Do you actually eat spiders when you sleep?

Friendly looking fellow. Source: Supplied

SOMEWHERE in history, some guy went around telling everyone that you eat eight spiders a year while you sleep. For some reason, a lot of people believed him and started telling everyone they knew.

Fear no more! That 'fact' isn't even close to being true. Spiders don't have any reason to get in bed with you, unless you're in fact not human and a giant bed bug.

Bill Shear, the former president of the American Arachnological Society told Scientific American that spiders have absolutely zero interest in humans and "regard us much like they'd regard a big rock... We're so large that we're really just part of the landscape."

But wouldn't that mean they could crawl all over us at will?

Well, no. Let's forget that we're giant rocks for a second and consider that spiders use vibrations to warn them of danger, vibrations that most certainly would be caused by all the random and unflattering noises we make while we sleep including snoring, drooling, farting and chortling.

So, while it's entirely possible to swallow a spider in your sleep, professor Shear says "it would be a strictly random event".

If that doesn't assail your fears though, we suggest sleeping with the window closed ... or at the very least, your mouth.