Kitten Scribbles

I think in words, you know. I mean actual words, each neatly typed out. Whenever I hear a new word, I have to know how it is spelled; otherwise I cannot call it up again. I confuse titles when they look visually similar, such as Requiem for a Dream and Remains of the Day. Or Return of the Dead.

My dreams are as confused a jumble of images and actions as anyone else's, but once in a while they are also reading material. I distinctly remember a dream I had back in high school: I was trapped inside a building, and the building collapsed in a cloud of dust and noise. My view zoomed out as the building fell. Somewhere above and to the right of the debris, in neatly typewritten text, the narration concluded: "…and then she died."

Dead and therefore purposeless, I floated above the dream-landscape in vague puzzlement until my alarm clock beeped me awake.

Anyway. I bring this up because I dreamt book reviews today.

See, I take the Book World section of the Washington Post to work every Monday and read it over lunch. (It's a fun change from the other stuff I have to read all day.) I only read for as long as it takes me to eat, which is why one issue can last me all week. I then nap for the remainder of the lunch hour, partly because I perpetually get too little sleep and partly because my stomach is full and comfortable. This afternoon my brain apparently hadn't had enough Book World; I dreamt in book reviews, text scrolling across the surface of my mind. Nameless critics praised the flowing prose of equally nameless authors, calling out several illustrative sentences. Characters and plot points were dissected, the accuracy of historical details debated. When I woke, I was unsure of whether or not I had slept at all.

It's not real, though. The dream-reviews of the dream-books are nothing more than nonsense text, in this case strung together in the language of book critics. Sometimes while dreaming I've tried to concentrate harder on what I'm reading, on the actual words, trying to commit them to memory; upon close inspection, the words never make any sense.

Still. It's an odd feeling, waking with fading ghosts of words in my head. I know that they're meaningless, but I still want to keep them.

We were getting on the plane when I realized that I had left my cat at my grandparents' place. I told my mother that I couldn't go back home without Kitty. Mom pointed out that it was Christmas Eve, that there was no way that we could get another ticket home before Christmas, and that I would just have to deal.

I refused to deal. So she took me back to my grandparents' house in the minivan, but warned that I would have to find another way home. We discussed alternate modes of transportation, and finally settled on the train; it would allow pets, and be slower than air travel, but I would still be back home in time to unwrap Christmas presents. (How Mom would be able to get home by air was never explained to me, but I didn't question it.)

We got back to my grandparents' place by driving at breakneck speed; my grandparents had already left on their Christmas activities, and the house was deserted. As I rooted my cat out of her hiding place, I heard the minivan screaming out of the driveway and I realized that I was stranded. I couldn't get to the train station, because I didn't know where one was. I couldn't open the laptop and use the internet to find my way back, because...

...I had left it on the plane, in my bag along with my wallet, passport, and everything else that I needed to function in a foreign country.

I sat huddled in my grandparents' house, petting my cat, realizing that I was well and truly stuck. Alone. Abandoned. On Christmas Eve. The situation was just too impossible, too steeped in pathos. This is a dead-end dream, I realized. There is no place for the story to go from here. I guess there's nothing for me to do but wake up.

So I did.