hordes of cats

Usually, I have no trouble remembering my dreams. For years I kept a journal, a blog most recently (you’re looking at it). Since moving to Texas, I seem to have hit a bit of a dreaming lull.

I couldn’t abide by this, the world around me begs for an escape, and my dreamless nights offered me none. I started asking my brain to unlock itself, to show me what had been keeping so quiet in there. It worked.

Now I’m remembering dreams quite regularly. Funny thing is, there seems to be a common thread.  Starting with the dream “I didn’t mean to come here” I have been inundated with feline presence. Every single night, I am visited by cats. All kinds and sizes. I walk into a room full of half-starved and dying cats. I find a palm sized adult cat that I keep in a tiny tube in my pocket. I am greeted by a strange cat in a friends home. I am given a helpless kitten to care for. They just keep coming.

Several days ago, in the midst of this bizarreness, I was sitting on my back porch, reading some articles on In5D and I found one about spirit animals. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if my spirit animal would come visit me today? As I was sitting there, I notice the neighbor’s beautiful, but rather skittish tortoise shell kitty lurking beyond the fence as she normally does. So I asked her over.

To my great surprise, without wasting a moment, she jumped the fence and walked straight up to me. She has never paid a bit of attention to us before. She slowly, nervously put her face to my hand, and promptly made herself at home in my lap, for over an hour. When she was done getting mauled, she decided to sit on the other chair, bathe herself, and settle in for a nap.

Listen to your dreams. They are not meaningless random firings of the neurons. They can teach you what you need to know, if you want to know it.

gone, gone, gone

i put my first love in the ground on sunday. this week has been hard. the night i learned of his suicide, my dreams were vague & spotty, but marked by comforting post-humous  snuggles.

i miss you, S. you’re a permanent resident of my heart & mind.

too much cheap white wine and one lost kitten

Somehow, i acquire a kitten. It is very tiny, it is hopelessly in love with me. When I stand up from petting her, she leaps into my arms, begging me not to leave her.  I take her home but mom insists that I turn her out. I can’t.  I just can’t. I spend a good deal of time on the phone, begging mom, but she never wavers.  My sister calls and wants to take the kitten to Montana where her mother lives. NO FUCKING WAY. a friend of mine has a strange lazy father who feeds strays all the time. He offers to let the cat stay in their barn until I have a place where she can move in with me.  He even mentions letting me stay there too, so I can see my kitty as much as possible.  But soon, my sister shows up with mother and step father in tow, chasing me, fleeing with my kitten across the countryside, I hide in an abandoned house, near the bottom of a bed. The brass lady on the headboard comes to life and lifts the sheet over me. The menacing face of the brass lady morphs into my mother, who snatches at the kitten who I’ve been clutching to my chest the entire dream.  The kitten looks at me, I can hear a little voice in my head begging me, “please don’t let me go,” but she is torn from my grasp.

semi-flight

Some people dream about flying. I usually dream that I can jump very well. Last night, I dreamed that I could jump 10 feet, and climb like a monkey. I could lift my whole body weight easily with one arm.  So I am at school, I guess, but the architecture building is way up on the other end of campus, where the Student Center is. I do this jump/run maneuver all the way there and it only takes me a few seconds to cross campus. There’s some younger students there in the middle of the night, getting ready for an early morning crit.  I dazzle them with my jumping skills and then demonstrate my super-simian climbing abilities by using just my hands to go up the stairs on the underside of the steps. It is awesome.

pets

I have three pets. A small kitten, a large bird, and a tiny gerbil.  The bird is crow-like, he is singing a song sometimes, and other times, he looks very skeletal and dead, but he’s always talkative. Some kind of police show up with a truck full of very big rats and they abduct my teensie little gerbil and put him in with the rats. I can see them out the window. The liberation force shows up and rescues my gerbil by tossing him into a tree. He’s fine, but he turns into a gecko in mid air. I  try to run down to save him but when I turn around, I find that the kitten has peed on the bed. I pick him up and scold him, depositing him in the litter box, which is incredibly filthy. I ask my roomate to please clean it out, because I need to hurry and rescue my gerbil/gecko. (wtf?)

my mother has a dream

She is at home, but it doesn’t actually look like home. It is the morning in which she is dreaming, and she is planning to do the things she plans to do in waking (paint the dinging room, etc.). I am there with them, and she’s laying in bed with M., just relaxing, talking about the day when the dog starts barking outside. She asks M. if he left the dog out, and he says he did. She asks me to please go let the dog in. So I go but come back soon and I’m standing expressionless in their room, pushing a door, which is vertical, toward them slowly. At this point, she gets creeped out. I don’t know if it’s my expressionlessness or the nonsensical action of pushing the door. She asks me what the hell is wrong with me and sees that I’m wearing headphones. She approaches me and sees that the cords from the headphones are going into my mouth. Now she’s getting really freaked out and can’t get me to talk so she opens my mouth and finds it is full of battery packs. She tries to pull them out and they break apart in her hands and crumble up and there just seems to be more and more of them. She feels as though this is something I have done to myself. She screams at M. to call 911, to do it quickly. But in his usual manner, he is clam and doesn’t rush at all. She gets very angry with him, screaming at him while trying to clear out my mouth. On the phone, M. is chatting nonchalantly with the 911 dispatcher and my mother just keeps yelling.

