First, he determines that he is hungry. Dry cat food will not do because the bowl is empty. Empty means he has eaten the stuff in the middle and reached the bottom of the bowl. Cat food circles his little funnel of emptiness. Plus, it requires serious jaw work to crunch the dry stuff so he heads for the kitchen and finds no canned cat food in his plate.

He pierces my dream with a call to action, meowing for me to wake up and fix this.

I push the blankets back, sit up, and ask him if he remembers what happened last Saturday. No answer. He trots up the hall and stands at the plate, pointing his face at it so I’ll know what I must do.

I pick him up and cradle him on his back and he groans and complains. I walk to the front door reminding him that he’s breached proper conduct by denying me much needed sleep.

Out he goes. Out the front door and on to the porch, paw to cold concrete.

I decide to get a drink pf water, and I realize that I will not get back to sleep.

It’s a combination of things. On the one hand, the little beastie awakened me. On the other, I had just had a trauma of my own.

Dreams are tricky because of their strange rules. I’d been on a paved street and had begun to walk along a yellow divider strip in the center between the lanes. At some point I felt there was some tension on the strip of paint so I pulled on it to make it tighter going forward. Then I realized I was walking with my eyes closed so I opened them  only to realize I was on a thin  little surface above ocean waters that were bounded by a shore landscape of layered pillars of stone, like in the grand canyon or thereabouts. I was high above. Suddenly I wasn’t so confident. A child was following behind, full of confidence and not the least troubled by the situation.

That’s when the cat intervened.