(1/24/06) saving the animals

(Entered in paper journal at 7:03 PM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was in a living room in a small house. It was day, and the light in the house was dim from the windows. I don't know for sure who or what I was in the house for, though I might have been waiting for someone in particular.

I heard a noise from the bathroom. It sounded like a mean animal. I was afraid, but I walked to the bathroom.

Out of the shadows, maybe between the toilet and bathtub, I saw a grey cat. It was a cat from my past. I called out to the cat, "by name," "Grey Cat! Grey Cat!"

I must have knelt. But I was disappointed: the cat didn't show up. I thought I must just have imagined it.

Now a cat crawled up from behind me, onto my back, then around one of my shoulders and onto my face. It did all of this in a cuddling way, to be loving. I "saw" that the cat was cream-colored or white with thick, giraffe-like spots of lemon-yellow or golden yellow. I was still disappointed that this cat wasn't "my old Grey Cat," and that it was instead "Yellow Cat," whom I also knew.

I called to "Yellow Cat" a couple times. I worried briefly about getting a cat disease from the cat having gotten too close to my mouth. The cat hopped off me and walked either into a kitchen or through a (closed?) screen door leading to a backyard.

Now the people were here. There was a small crowd of people. They were some of my coworkers. But there were also some characters from the TV show Arrested Development. My old boss PG led the group.

PG asked me, "Where are all the animals?" I felt like she meant puppies, two to four of them, very small, which this group of people had come to take to the pound. I'm pretty sure PG didn't mean Grey Cat and Yellow Cat.

I now knew I hadn't been able to pull together the money to keep "the animals." But I knew now that I had to keep "the animals," for the sake of Grey Cat and Yellow Cat. So I made one last attempt to pull the money together.

We were all in a room with no windows. Light came into the room only through a doorway just off from the bathroom. I stood over a square, wooden table with a thin top and thin legs. A wide, foolscap-like sheet of tan-white paper lay across almost the entirety of the table. It said, $1,300, which was all the money I had pulled together.

I was about to tell everybody, "This is all I have. What else can I do?"

But one of the people, possibly Michael from Arrested Development, stopped me before I spoke. He said, "Is that all you have? I don't think so. Look down there. We wrote $17,000 on the paper."

I looked down and looked up. I was incredibly relieved. It looked like everybody else was relieved, too.