It was never a dream and I don’t live where cats scream in
the night. It was a scream of terror, hysteria, fury, like one would hear
silently in a nightmare. Lying half-asleep in the total dark, trying to will
unconsciousness into my eyes and sinuses, my tense neck and shoulders, my teeth, with my exhausted mind, I seemed in that unreal place of dread, where
everything is both clear and confused, confident and at risk. And then the
scream with a piercing wildness: I thought if I lifted the window shade a fire-spitting
yellow-eyed black feline with its fangs splayed would be flattened against the
window, its wispy white belly breathing moisture against the glass, its
sharpness stabbing through to me as if by osmosis, the noise itself with a
capacity for maiming and ruining, the unreal dread turning to action, the final
true meaning of what it is to dream until you die.
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