Contains the line “microscopic spiders, a millimeter long or less,”, which reminds me that our skin is colonized with arachnids much smaller than that: “spider mites” Three Things You Didn’t Know About the Arachnids That Live on Your Face | NC State News
I’d heard this factoid previously, and always thought on its face it seemed implausible.
If spiders, large enough to notice, so often strolled into our mouths at night, shouldn’t there be lots of near-misses? e.g. stories of people waking up with a spider in their mouth, or coughing up a spider, or with a spider on their face (:eek:)?
Why, oh why did I have to read that column? It’s nice to know that eating a spider is unlikely, but the fact that it’s still remotely possible grosses me out.
My irrational fear of spiders is actually the reason I sleep on my stomach, with my face buried in my pillow. Seriously, when I was a kid, I had this strange thought that a spider might lower itself down from the ceiling, and land on my face. I grew up in an old house in New Jersey, and would often see a little spider work its way down with a long string of web. Once I thought about the sleep scenario, I decided the only safe thing to do was to turn over and keep my face protected from the horrid little spiders.
Good thing I didn’t grow up in South Carolina, where I now live. We have these hideous, gigantic, hairy wolf spiders down here. If I had ever seen one of those as a kid, I probably would just never slept at all.
I’ve never heard of anybody that swallowed spiders in their sleep, but I know an old woman who swallowed a spider.
It wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch a fly, but I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.