I once used to have a black cat I lost many years ago - over 10 years ago now - and the other night I had a strange dream of that cat I once used to have, except that in the dream he now looked much, much older, with whitened hairs all around its furry, delicate 'face'. I remember being taken by surprise at his appearance in the dream, and at once I found myself calculating how old he would be today - 19 years old.... that would be very old for a cat, indeed.
"You've found me! You've come back to me..." I whispered, but as soon as I tried to approach him, he jumped away, almost as though he was walking away from me. I ran after him, looking for him inside some vague room I can no longer recall, and kept coming across other cats looking just like the one I currently have. These 'copies' of my current pet didn't run away from me, on the contrary, they kept coming to me, but I was pushing them away - intent on finding the old cat I'd just seen appear before me. When I woke up from the dream and saw my real cat - the one that is actually alive - sleeping in a ball by my feet, I almost felt guilty for somehow 'rejecting' him in the dream in favour of the one lost so many years ago.
Talk about multi-layers in terms of meanings to be drawn from such a strange and unexpected dream...
The black cat was my childhood pet, and when we left the old country behind overnight, I was made to give him up to family friends who ended up beating him up when they weren't locking him inside a closet. We didn't know about the abuse, but after a few weeks spent in London, I started having dreams of my cat looking withdrawn and skeletal, which led me to convince my mother we needed to go back to check on him. Lo and behold, when we got there by surprise, my poor cat was missing a tooth and looked like he hadn't had a proper meal in days. I remember opening the cupboard in which he was kept and seeing him stare at me for a moment, uncertain. And then there was a flicker of recognition in his impenetrable, feline eyes, followed by a weak meowing whose tone was so disturbingly close to a question mark...
After much insisting on my part, I managed to convince my mother we had to take him with us - I was only 17, and he suddenly represented everything from my old life. After much hassle involved, we finally got him back with us. And this is where the happy ending should be... right?
A mere few months later, while I was away, my mother decided to let him out into the garden of the house we were sharing with a bunch of nasty young men who began to throw stones at him for 'fun'. The poor creature got so scared that he wouldn't come back inside the house... and by the time I came back, he'd been living outside for weeks. I remember sitting outside for hours, waiting to see a glimpse of him, and whenever I did, I'd try to entice him back to me... to no avail. I could see wounds on his body, dried up trickles of blood down his once shiny black fur... One night, right before I had to leave again, I caught a glimpse of him staring into the room I was in from the top of the high brick wall between our garden and that of the next door neighbour... So I went out into the night, and I remember the moon was shining in streaks of silver between the tree leaves dancing gently in the quiet wind. I approached him ever so slowly - and he stayed right there. He didn't move. I patted his wounded head softly and picked him up as slowly as I could, praying inside he wouldn't get spooked... but then I tripped. I fucking tripped on a loose stone... and the next moment he was fighting me, and I had to let go of my grip.
That was the last time I ever saw him. A few months went by, and I had another odd and unexpected dream of him out of the blue, and in that dream I was back in our old home, and there he was. It was as though he'd never left and had been waiting for me to come 'home'. I never dreamed of that old cat again until recently... I used to think that the reason I'd dreamed of him back in our old home was because he'd died, or something of the sort - a 'nicer' reason than the ones reality often ends up providing.
I know that my dreaming of the black cat is linked to deeper underlying 'psychological' reasons, of course. If anything, the animal became a symbol for my subconscious to use to relate certain themes to my conscious side. It's all about the theme of loss, and the hard lesson of letting go, or something of the sort.
The fact that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you simply cannot go against something akin to 'fate'. As hard as you may try, sometimes you just have no power whatsoever to change the outcome. In the black cat allegory, I suppose I was bound to lose him, and no matter how much I fought against it I eventually did lose him sooner rather than later.
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