progress.

I float down to the fire in my amygdala and begin scooping up the burning dirt in my hands. My hands blacken and char.
“You’re not going to extinguish the fire that way,” the giant psychic therapist spider said.
“Please, would you and my dreams stop insulting my intelligence? I get it, the fire represents the burgeoning chaos of my mind and my inability to put out the fire, only mitigate its effects with my microscopic, insignificant damage control, represents how the chaos spills over into my everyday life and makes living incredibly difficult.”

“No,” she said.
“No?”
“Put the fucking fire down and stop being an idiot. When you wake up, I want you to remember three words: Sonder, sillage, and unerkannt.”

“There is no way I’m going to remember that.”
“You’re a writer, aren’t you?” the giant therapist spider asked me, a question that wasn’t actually a question.
“Yeah, of course, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Are you a good writer?”
“I mean, I get favorable reviews on Amazon.”
“Good writers keep a notebook and pen beside their bed.”
“Oh.”
I did not do that. I didn’t even keep a notebook in my purse.
“You’ll remember this,” she said.

The giant psychic therapist spider took my hands in her black tipped limbs. She burned brighter than the fire.

**

“What have you learned in your waking hours?” Asked the giant psychic therapist spider.

“Not a goddamn thing,” I said, running through the shadow plane from seven shadow children, who wielded yo-yos made out of fang teeth and gray lollipops and laughter like the choking of wasps.

“Are you sure?”

“Well, obviously. I always come back here when I’m stressed out. Back to this shadow plane. Back to these fucking shadow people with their teeth hollowed out, containing every anxious bad thought that has ever entered into my mind. They collect these thoughts, use them as a resource, eat them, store them. They want me.”

“What was the last thing that happened before you went to sleep?” the giant psychic therapist spider asked me.
“I don’t even want to think about that right now.”

For some reason the shadow realm inside my head was constructed mainly of warehouses and abandoned suburbs. I ran inside an empty, scratched out warehouse, and the shadow children pursued me, hissing and laughing. I ran up a winding spiral staircase and they followed right behind, shaking the railing so that I’d trip.

“You need to think about that right now, otherwise you’re going to keep coming back here,” the psychic therapist spider said.
“I was at the gun range shooting blanks,” I said as I kept running. “I was in the bedroom with my fists knotted in my hair.”
“While others keep a dream journal, I want you to keep a waking journal,” the spider said.

The staircase toppled over. The shadow children dragged their fingers straight through my chest.

“That sounds like nonsense,” I said.

**

Autumn Christian’s waking journal (Written down per instruction of the giant psychic therapist spider):

I walked through the Denton square and the sun burnt the top of the head and the top of the trees. I breathed in heat. I’d never seen green like that lawn before. It’d been so long since I’d dropped the shield walking around, and observed the rawness of the color green.

I was driving home through traffic in Fort Worth and the light shone on my hands. I thought if I could have prisms hanging from the back of my car I could push rainbows through my knuckles. Behind me the sky is the color of a blood orange, and it’s casting its deep shadow down on the highway, down on the cars, permeating through the surface level of the city.

I’m vibrating with the frequency of a hundred strangers and most of them are desperate for approval. It sits on their skin, like a kind of bacteria, the hopeless smile, the hopeless nod. There’s always one person in every cafe that has to proclaim loudly how wonderful their life is, but it’s with the submissive grin of an orangutan, waiting for someone to tell them, “It’s okay, you are worthy of life.” I wish they could know they are making themselves less and less worthy with every self proclamation.

My brother’s friend sits down at the table with shifting eyes, loudly complains about me being on my phone. “I guess I’m old-fashioned, I’d rather have a real conversation.” I shrug. “You’re boring me to be honest.” He said, “I’d rather people watch than be on my phone.” I stand up and scream, “Why do you constantly have to try and prove how much better you are than everyone else? Get the fuck over yourself!” Everyone tries not to look at me on the way back home.
It is dark and clear on the highway. I’m listening to Angel by Massive Attack and my nausea is dissipating.

I am having sex, and his fingers are pushed through my hair. I’m learning how to look at someone while we fuck and bite my lip and not hide my face, not close my eyes, as my eyes roll up in my head, to push myself back into the present moment, to stop fantasizing about being on a dark cloud fucking a storm. I am here, in this room, on top of him, the cool air pushing its way through my spine, his hips pushing upward against mine. I am real I am real I am here.

I am here.

Read the second part here

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