Cats’ Dreams

Cats live in the moment, they say. They say it because of how cats act around us. But how can we really know, when we can't really know what's in another person's mind? In fact, I don't know much of what goes on in my own mind. This morning I woke from a dream in which I was trying to figure out what to do with a big pile of junk that I didn't want to throw away (it's not only in dreams that I have that problem). That dream was just after a dream in which Judith and I had just moved into a house that was cluttered with stuff and strangers and the toilets and water faucets didn't work right. How could I know what a cat dreams?

A cat sleeps a lot, twice as much as people do. Researchers say that all the evidence points to the idea that cats dream, much like humans, about their waking experiences—jumbled, of course, since their awareness and their motor mechanisms are suppressed and there’s no “reality” to keep their minds focused. Their sleep patterns are also like ours (and most mammals), with deep sleep and REM cycles in which they exhibit signs that they might be dreaming. Eyes move under their lids, paws twitch, and sometimes they make little noises.

We don’t remember much of our dreams, at least after a short time when we awaken. The exceptions that I experience come after dreams that I wake directly from, and remember vividly. If I then think about the experiences in the dream, I remember longer, because I’ve incorporated them into my conscious mind trying to make sense of them. I’m seldom successful about that (making sense), except for overall themes that suggest to me intense processes and conflicts that I’ve been going through lately. Like the dream of wondering what to do with all my junk. Maybe my dreams will get better if I actually throw all that stuff away.

My dreams about making love, I’m probably stuck with. At my age, there’s little I can do about that.

It’s unlikely that our cats dream about stuff. That’s a human condition. They might dream about sex, of course—our cats have been “fixed,” so that they don’t have such experiences in their waking lives. But it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that they dream about it. Sad, when you think about it. We assume that our animals are perfectly all right without such experiences.

They might dream about hunting small animals (which ours have never seen, that we know of), but how would it be to dream about something you have urges about but have never experienced? Maybe I do. Maybe a lot of what I dream are just such unknown experiences. That woman I’ve dreamed about never seems to have a face. It’s mostly feelings—maybe the images that become part of the dream are just random concoctions my brain fills in the empty places with to explain the feelings—euphoria, lust, disappointment, depression, fear.

Maybe I dream like a cat. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything except for the feelings. I can’t explain the feelings except by analogy. One of our cats loves to be brushed (she’s a long-haired rag-doll breed) and purrs like crazy when we do it. But she doesn’t like to be handled much otherwise. Only when she’s parked herself on my desk while I work and snoozes peacefully, I think she might have special feelings for me. Naturally, I return the favor.

But I have no idea what goes on in her head. When she purrs while I brush her, maybe it’s something erotic to her. Maybe it eases her dreams. Least I can do, I guess.

My Women

I’ve been writing fiction for a number of years now, and lately I’ve thought about the themes and the people I’ve been “creating” in my stories. I’m aware that they all come out of someplace in my very cluttered and mostly hidden mind, and I got curious about them all and whether they might have some meaning.

I’ve noticed that I write a lot about women and relationships with women. In Waking Up, the young narrator of “The Class” resembled me from sixty years ago, beginning to break free of the world my family had established for me. He was curious and skeptical, and somewhat dependent emotionally on his sister, who was a kind of surrogate mother to him. The girl he connected with saw him as more powerful than she, and more knowledgeable, the traditional male role. I recognized that relationship as similar to my own at that age, even though the details of the story were different from mine. Eventually in that book, their relationship developed and matured, but as his wife became more in touch with her own needs, the marriage became difficult. He reacted to his wife’s growth with panic at first, then (more or less) acceptance.

Osmosis was an entirely different kind of story. The main character was a woman, near middle age, struggling with feelings about her own history and relationships. But she is strong, and her relationship with the principle man in the story was one of equal strength, although she was much more emotional in her responses to him (emotion not necessarily being a sign of weakness). She even discovers the confusion between her maternal reactions to another young man and her recognition of unacceptable desire. In the end, she learns to accept these conflicting feelings and begins to will her own future path.

The short stories in the collection Lovers, Past and Never and the novellas The Guitar and Movie Group reflect differing kinds of women. Most, it seems, possess power in their relationships with others. Most are sensitive, intelligent and compassionate. One or two tend to be impulsive and intuitive. I haven’t begun any of these stories with a clear idea of who might populate them. I’ve described an initial situation and let the story tell itself, being myself entertained by events. Occasionally, I’ve felt some illumination on the processes of my own mind as those events unfolded.

Looking back, as it were, on these stories as illustrations of my personal relationships with women in general, I feel pretty comfortable. Particular cases sometimes have not been so comforting to me, and I have mostly passed over them in reviewing my writing. Perhaps at some time in the future I will have the courage to face those stories and figure out what they mean.

The truth is, women are crucial to my life as well as to my stories. Very few of my eighty-four years have been spent without a strong connection to a woman. Yet rarely have those relationships appeared in my stories, except for occasional literary fragments and, of course, memoirs. My use of first-person narration in some of my stories does not mean that those stories are any closer to autobiographical than the third-person narrations. It’s just the way they came out. Some people who know me well may recognize aspects of me in some of the stories. In retrospect, I sure do. But I haven’t tried to include or exclude such aspects. As I said, it’s just the way they came out. On the other hand, if anyone who knows me thinks they recognize other real people in my stories, I can only repeat from the copyright page, “The names and events portrayed in these stories are fictional, and any similarity to real persons or events is entirely coincidental.”