Always the Traveller

Dreams don’t let go of us easily.

Nestled under comforters and old lovingly stitched quilts our minds usually want to keep roaming. In worlds constructed by neurons, fleshy fibers and engrams our perfectly formed bodies ache to continue chasing the impossibly shaped and colored butterflies. Oh to go into the farthest reaches of the impossibly green and perfectly manicured fields of night’s phantom worlds. Don’t you sometimes wonder whether a person in a coma is mentally living in a fantastically constructed world similar to ours but unlike ours that just keeps rolling on and on?

Bladders, full to the brim and aching are the most common terminator of dreams. Alarm clocks are a close second. And then there are the snorers of you out there, or the curtain raising misanthropes among you who just have to let the damnable bright sunshine in and finally those who just can’t see a lay about lying about.

When you eyes open at first your night’s path and passages remain all so real that you know, you are sure that later in the day you will be able to write a short novel from the stuff that crossed you mind while you played about in REM sleep. But by the time a human bladder is voided and you are starring down the disheveled stranger in that bathroom mirror, the angels and archangels and the wide expanses of golden worlds are already fading.

For me the main cause of my dreams departure over the last thirty years has been feline. Soon after I was married my wife and I adopted a pair of cats. Being contrarians we named them Spot and Rover. (When we told people we had two pets, Spot and Rover, there was usually a surprised look as two grey and white cats sauntered out to greet the visitors inflicting gray and white hair shed upon them).

The apartment in the 1500 block of North Van Buren Street was the ground floor of an old pre-civil war townhouse. Our flat had exposed brick walls, a cool cooking island, polished wood floors and doors than did not approach anywhere near to flush with the floor. Just for kitten funsies Spot and Rover would run the length of the long hallway that ran the length of the apartment and then slide bouncing into the bathroom door. As kittens these two had several other games, like turning on the TV by stepping on the remote control and the most irritating being called the let us in and/or feed us game.

At six a.m., more than an hour before I needed to be up first one paw would enter under the bedroom door. The door was off of the long hall to the bathroom at the back of the house. The paw small but sinewy would start to rattle that foam cored room separator. We kept the door closed for without it Spot would invariably snuggled into my armpit in the middle of the dark hours while I was chasing the elysian images of my nights mind. There is nothing like a cats’ moist and whiskered nose in your armpit to end a dream.

Clawless paw would begin to pound on the door causing it to rattle loudly. Soon a second paw would join up with that first paw as both brothers began to whack and rattle the door. It was unnerving, it was unceasing and many was the time I was brought back from a trip to an ethereal Sherwood Forest by the furry ferocious, whack, whack, whack, thumpa, thumpa, rattlings that went on and on and on until I cleared my mind opened the door and went down the hall. After I took my morning pee I would feed them. Then back to bed to wait for the alarm.

Dreams don’t die easy but cats do not readily take no for an answer.