cat dreams

Over the last few nights I have had three dreams about cats. I tend not to remember my dreams, but these three are all quite clear, although I don’t know why as they don’t seem especially significant. It might be because I started calling my own cat Peterson as a joke. My wife said it wasn’t really fair to call her Peterson, because she responds to her own name (Willis) and it will confuse her, but I said “Peterson” in the same high-pitched tone of voice I would usually say “Willis” and she still looked around expectantly and meowed at my face. My point was that it was more about tone than recognition of word choice. Cats can’t speak English etc. Even if I call her a cunt in the right tone of voice she still looks at me. I love cats. It’s hard to trust people who don’t.

Dream 1:
In this dream my parents owned the C of E cathedral in Norwich and we lived in it together, but still let the public and the religious come in and look around at the artefacts and architecture. Our beds and living room were amongst the crosses and paintings. Willis lived there too and spent the days running about the huge stone space, making the weird growling noises she makes when she gets excited and breaks my things. She is small and soft. My sister and her husband came to visit and they brought their two Springer spaniels and a new puppy they had, which although only weeks old was about the size of Willis, and they got along very well and played together and ran about like friends. I spent the whole time my sister was there trying to keep the cathedral door closed so that Willis couldn’t escape onto the busy road outside, but my parents kept telling me that they had to leave it open to attract visitors. After a while the puppy ran outside and Willis ran with it, through the huge wooden door and onto the road (which was a road from Cambridge, not Norwich). Like prophecy I knew that Willis was going to be run over, and I threw up (in the dream) and woke up (in real life).

Dream 2:
In this dream I was in a high-school school reception for some reason, towards the end of the school day. A little boy with red hair was hugging my legs but I made him let go and then left him crying there with his sister, who was shouting something at me in a language I couldn’t understand. Outside it was getting dark and snowing. I started walking home, the path running alongside a deafening busy road. There was a group of three youths standing around outside a house. One of them came up to me and as he walked past he hit a small vibrating pig into my shirt pocket with a miniature luminous pink tennis racquet, which was about eight inches long. I pulled the pig from my pocket and held it in my hand. Behind me I could hear the youths laughing. I turned to the road and instead of being full of cars and traffic it was thick with giant cats and the noise was their purring.

Dream 3:
In this third dream I was taken to the sun by two winged cats, and entered its core. Somehow the heat of 13,600,000 Kelvin was perfectly comfortable. In the core I was greeted by the acceptable face of TV physics, Brian Cox, who had his own head and taut features but the body of a man-sized cat. He smiled at me relentlessly. He talked to me about the real formation of the sun, and how it hadn’t been formed in the big bang but was the product of something far more incredible. We walked around the sun’s core and met other famous scientists who all had cats bodies beneath their perfectly preserved head. Isaac Newton had the body of a Persian. Richard Dawkins had the body of a Bengal. The biggest of them all was Charles Darwin. They told me that cats had built the sun and that the creator cat was Willis. She was the unmoved mover. Brian Cox then flew me out of the sun’s core and to an orbit around it, and when I looked down I saw Willis’s giant head in the centre of the sun. Her head vibrated with excitement, her hypnotic eyes drew me ever further into the great void that lay within them. She opened her mouth wide like a yawn and swallowed the sun, the universe, Brian Cox and I, everything. There was nothing but Willis.



I don’t know where on earth these cat dreams are coming from, but I enjoy the way cats legs move when they walk; their varied vocalisations and their nose touching; their obvious wisdom hidden behind constant mistakes. When I was young we had a cat called Oscar. When he got very old he climbed over our garden fence and into the garden that backed onto ours. We were all worried about him and tried calling him, coaxing him back home, but he just lay there in the sun. Eventually my sister and I crept around into the neighbouring garden and carried him home. We put him on my parents’ bed and he just lay there, as though he was waiting for something. He died when my dad got home from work. It was incredibly sad. Another cat I knew went to the vet to be neutered and the practicing veterinarian said that he (the cat) had the smallest two testicles he had ever seen, which seemed pretty unprofessional. Yesterday morning Willis pulled a whole curtain down while she was trying to climb up it like a weird snake. She often strikes me as slightly reptilian, like a caiman. I did call her a bitch while I was picking up the shards of broken curtain hook, but it was done with love, and she turned around and meowed at me as I said it.