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The Story
My cat went missing two months ago, and my efforts to find her provided me a unique and clear opportunity to compare dream content to reality in order to better understand how it translates.
CAT PROFILE
Name:"Tyr" (pronounced 'tear', after Norse God, son of Odin, which is the name of our dog)
Age: Under 1 year old
Reason for leaving: Not spayed, born a stray, locked out accidentally one night
Home Status: Loved us, part of our family, our dog and her were best friends
TIMELINE
January/February 2015 - We discover our boy (Tyr is a male god) is actually a girl when she goes into heat upon our return from travel. Her meowls are relentless, awful, continuous through the nights and we aim to spay her at the earliest opportunity. A SNYP program is offered for February with participating vets to spay/neuter your pet for $20. We get a voucher and make an appointment that won't be until two weeks later. I worried she would get pregnant before we could get her in and I would have to make the decision to abort or not. With my first beloved cat Jadzia (also a stray, and similar coloring... huh.) we only found out she was pregnant after the procedure and it devastated me. As a child, I felt terrible for having removed her only chance to experience motherhood. That sadness stayed with me all these years.
Subsequent dream - I see a black long-haired cat wandering around our premises and wonder what he might mean. When I awoke I was considering he might have been an omen or symbolic visitor, though I couldn't land on a particular answer.
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February 17, 2015 - Cat went missing a few days before she was scheduled to be spayed (of course). I searched for her all night, shining a light in every nook and cranny I could find. Eyes reflected back at me in the nearby field, but I was disappointed to learn it was a different cat.
Subsequent Dream - I'm searching through my house, expecting she is someone stuck inside. In waking life I had swore I heard quiet meows when I called for her and searched for places she could have got under the house to no avail. In this dream I was again searching the house with particular attention to the couch, again, without success.
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February 18, 2015 - My partner goes out to search the next night, checking our immediate surroundings, and walking up each adjoining road. I go out again as well. After a couple hours I give up and come back to find a black cat sitting on our porch. I was told later that he probably smelled my cat's residual pheramones, but it was such a bizarre coincidence. It was the same cat I saw in the field and a part of me drew comfort in his likely instinctual gesture. I believed he may have been my cat's chosen mate and heard us calling so desperately, chose to come to calm our worries.
I worried she would be going hungry and would be malnourished and thin if and when she returned. I feared she was trapped.
Subsequent dream - In my dream she meandered up to our door as if nothing happened, and she was fatter than when she left, which indicated two things to me, 1) that she would likely be pregnant, and 2) she might be hunting. I know she can hunt well because she caught two mice in my house after only being with us 6 months and constantly stalked birds at our windows. But these facts hadn't occurred to me until that dream.
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March 2015 - When I couldn't find her in the first few weeks, I finally accepted that she was either already dead or was managing to survive on her own. I continued to search for her everyday, assuming she lost her way or was stuck and too scared to venture across a barrier that was previously passable when she went missing.
Subsequent Dream - I see her in my dream, she meanders up to me happily. A tall blonde woman whom I call her Nanny comes along with her. I embrace her in a hug as is right when you haven't seen someone for a long while, then punch her in the side (because I can duck under her arm, she's so much taller) for not having done what she was supposed to. I saw this woman to be Tyr's guardian spirit, or nanny, and by getting her lost I felt she had failed at her job.
Tyr was trying to tell me something, that she didn't want to be with the nanny, that she missed me, but the nanny went off and Tyr was forced to follow. Upon waking from this dream it hit me that perhaps Tyr wasn't returning home because she was being fostered by a neighbor. That would explain why she wouldn't be losing weight.
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April 2015 - Weeks passed into months. I searched for her everyday in some small way. I kept up on my Missing ads online, checked local shelters. She's wearing a collar though, so anyone spotting her on the side of a road would assume she belonged somewhere and was just meandering, like cats do. No word, and no new dream I could recall about her. No status update made me worry. Was she dead? Would I know if she were? Would I get a dream sign of that? Or were those early dreams just that and now she's moving on?
There was only one thing I hadn't yet tried, the most classic of search tactics: Lost posters in the neighborhood. Why it took me so long to resort to such an obvious answer, I don't know, but at last I did. I determined to try that approach.
Subsequent Dream - I'm searching the house again, like a previous dream, except this time I find her behind the couch, caught under a cushion like it was a heavy rock that trapped her. I was so relieved to find her, confused how I did not think to check there before, but felt it all finally made sense why I heard her softly mewing in the beginning. She was weak now though and when I lifted the cushion I could tell her legs had atrophied and sores had developed on them. My baby cat looked old in her hips and legs. I felt it was saying any later and she would have perished.
Of course this concerns me now because it's taken so long to get the posters printed (ran out of ink, tending to my other two babies). I don't believe it was saying she is trapped in the same sense as I saw her. But could she be in a position where her physical health is quickly deteriorating? Has her situation changed? Is she no longer able to get care?
If she is pregnant, she would be about ready to give birth. I started searching for ads giving kittens away, thinking I could find her and whomever is caring for her that way. No luck so far. Every day I'm worried. If she's giving birth in the wild, how will she be able to care for her kittens in this town?
Before, I assumed we would find her after she had her fill of sexual escapades, and when we did I still debated whether we would spay her (abort the pregnancy) or let it continue. Now I am sure more than ever that I only want to be by her side when she does, that I want to hold those little kittens and care for them all, make a safe space for them, and nurture them. Maybe we'd keep one with momma and give away the others to good homes, thereby adding another to our family. I just want to know. Not knowing is the worst. It's been killing me, as this kind of dilemma always has of late. I feel this is a recurring chance to learn something and I don't know what. Faith in my guardians and guides, maybe. I trust you're going to bring her back to me alive and well. Help her get back to me. Help me find her. Bring our paths back together.
More to come, I suspect...
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