Spiders Dreaming? And Writing Notes
It has been a while since I posted a blog. I can't write them if an inspiration doesn't
somehow arrive in my heart. Last week I saw these grasses in a field in Southern Pines, NC. The unintended fuzziness seems to give it a ghostly quality. Autumn grasses with the low afternoon sun shining through them is a miracle as is what I learned this morning about a certain spider. It is near Halloween and spiders fit in well. A fascinating article in my morning feed from Science News showed recent research that strongly suggests that jumping spiders sleep. I have seen jumping spiders in my garden and now, oh how I wish I had known to pay more attention to them.
They are tiny so photographs that magnify them are illuminating. They are known for their eight eyes- two large front eyes and three smaller ones on each side. They see in color, fairly sharply. They have depth perception. I ponder how such a tiny brain can make sense of the images it receives from all those eyes. There is something adorable about them.
Jumping spiders have to see well as they do not use webs to catch their prey. They hunt, stalk, and then leap at what looks tasty. During Covid, an ecologist, Daniela Roessler, wanted company so just happened to collect a few Evarcha arcuata (a species of jumping spider), made some little transparent boxes for them, and then lined them up on her windowsill. Soon, one evening she noticed each one was hanging upside down on a single strand of spider silk, mostly motionless. There were more indicators of sleep. She published a paper in 2022.* What a great Covid project! It documented evidence in the spiders of REM sleep, along with limb twitching. Later she and others confirmed all this in other settings and found evidence of their circadian rhythms which also suggest sleep. Then, Roessler raised the question about whether they might
dream. She is trying to figure out a way to study this. What a thing to ponder. The article didn't mention what thoughts would have to follow this, at least to me: if these spiders dream, a lot of other critters to whom we have not given full critterhood, must dream, too. And, then, doesn't that imply consciousness?
Also, I want to share a bit about the amazing week I just at had at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines, NC, at a writers-in-residency. This is the second time I have been there and the first I shared with three other amazing women. One is a local friend, the other two started as strangers. We all ended as close friends. We worked hard, learned so much from each other, laughed and felt sad at times, and shared ourselves and our writing. I am working on a new
book that is really challenging me. During each of these weeks, I made progress on some tough parts. The majority is still to be written. I will share more about this and an another book project I am involved with in a few weeks. For the latter, I am off to Birmingham in week. We call ourselves the Dissident Daughters of the Confederacy. There, we will finally, after three years, all get to be together and
meet each other in person. We total nine Southern women. They are also all amazing. I can't wait to get together!
*Rößler, Daniela C., et al. "Regularly Occurring Bouts of Retinal Movements Suggest an REM Sleep–Like State in Jumping Spiders." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 119, no. 33, 2022, p. e2204754119. www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2204754119
Marcia Edwina Herman-Giddens, October 2026
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