Please help me interpret my dream

Last night I had a rather bizarre dream. In deep sleep, I suddenly felt a close presence, nothing really like a dream, where a very large cat on my bed , close to my face, stuck his face near mine. I had some extremely realist. Awareness of its presence, not in a dream like sense, but in a super reality sense, as though experiencing it while totally awake.

Then, as if on cue, the thought occurred to me, in my dream State, that maybe I am still dreaming.

Then I thought I woke up, and asked my wife if there is a cat in the room, and I looked behind to door, and indeed there was a large yellow cat there.

But in fact, that part was in a dream too, for I woke up, and the door was closed, my wife sleeping besides me, and lol and behold-no cat.

What could all this possibly mean?
,

It means that your mind recognizes that you are lost in the maze of life and there is a “noid” in the mix (an actual, real stealthy mischievous culprit approaching you when you are not paying attention).

They have a name for that:
… “Schizophrenia”. :wink:

Being trite does little to clarify. Reality, super reality, are no mean words, in times of supercollider seeking the so called ‘god-particle’. In fact, reality has been consciously been, and is being separated into levels, which are accessible only with those having access to them.

Schizophrenia is a sign of a subconscious or unconscious split, whereas the splitting of reality, which began co incidentally with various art forms heyday, foreshadowing a legitimate splitting: VI’s for example the splitting of the atom,- where the underlying splitting really shows a transformative effect-namely, the transformation of matter and energy. The effects are reversible in between perception, qua. As in art-(metamorphosis of Narcissus, in Dali) and its political metamorphosis in Trump’s gross Narcissistic Personality.

That these conflation of large and small scale changes be pulled together, show an anomaly of process, usually described as entropy.

So a dream is a dream is a dream, and in my case with the cat, there seems three realities conflating, may indicate such a process going on, where the conscious state is never obvious, it can again become a dream within another dream, a topic long dealt with.

Maybe such hiddenness, is somewhat revealing in a tendency for the psyche to awake from the dream, and become conscious of subconscious and unconscious elements. Whereas there are those lower levels, may it not lead to a conclusion of higher, super conscious elements, where our sense of reality may be realized further on as less then, therefore, less conscious?

That this is not a shared experience, is no surprise, because most of conscious experience does little to avoid forming clear breaks between levels of reality, due to the way the mind is used to interpret conventional reality and exclude anything other than.
But such exclusions are supported by the way mind fills in the exclusive sequential learning which omits and changes their content , ending in logical misidentifications apprehended , of such variable
signals.

With this in mind, my mind, may seek to clarify the compiled anomaly, and pull it out of lower levels of apprehension.

But the cat? For one, in the Middle Ages they thought little of them, routinely flinging them down from roof tops, the ancient Egyptians, on the other hand worshipped them.

The fact that I am a cat lover may add an added dimension , as well, I dunno.

The above interpretation as to its structure is not sufficient to explain its meaning, even after having looked at a book of dreams, but thank you for the effort, James.

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If so who, or what is this noid or culprit? Can it be a real or an occult thing or being? Or, can even such distinction be made ?

I suspect that in your life and environment all has become too conflated to discern.
You need a shift; relocation, new perspective, new hope.

Not, if, it happened intentionally, in a conscious mode of apprehension. This is where absurdist sand surrealists may disagree with You. What if I may not want to change anything I. My life, what if, true to Liebnitz, I see the world as predetermined, and built on exact laws governing cause and effect?

… All the more reason.

What if you follow the laws of aesthetics, and the contexts may loose focus at the intentional shit to other areas such as the foreground, where extreme violations of aesthetic distance cause an inner change, such as in pointillism ? What if drug induced states ala Huxley, have desired effects of changing reality? Isn’t that the case, where sans freedom of movement of the outside may result in a sublimated internal change of perspective?

I am not being defensive to support my sanity, only trying to decipher the dream, not trying to change

what it represents, but trying to attain what it means, without being compelled to move away from its casual agents.

I keep coming back to the cat: It was large, I think Tabby, of an orange color. It was very amiable
nothing threatening in its attitude. I liked to have it
around.

I see again in the interpretative scene of things not as being stuck on Leibnit’s level, but as someone being at that stage of his development, right now, corresponding to an idea that in morphology, the fetus goes through all the sub specie forms of animal experience, starting with one cell organisms through fish like forms toward what a human being now looks like, these last thousands of years.

You asked.

And thank You for answering, am not rejecting or arguing with Your interpretation, and i have gained from them, however, the differing realities offer an
opportunity to remind me of an eye Cummings poem : 21 ways of looking at a blackbird; by which I feel the manifold interpretations which could enhance its meaning. I’ve had this kind of drea only a few times in my life, and every time it mystifies me.

And btw, it’s likely that the cat image itself stems from a very early childhood experience, perhaps from the crib.

My interpretation involves two dream theories.

In the Old School dream analysis (not one I embrace or give much credit to) the objects, characters, and actors in dreams all had a very significant significance. They could be symbolistic representatives of worries, anxieties, or even of happiness, calm and peace.

According to more modern theory, the objects and characters and sequences in your dreams in REM state are connected to recently focussed-on realities in your mind; that is, on events and characters in your real life, which you fussed about, or in the least kept re-hashing in your mind the previous day. The dream sequence is a reflection of randomized embedding of the experiences of lasting significance in your long-term memory.

In my own theory, and this is not supported by any research, the dreams still do have to do with thoughts and preoccupations of the recent past in the life of the dreamer, but the randomization is a counter-effective method to stop the obsessing. In other words, one day you are constantly worried about, for instance, your upcoming school report card or your upcoming work performance record that will determine your annual raise. So you obsess, but next time you dream, the icons of your obsessions will be randomized in order to “clear” your mind as if it were a “slate” in order to make room for new obsessive worries.

