So, I’m asleep on the couch, dreaming...

OK, the fact that I am asleep on the couch is not uncommon. I often stay up well past midnight and, when I get tired, I just fall asleep wherever I find myself. That’s usually on the couch.

My wife has given up trying to get me to come to bed. She has employed all manner of coercion to convince me to move my sleeping to the traditional bedroom setting, but none have ever really been effective and so she has resigned herself to leaving me in the living room to whatever the fates will for me. I often wake up around 3am to find that she has closed down the house and gone to bed. I am left to navigate quietly through the darkness to take my place next to her, where I often find that she has taken her half out of the middle of the bed as revenge.

But I digress.

Let me start again: I’m dreaming. That’s the thing that’s important here. I don’t dream very often; at least, not so I remember it when I wake up. I’m just not terribly sensitive to my dreams. Every once in a while, though, I get one that’s vivid. Sometimes, they’re momentous, like the one where I learned my older daughter’s name--before she was born. Sometimes, they’re subconscious lessons for me. The following dream is neither of those:

I’m teaching in a traditional high school classroom. The desks all face toward the front. All the students are taking a test. I’m looking over their shoulders, and I can see that it is a multiple choice test. Then I look closer. It seems as though the answers to each of the questions on the test has a common answer.

The 16th president is…

a. Woodrow Wilson
b. Grover Cleveland
c. Abraham Lincoln
d. Ferguson J. Cat

The Civil War began in what year?

a. 1794
b. 1918
c. 1861
d. Ferguson J. Cat

This strikes me as odd because I cannot imagine why my cat would be listed as an answer on my test, but I convince myself that there must be some good reason for it. Maybe it’s some sort of twisted attempt to get a laugh out of the students. I’ve been known to do that.

I go back to looking over shoulders. As the class period goes along, I notice that the test is getting more and more strange.

The cubed root of 8 is…

a. 4
b. 2
c. Ferguson J. Cat
d. Ferguson J. Cat

Anchorage is the capital of…

a. Alaska
b. Ferguson J. Cat
c. Ferguson J. Cat
d. Ferguson J. Cat

The Earth is how many miles from the Sun?

a. Ferguson J. Cat
b. Ferguson J. Cat
c. Ferguson J. Cat
d. Ferguson J. Cat


What the hell??!?

My brain simply could no longer suspend its disbelief and I rose to the surface of consciousness.

It takes a moment for me to realize that Ferguson J. Cat is laying on top of me, her head tucked into my neck. She is stretched out all the way to my waist, basking in the relative warmth and comfort of me under the afgan.

Lesson of the day: Cats have the power to affect the subconscious.