Then she wakes up. She’s totally freaked out when I call later in the day. She has to tell me all about it.

bubblegum vampyre

this is all vague and spotty but I’ll do my best

I am male, in a swamp, approached by a striped female vampire. Looks like she could be made of candy. behind me is the lair, an enormous fanged creature, also apparently made of various types of brightly colored candy. Inside of this beast are children, sleeping in a bed. I escape with the three of them, rolled inside of their mattress.

I end up at some weird costume party, without the children. I am now female again. someone sprays something gross in my hair and someone else leads me to a washroom where I can wash my hair and there’s a pony in there, all dressed up too. The hair dryer is too hot. I look like a frizzy dog.

i didn’t mean to come here

I am driving and I pass my intended destination. But before I realize it and have the desire to turn around, I have to stop for a lot of cars turning left out of another street onto mine. Not because there is a stop sign, but because they won’t stop and they all seem cartoonishly sad. I realize it is a funeral procession about half way through. There is now a passenger in my car, she seems like one of those oddly sad people from the procession. When we are finally moving again, she tells me her destination is just a little farther. Funny, I don’t remember agreeing to give her a ride. We drive on this road that snakes further and further into the woods, all the while she’s urging me, just a little further. Then, we reach some kind of road construction, or that’s how my brain rationalizes it, a huge pit in the road. She points, past the pit, to an obviously abandoned cafe. “There, I’ll walk,” great, because if you thought this car could magically float over the pit, you were mistaken! I am a little pissed now because I had no intention of coming out here. There is a house nearby the road, which I am trying hard not to look at. I mean, I really didn’t mean to come here. I place a quick phone call to my father who tells me it’s such a shame, because he changed the music, just for me, and it does sound like he’s having a great time. I tell him that I didn’t mean to come here. I end up in the house anyway, either intentionally not looking any further at my surroundings, or somehow knowing that I should not look. The people seem nice enough, and they know that I can’t go home now. So they offer me a bed, which terrifies me. I am lying in it, knowing that my car is gone, that I cannot leave, and that there is something out there. I get up, from some brief nightmare, irrationally intending to walk calmly off the property and back to my safe home, where things are normal. I am met on the porch by the couple’s young daughter, who just happens to have a beautiful face. She tells me not to look, that I won’t like it if I see it, that he’s feeding it. I couldn’t have seen it anyway! I walked out the door with my back toward the outside! I remind her, implore her, I didn’t mean to come here. But I turn anyway, and she guides me past the thing I shouldn’t look at, she takes me to a largish pond, beyond the driveway. It’s man-made, and full of potted water plants which obscure the bags and containers at the bottom of the water. She kneels at the edge of the water, her knees in some gritty, sandy dirt. She tells me she wants to show me something. From the greenish water she pulls a bag, from inside the bag, she pulls a cat, it is black and has white hairs on it’s face. This animal is very happy to see her, it’s purring wildly, kneading her arms and rubbing its face up and down the sleeves of her shirt. I see other things in the water now, moving. A snake larger than I have ever imagined slips around near the surface. Revulsion nearly overcomes me, when I realize that I am in plain view of the thing I shouldn’t see, and I still don’t see it. But I know it is there, too large to be hidden, but hidden somehow, by the sheer impossibility of it. And I wrench my attention back to the beautiful, writhing cat in her arms. “She is so beautiful, isn’t she? Look at her… she likes you.” I am petting the cat and surely, her purr is growing louder and her crazy green eyes are closing lazily. I cannot imagine why she must be hidden, in the water like that. “She really likes you… she has beautiful eyes, look at her eyes,” the girl says, and I do. But not the green eyes I remembered, they were filling with black, inky black that consumed the pupil. I barely have time to react, “she’s leaching you, she really likes you.” My hand is stuck firmly where it was petting the cat’s face, and the vibration from her purr is making it’s way into my chest. It tingles and is intensely pleasurable, like some kind of orgasm. Before long, my entire arm is nothing but black, furry, purring mass.

god, I’m so broke…

I am at my dad’s house for christmas and I’m looking through the closet for some money I stashed there the year before. I keep finding $100 bills. When I’m done I’ve found about $500 and organized everything in this huge walk-in closet. Merry fucking christmas.

steamy

in this dream, I am visiting with Crtny, she was taller than in real life. Probably about as tall as her personality. She seduced me, rather successfully, on the living room floor. When her fiance came home, he didn’t seem to notice or mind at all, as if it was commonplace to come home to find her friends all naked and writhing on the floor.

I am slightly disturbed by this.