In 1997 I was living in Portland, Oregon. I would regularly do psilocybin journeys with a group of women and quite often more with my friend Jan. We would get out our tarot cards and crystals and what have you and spend time with each other supporting on our spiritual path and looking to the “messengers” or the mushrooms for spiritual guidance.

Now, mind you, these days I am a pretty hard core atheist so I don’t know what to think about this but here is the story...

One time when Jan went to go visit her family in Alabama as she often did she was preparing to return home to Portland and I received a phone call from her one evening while she was on her way. “I’m on my way to the airport but I have to tell you something,” she said. “I had a dream about you last night that you are on a mission with The Spider Woman”

“The Spider Woman?” I replied chuckling. “What’s that?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” she replied, “But I have been given instructions that we need to go on a journey tonight to find out.” “Tonight? When you return from Alabama like really late?”

“Yes.”

Now this struck me as odd because Jan is the type that needs her sleep.

Now this struck me as odd because Jan is the type that needs her sleep.

“Ok,” I said. “I’ll get some messengers.” “Good,” Jan replied. "I’ll see you later tonight."

Now I was intrigued obviously but I needed to get things moving. I placed a phone call in to our friend Justin Singingwind. Justin Singingwind was a brother that you would find at the rainbow gathering and would often invite us to raggae dancehall parties where he would flitter around the dancefloor like a butterfly. “Sister! Howwwww are you!” “I’m great but listen I need some messengers. Jan is on her way home and we need to do a sister journey.”

“Oh yessss! I can help you with that. Give me about two hours and I’ll come right over.”

I lived in a traditional portland bungalow style house it was light blue with a big porch. Justin called and said he was on his way so I say on the steps and waited for him. I looked up and saw him gliding down the street toward me. He slid in next to me and gave me a one armed hug and snuzzled my neck and kiss on the cheek.

“Sister. I have brought you some very special messengers. These are the messengers of the spider woman.”

“WHAT? Spider woman? Have you been talking to Jan?” “No I haven’t talked to her at all, why?

I told Justin about Jan’s dream. “Ohhhhh sister. You are going to have a very bless-ed journey.” He looked at me with a grin and a twinkle in his eye.

“Ohhhhh sister. You are going to have a very bless-ed journey.”

Jan arrived a few hours later around 2am. We prepared our space as usual, laid out our tarot cards and our crystals and ingested our messengers.

A couple hours later when we were well into our journey one of us happened to look up at the wall and there was a good sized SPIDER that had crawled up under a poster. We were totally dialed into this and we went over to the spider and picked it up, I believe it was Jan, that let it crawl on her hand.

I’m not sure how much time had passed that we were playing with that spider. I do know that foreheads were involved and we thought we were seeing out of the spiders eyes, you know the eight eyes point of view.

When we were done with the spider we put it back on the wall and it crawled back up the poster.

When the night was over and we were contemplating what had happened we came to a conclusion.

We had transmuted human-spider fear karma.

This really happened. The end.

@soulsistashakti is a chillout and dance musical artist and writer based in NYC. You can check out my music on my FB artist page at https://www.facebook.com/soulsistashakti