brainylady

Do cats have nightmares?

Seriously, I'm wondering, because the craziest thing happened this morning. At about seven o'clock, more than half an hour before the alarm was set to go off, I woke up suddenly because Bill yelled. I looked up and Mooky, the fifteenish-pound cat, was hanging, perfectly still, from the bedroom curtain. Just hanging there by his claws, which had pierced the fabric. It took me a second to react to the fact that Mooky was hanging from the curtain, and that he was about five feet off the ground. I jumped out of bed and grabbed Mooky, mostly worried about the curtain crashing to the ground with my cat attached to it. (It's one of those heavy cotton Ikea curtains with tabs at the top, and it's just hanging from one of those cheapo adjustable metal rods.)

Anyway, everybody's OK, and Bill doesn't remember any of it, so neither of us knows why he was yelling in the first place. But as I'm thinking about it, I realize that the only way Mooky could have been so high up the curtain was to jump onto it from the bed -- and what on earth possessed him to hurtle himself from the bed towards the window, and to grab and hang on to the curtain?! Here, I'll show you the punctures in the curtain, to help you visualize the whole situation:



Granted, this may not be as dramatic to you as it is to me. The things to note here are (1) the holes are further apart than Mooky's claws, which means his paws were fully extended for battle as he hit the curtain, and (2) there are only these two sets of claw holes on the whole curtain -- it's like two footprints in the middle of a backyard of virgin snow. In other words, he didn't climb up the curtain, people. He landed squarely in the middle of it.

It's not just me, right? Is this one of the craziest things you've ever heard? I think it's hilarious (since Bill bent the curtain rod back to its original position, and Mooky seems to have forgotten about the whole thing). And seriously, all I can think of is that he had some kind of bad dream where he was being chased or something. But whatever -- he's totally over it and is back on the bed:



(The painting shown behind the Mook was done by Barbara Tucker.)