I used to have a cat called Domino, who like to sleep on my chest. When I got into bed, she would jump up on top of my chest and enjoy the warm spot. Sometimes I would fall asleep with her still sitting there. Then I would have strange dreams about having a pressure on my chest, or of being unable to breathe properly. I might dream of being stuck under a fallen piece of furniture, or of being trapped in a cave where the air was thin. Eventually I would wake up and throw the cat out of my room. After all, I am a man. My sleep is more important than my cat’s comfort. But while I was having these strange dreams, what was my cat dreaming about?
This week I listened to an audio version of Neil Gaiman’s comic book series, “The Sandman.” It is available on Audible.com. He is one of my favourite writers, and his Sandman comics are perhaps the books which I have enjoyed more than any other. They are really a collection of lots of little stories, which fit together into a larger narrative. One of the stories which I enjoyed is called “Dream of 1,000 Cats.”
In the story, a kind of cat prophet travels the world, telling her story to all the stray cats and pet cats that she can reach. She tells of how she felt she had lived a privileged life as a pet cat, being well fed and cared for by her owners. Then, after she took a stray cat as a lover and had five kittens, she looked forward to teaching her children to hunt and to grow to be strong. But her owners didn’t want the kittens and so drowned them in a river.
Broken-hearted, the mother cat fled, and travelled far to find a reason why the world could have been so cruel to her kittens. She eventually came to a kind of cat god, who explained that in the beginning of time things were different. Cats were huge in those days, and humans were only the size that cats are today. So the cats kept the humans as slaves and pets, and hunted them for food at night. This continued until one day a human prophet dreamed of a world in which humans were big, and cats were small. This prophet travelled the world, telling other humans of his dream, and eventually enough humans shared the same dream. When 1,000 humans all at the same time dreamed of a world in which humans were large and cats were small, this dream became reality. In the new reality, people had always been big, and cats had always been small, and it was the cats who lived as pets.
So the cat prophet now shares the dream in which cats rule, and humans are pets. And if enough cats – perhaps just 1,000 – ever have the same dream at the same time, the world will go back to the way it used to be. And the human pets and slaves will fear their cat masters.
Perhaps that is what Domino was dreaming about.Maybe that is why I felt uncomfortable. My dreams were trying to give me a warning. Look at your own sleeping pet. What is he or she really dreaming about?
Vocabulary:
a prophet – a religious figure, such as Jesus, who can reveal messages from God or the gods to people
a stray cat – a cat which lives amongst humans, but which does not have a human owner; a street cat
to be privileged – to be in a lucky or special position, which not all others can enjoy
to drown (someone) – to kill (someone) by forcing their head underwater
to flee (past tense: fled) – to run away or escape
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