Short Essay: "Feline Dreams"

This piece of writing began as a prompt from one of my notebooks: “What do cats dream about?” I’m always game to write about cats, and my thoughts soon turned to an interaction that I once had with my own dear little furball. The result was more of a contemplation piece than a true narrative, so I didn’t feel right calling it a story. “Essay” is probably not accurate either, but it’s the closest term I have for now. Read and enjoy!

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I’ve heard it said that when cats dream, they dream of power. Power over their prey, power over each other, even power over humans. They dream only about violence and bloodlust and the whispering creatures of the dark. At least, that is the popular opinion. But I have reason to wonder if cats sometimes dream of other things. For I have looked upon a cat deep in its dream, and I saw no trace of that terrible power.

Zorro is curled up on my bed in a near-perfect circle. If a cat sitting with his legs tucked beneath him is acting like a loaf of bread, then mine is currently pretending to be some sort of croissant. He’s also dead to the world, outside of a few occasional movements. A flick of the whisker here, a twitch of the paws there. One front paw covers his face, trying to block out the light from overhead. He’s been like this for at least half an hour, probably longer.

And there I am too, sitting at my desk a couple of feet away. There’s a document open on the screen in front of me, probably like the one I’m using to type these words now. The minute details of the memory are hazy, but if I know myself—and I’ll be presumptuous enough to say I do—then the document has a few hundred words already, and I am either struggling to add more or trying to make sense of what I have already written. Either way, any excuse to set my work aside would be welcome.

So, I swivel around in my chair and begin watching Zorro as he sleeps. 

Intellectually, I know my cat isn’t really any more special than the millions of others that I’ve seen in my life. But I answer that with the refrain known by every cat owner across history: of course they are more special than the others, because this one is mine. I know the texture and the patterns of his fur, the sound of his meows, the sound of his feet padding down a wooden hallway. I could tell you of his uniqueness in a hundred different ways.

Since he is lying at the foot of my bed, he is just close enough to touch. I reach out and make light strokes across his side. 

The reaction is instantaneous. Zorro tenses up, like a rubber band pulled tight enough to snap. He jerks awake, releasing a yowl of confusion and anger. His front legs fly out, splayed in front of him, the claws coming unsheathed. This time, I’m at least quick enough to escape another skewering. 

The moments ends just as soon as it begins, and I think it leaves both of us shocked.

My first instinct is to drop into “doting guilt-ridden cat mom” mode, the same thing I would do if I stepped on Zorro’s tail or tripped over him in the dark. I descend upon him with a flurry of ear and chin scratches while cooing out endless repetitions of “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry!”  

Luckily for me, Zorro is the sort of cat who's quick to forgive. Once he realizes where he is and that I’m not going to kill him, he settles back down and begins purring as usual. For him, a few minutes pass and it’s like the whole thing never happened. 

I, on the other hand, don’t stop thinking about it.

I’ve seen frightened cats before. I even had one who would run in terror at the sight of an apple. Zorro isn’t one of those cats. The sound of a lawnmower doesn’t faze him. A massive dog could be standing right behind him, and he wouldn’t even flinch. For something as innocuous as a touch to make him jolt, he must have been close to the edge already. 

And so I cannot help but wonder: what were you dreaming about, my friend? 

My mind briefly considers the easy answer, that he dreamt of fighting some fearsome opponent and was simply startled by my waking him. But what if it was something else? I know that he hasn’t always had the comfortable, cushy existence he enjoys now. There must be plenty of bad memories in that little head of his.

Do cats ever dream about the past? The simpler days of kittenhood, the prime of their life when the world was theirs to explore, the accidents and tragedies that remind them how fragile they really are? Does a cat rescued from the street dream of the unhappy life they once knew, when they went cold, wet and hungry in an endless, uncaring world? Imagine dreaming of hunger pangs or a broken leg and feeling a touch that your brain can’t rationalize. You might scream yourself awake, too. 

Or perhaps Zorro wasn’t dreaming of something real at all. Maybe feline dreams are like our own in that they can eschew reality altogether, seeming so real to our sleeping minds and yet so alien when we wake. Does a cat, for example, dream of its teeth falling out? Does it dream of flying? In its mind, do snatches of remembered sight and sound weave themselves into collages of nonsense that still become places, figures, sensations? 

I could imagine a cat dreaming of some paradise where the grass is all catnip and the trees are great carpet-covered towers reaching towards the sky, or a prison where dogs walk on two legs and drag all the cats around on leashes. How would they comprehend such things? Might they realize that something is terribly amiss and thus return themselves to the waking world? Are there words in the feline vocabulary to match that human feeling of “What a relief...it was only a dream”?

A rational mind would say I am foolish to ascribe such emotions to a simple animal. They would trot out the word anthropomorphizing, that childish and dangerous train of thought. But what writer has not ascribed depth of thought to something which is not human? Have we never given meaning to a dog’s bark or a rooster’s crow? Of course we have, and more. We have given mirth to the striking shades of flower petals and the soft babbling of a brook. We give anger to a thunderclap and glimpse despair in the drooping branches of willow trees. We see kingdoms in anthills and cities of fish in the oceans. To write is to capture a scrap of what we believe it means to be human. To be human is to be forever reaching out at the world around us, hoping to find something which sees and feels and thinks as we do. 

Zorro sleeps once again, stretched out on the bedroom carpet beside my desk chair. I reach down to pet his side, and this time, he does not wake. 

I smile and think, it must be a happy dream.