cat interactions with dreams

Last night I had a dream where I had to commit suicide, and so did my mom. I think maybe I had to kill her but she decided to do it herself to spare me from murdering my own mother, or something. It was pretty bleak. I said she could write a letter to Dad for him to read when he got back from work, letting him know what happened. I told her to be sure to mention it was my fault. My mom was turned away from me the entire dream, so I couldn't see her face, but I could feel the immense disappointment and sadness from her, with a faint mix of tragically unconditional love. The disappointment came across the strongest, and I felt very small, like a child again, and trapped behind a wall of cold glass.

I don't exactly remember the next thing, but my mind started wandering to cats, and I was in an animal shelter adopting a neon green cat wearing a monocle. Then I guess I went "Oh yeah, back to killing myself" and I plunged back into the previous heavy atmosphere. I cleaved my rib cage in two, but didn't start dying until I pulled the blade out. The absence of any pain was what scared me most, as I could see blood bursting from my chest Kill-Bill-style, spurting with each heartbeat. Other sensation and perception faded until all I could feel was my heart beat. I could really feel it, beyond the dream, and it terrified me more than any pain could have. I drifted into death, which was really wake-land.

Priya was sitting next to me, using her front paws to aggressively knead my chest right above my heart. Providing the special effects for my dream, I guess. "Really feel it" indeed.

It reminded me of a childhood dream I had involving the X-Files and Gillian Anderson in my basement and impostor David Duchovnys. At the end, I was in my hallway having a karate fight with the impostor David Duchovny ("You're not the real David Duchovny!" I said to him accusingly, which I apparently actually said out loud in reality too), but after the first couple strikes, it quickly devolved into a girlish-style slapfight. I woke having a slapfight with my cat BJ, who was understandably pissed that I was striking him. (And probably pissed that I named him "BJ". I would be too.)

Another cat-dream interaction, of a different kind: Nothing wakes me up faster than the sound of a cat beginning to hurl (*hrk-hrk-hrk-hrk-hrk*). I am literally up and moving the cat onto a non-carpeted surface before I've even woken up, or finished processing that I even heard the sound. I will thank my cat Claude for that, who spent his last elderly years pretty much exclusively in my bedroom and had a lot of hairball problems. It would've been nice if he had timed his vomiting to when I needed to wake in the morning. I miss you, Claude, even though you peed on my Playstation 2 and I'm convinced that's why the AV output plug is so touchy.