Turning Into a Cat

Do cats have anxiety dreams? I know I've been having anxiety dreams lately, and they're exhausting. I wake up completely skeptical that I've had any rest at all; the temptation is to put in a few more hours to try to make things right.

Earlier this week, I was away from home for the night, and I had a dream that my house had been destroyed and was down to a pile of rubble. Only, the actual stressful part was simply that my cats were hanging out on the rubble pile, wondering if I was going to be back any time soon. Time was slipping away before they became likely to wander off and get lost.

Clearly these cats have cast a spell on me.

Perhaps they have been trying to turn me into one of them. The truth is, I don't just have trouble transitioning out of sleep when I'm having a bad go of it; actually, I have exactly the same problem when sleep is going really, really well. I realize there's a saying that you should leave a party while you're still having a great time, but tell that to the comfortable corpse of my sleeping body when I'm  in the zone.

I get into it -- sleep, that is. It's like I was made for it; I'm training for the sleep Olympics! I have three of the best sleep coaches a cat lady could ask for.

Cats: Please Kill Me!

A few years ago I got the idea of using one of those wheat cat litter products from a crazy cat man I was dating at the time. He used the stuff with no problem, and it struck me as possibly more environmentally friendly, since you could just keep the litter box right next to the toilet, scoop the waste right in there with your own, and then flush it down instead of sending it out to a nasty landfill somewhere.

That was all well and good until I realized I had mice who were feeding off the stuff. Which sounds a little ironic -- the mice were, in a roundabout way, coming around because of the cats!

Not so ironic, though, considering that study that basically says that cat feces contains a bacteria that works away at their little mouse brains (and possibly human brains) and makes them want to throw themselves into the path of a cat, crying, "Kill me! Devour me! I don't care! Just be near me!" (Seriously, if you don't believe me, look it up on Google.

And what about that? Wouldn't my cats just oblige by devouring the poor, insane, suicidal little mice and be done with it?

Well, apparently it wasn't working. And I guess that statistically, only one of my three cats is a psycho mouse killer (another one for the Google search!) -- but it has also been my observation that 1) Princess will torture a mouse, 2) Monster will completely ignore it, and 3) MadMax, despite having only one tooth left in his entire mouth, will gum the whole thing down.

I guess that maybe the cats were outnumbered. I just know that the mice were scaring the crap out of me, and shortly after switching back to clay I never saw them again.

(With apologies to the environment).