A Goodreads user asked David Wong:

I David, I love both Dave and John books. One of my favorite sections is actually the stuff about the college experiment in Temple of X'al'naa'thuthuthu. As a sufferer of Sleep Paralysis, and the owner of a wildly over active imagination I found it very eye opening and have since looked in Koren/god helmets and the like. Do you think you'll bring anything similar into the third D&J book?

David Wong I'm glad you asked that. One of the most common messages I get is from people who think they've seen shadow people, and assume my books are a statement that they are real phenomenon they should be afraid of. There's actually an afterword in this book explaining that everything involved with these books is fiction, and that the shadow people are in there BECAUSE its a very common hallucination suffered by people who have sleep disorders etc, and thus found their way into pop culture (they show up in Dean Koontz' Odd Thomas series, as well as the movie Ghost with Patrick Swayze).

So I omitted that scene because it seemed to almost be there to directly tell these people, "No it's not a hallucination and you should be scared, see here's what happens when you try to study it." Even though the book is obviously (and ridiculously) fiction, you have to put yourself into the mindset of a sleep-deprived person who's ACTUALLY SEEN shadowy beings emerging from their closet. It'd be easy to assume that the silly stuff in these books is fiction but that the shadow stuff is real, in the sense that Jaws is about fictional characters but sharks are real. And I really don't want to come off as conveying that message.

So I left that scene out of Spiders and really haven't thought of it since. And from a story perspective, at this point in Dave's life I can't see him subjecting himself to a test like that anyway, unless they were offering a lot of money. I mean, what's he trying to find out? He knows what the deal is, he doesn't need a psych student to tell him.

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