In fact, REM sleep is a natural and healthy way to make room for new worries, by way of throwing away the old worries.

Because, surprisingly, worrying is a human trait which is a survival advantage. But too much worrying, or focussing on a single set of unchanging worries is not healthy, not conducive to survival… you must come to terms with things that worry you, and you must obsess about different things, in order to stay competitive in the natural world.


Applied to your dream, in particular, the cat may be a symbol of your obsession in the previous days leading up to your cat-dream of events or people in your life in which you were treated as a cat-toy; or in which a power figure, who may have been your wife, you, your boss, or even a real cat, displayed traditional human interpretation of cat-like qualities, such as being cute, but able to turn on you if you displease it /him / her; or being hedonistic, or torturously sadistic, or quietly loving in an unassuming way, or cunning and manipulative, or else, etc. etc.

Your worries in the past few days may have had to do with your struggle with the God question, or with life and death, or with your grandchild’s well-being, or with your wife’s sexual prowess, or of your own (without trying to imply anything negative or factual, as I don’t know you, I’m only feeling my way in the dark.) Any worries that could be symbolized as a weight sitting on your chest, and which you need to get off it. But this is just one of many possible things. Without knowing the events and worrries in your head that you’d been re-hashing over and over in your mind the day or days leading up to the cat-dream, one can’t say what the real meaning of the dream is. And in fact, it is not important… knowing the reason you had that symbol and why you had it has no significance, in terms of future behaviour or omens or learning about the past… if my theory is correct… because the ONLY significance of the symbol appearing in your dream is that it has undergone the randomization, which makes it evaporate as a worry.

Is slipping in and out of various levels of dreams within dreams illustrative of this randomization? I do appreciate your interpretation and will think about it, and factor it in, next time I have such a dream, although, since I have only have had a few, I probably won’t.

But in many ways it reminds me of a Jungian type experience, where it was uncertain whether he was sitting on a rock, or if he was the rock upon he was sitting. A kind of mix of realities of conscious and sub and unconscious states.

Jerkey,

If you have that dream again, ask the cat what he is trying to say to you.
Most everything we dream about is a facet of our selves.
Remember the face of the cat - reflect on it/him until something comes to your mind.
You didn’t dream about a cat by accident.

We are the only ones, really, who can eventually interpret our dreams. And sometimes we need the dreams which went before and after, to clearly understand what our psyches are pointing to.

Based on your description, it sounds like you might have had a mild type of hypnopompic (coming out of dream) hallucination (not to be confused with hypnogogic waking nightmares, which are terrifying, but work along the same principle ):
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnopompic

I think you were already coming out of sleep, but not all the parts of your brain were in synch with the process, so you had this type of sensory hallucination. Next type it happens to you, try checking your body temperature/heart rate (you might find it elevated). This would suggest that your body was already initiating waking process, but certain parts of your brain were lagging behind, or were out of synch, which can be caused by many factors, but I would bet on some kind of chemical imbalance in the brain.

I used to have a few of these “real” dream experiences when I was a child. As I would fall asleep I would hear my mom’s voice calling me, and I could swear that I heard it because it sounded real (I actually heard a voice). But when I went to see her, she would say that she didn’t call me. This would be a type of hypnogogic (while going into dream) hallucination.

Arcturus Descending,

Interesting insight, actually, the strange thing was in the dream I never really thought, other then felt. The thought of interacting with the animal never crossed my mind, and if it ever does cross my mind in the future to ask something of the cat, I would certainly do. I do recall, however, only one time in my life that a dream became an audible dream, it was so significant that I remember that about it, but what the substance or the context of the dream is concerned, nothing comes up.

This is different, though, in as much as it was a purely affective , feeling and visual dream, not connected to any voices, or thoughts, therefore it had nothing conceptual about it. Purely an image-symbol, a sign which signifies nothing except a kind of idea expressed by Shakespeare, when the uncertainty between dreaming and being conscious is made manifest. It was as if, I was suspended in doubt, doubt about what the sign:cat was supposed to mean, and doubt about what level of consciousness or subconsciousness I was trapped in, for I felt trapped. Unconsciousness can be ruled out because I was conscious either of being conscious or, in a dream.

Thanks for Your interesting and illuminate every suggestion.

Pandora:

The idea You are suggesting is interesting as well, and the hallucination seems like a kind of resistance to avoid waking. What the cat has to do with it, does remind me of a warning dream, in also my childhood, and that is the first time a cat entered my sub consciousness. It went down like, there was a cute
cat, but it behaved in a certain odd manner. Then , after a while amid a great rush of noise, and dramatic color changes, the cat became a roaring, threatening lion. Previously, a few weeks before the dream, I was at a party, I ingested a very large dose of lysergic acid, dropped into my cocktail by some friends of my best friend at the time. The cat turned into lion was followed by a series of devastating recurrences of the frightful sequences of the dream’s central theme-death. It became a death trip, a trip which became stronger and fearful, until, I ended up near death, injected with epinephrine, and being told that I was actually without vital signs for a few minutes. This is the underlying cause of my concern with this repeated symbol: the cat, with which I have had affinity since. Coincidentally, I began to obsess about the popular tune at the time’ The Year of the Cat.

But ironically, liking cats as much as I do, dogs are my favorite animal, so the cat occupies a peripheral position in my mind.

Thanks.

Clarification of a confusion: I was 17 at the time, and many people noted how childish I was. So on recollection, i wrote that it was a childhood era incidence, whereas, I meant to say-that it was a childish one, for I considered taking drugs childish irrespective to the fact that the lsd was inadvertently taken.

Just wanted to avoid a confusion which may have had indications of insincerity about it.