cat dreams

Hello,

My dead cats keep visiting me in my dreams.

This sounds like the introduction to some postmodernist novel, where I am about to be swept away into a magical vision or a surrealist realm, and then an old man is going to reveal some terrible truth about my life, and I end up having sex with an ill-advised figure. I promise it’s not though.

Last year, two of my cats died. Mimi in February, Sundy in November. Both were heralded post-mortem by a single call of my mom sobbing. Despite how much time I spent popping in and out of home last year, both of them left us right after I moved somewhere else again. They were both, respectively, a few months shy of their shelter-ordained 14th birthdays.

Personally, I am neither a religious or spiritual person, so I understand that these dreams are the result of bad sleep. I only remember dreams if they occur in the quarter-hour intervals when I’m slipping in and out of sleep due to some disturbance. All of these quasi-sleeping dreams — cat-related or not — tend towards the stressful.

I didn’t mention these dreams to my mom until June this year. I was traveling alone in Porto and had a dream where Mimi came to lie with me in the hostel bed, and she looked as she did as a kitten. I called my mom as I walked down the hill towards the bus that would take me to the beach that morning. My mom had started crying before I could. She can’t really bring herself to talk about either of our dead cats. All she said was, “They haven’t come to see me yet. Was she okay?”

I didn’t really know how to answer her, but I knew what she meant. In Chinese folklore, when you see someone in your dreams, it means that they are coming to see you. Either you are missing them or they are missing you, and your spirits are able to meet in your shared dreams. If the other party is dead, then they are coming to visit you from the Yellow Springs. It’s a major feature in Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the Four Great Classical Novels, as well as a plethora of other classical poems and literature. Despite the general atheist nature of most Chinese people nowadays, spirits being able to travel in dreams remains one of the superstitions that we hang onto, especially after death as a form of comfort.

To my mom, I responded, “I think so. I’m glad she came to check on me.”

My mom believes that our cats are visiting me. I don’t actually buy it, but I carry it in my chest — this melancholic yet reassuring notion that, even as I bounce aimlessly across continents, my cats want to come sleep next to me one more time. I want them to know that I miss them too, so much. I’m grateful that we had the chance to love and care for them.

Whatever the real explanation, the result is that I keep dreaming about my dead cats. In every dream, I am in my bed, either in Queens or in Paris, and it feels so real when they come to curl up in the cradle of my arms. Sometimes they come to me as they were right before they passed — lesions and protruding spines. Sometimes they are kind enough to visit me as they were when they were younger. Mimi has the smoothest fur I’ve ever seen on a cat, and Sundy sits against me like a Laughing Buddha — rotund and sweet.

From a psychoanalysis perspective, it probably means that I haven’t been sleeping well since this time last year and that I’ve carried this silly cat grief across oceans, but I kind of like my mom’s interpretation. Sundy visited me again last week, and when I saw her — even as I drifted between believing that she was actually here and knowing that it was another dream — I made sure to press my face against the fur on the back of her neck and thanked her for coming to see me, for coming to make sure that I’m okay.

夢李白二首其 (Dreaming of Li Bai) by 杜甫 (Du Fu)

No book recommendation for y’all this time. This is my modified translation of an excerpt from a Chinese poem. Sophomore year of undergrad, I took a course on Classical Chinese poetry, and we talked extensively about the role of the spirit and of dreams in ancient Chinese beliefs. Du Fu misses his fellow poet, Li Bai, after he has moved afar and ponders as to whether his dream of Li Bai is a result of him missing his friend or if something has befallen Li Bai’s body.

“Seeing off the dead, mourners swallow their cries,
Seeing off the living is often as sorrowful.
From south of the Yangtze, the malaria ridden land,
Came no news of my exiled friend.

An old friend¹ entered my dream,
It must be a reflection of my waking thoughts of him.
But he might have fallen into toils,
For how could he have wings to fly?
It may not be his living spirit,
The journey is long and far, too difficult to measure.

His spirit arrived amid maple green,
He left over mountains and fortresses black.
Moonlight shone all over roofs beams,
I wondered whether it could return color to his face.
Waters deep and waves wild,
I wish to caution him against flooding dragons.”

(1. Also a term used to refer to the deceased.)

For the first time, the book rec section takes up almost as much space as the actual letter. In retrospect, I appreciate that class so much. I wish I were good enough at more languages to be able to do this with other poetry.

What kinds of dreams do you have? Do you attribute meaning to them? What types of sorrows do you talk to your mom about?

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie