Strange dream

"Those other 10 o'clock shows that come on, all you get from them is headaches and nightmares when you go to bed! At least we give you food, know what I mean?" -- Chef Emeril Lagasse.

What do you call a vision by night that is neither dream nor nightmare but something in between?

Returning home from a horribly lengthy work meeting (11 p.m. -- absolute insanity!), I stopped by Wendy's and bought an "Oriental" salad. My Beloved warned me that it would give me nightmares. I countered that only greasy, spicy foods do that and that I was so tired I would sleep like a baby.

We were both a little right and a little wrong.

My dream was simply bizzare. I was on my hands and knees in my front yard, weeding around a low berm of dirt. When I yanked up some tall crabgrass, a hole in the berm was revealed to me, a sort of entrance into a vast room carved out of the inside of the berm.

The cave-room was beautifully furnished, with a hardwood floor. But as I peered into it with amazement, a large cat shoved its way out the entrance, past me. I had a vague sense of foreboding about the animal but not quite fear. Another cat appeared but I don't remember what it did.

The narrator of the dream impressed upon my mind that these cats, not humans or hobgoblins or whatever, were the owners of the place.

And then I woke up.

I do not have a cat. Cats are not a part of my life. Neither are secret rooms in my front yard. I would be genuinely puzzled about why I would have such a weird dream, had I not realized long ago that my brain dreams randomly, assembling odd bits of this and that for its own amusement while it is forced to lie in the dark waiting for me to wake up.

In this case, the concept of cats in a cave only connects to an obscure book that I read at least 22 years ago -- a pun by Piers Anthony in one of his Xanth books on the subject of a cat-as-trophe.

That's a long reach back in the cranial file cabinet.