Dream 71: Killing Cats and Opening Night
Before I relate these latest dreams, just to say I’ve been having quite a few travel dreams (a very recurrent theme of mine) usually trains and aeroplanes/airports where I’m thwarted and sent hither and thither. But they become blurred and distorted on waking and I can’t capture them. Also had a few odd dreams about playing different kinds of games or doing complicated tests but again I haven’t been able to piece them together when I wake up. We have moved bedrooms recently which seems to have slightly affected my dreaming and my ability to recall them, plus the usual problem of disturbed sleep, when you’re jolted awake suddenly your dreams tend to disappear completely!
So, I had several dreams last night these are the two that remain with me. In the first an aunt had died and we went to her cottage. She had a lot of cats and we had to put them down. They were beautiful cats all different varieties but well kept, sleek lithe bodies and healthy coats. They were also very friendly and trusting. I didn’t understand why we had to kill them, I kept thinking of alternatives but for some reason we could do nothing else but destroy these lovely animals. Under instruction I prepared a solution. It was white gooey stuff in a plastic tube which we would use to pump the stuff into the cats. It was like the sealant you use on windows or similar and the tool was also like you would get in a hardware shop. We had to prepare the goo then take each cat and pump some into their mouths. The cats were so trusting and pliant they let us. In fact more cats kept coming to us for the ‘treatment’. Then the my ex housemate from the 1980’s, S, was in the kitchen and when the cats were falling alseep from the goo they’d been given she gently took them and put them into a large frying pan. The cats were curled up as if asleep and S made them fit exactly, one at a time, into the pan which was very slowly heated for a few minutes then the cats were put in a pile together. It was meant to be the most humane way to put them down and they did look peaceful, but not all of them died at once so S had to keep taking them back to the frying pan. It was all very calm but I felt so awful inside.
In the next dream it was the opening night of a show I was in. It was a big theatre and I had a reasonable part but was not one of the main cast. We were doing various back stage preparations and last minute directions were be shouted and reiterated. It seemed to be the first time we had full costumes as there was a lot adjusting and complaining and people running about with bits of flapping material.
Then there was a big fanfare, the show was about to start. I had in my minds eye my main scene which was later in the play, but I actually didn’t know much about the rest of the show. A small group of us were ushered through some corridors and shown with a flourish into the back of the auditorium just as the show started. I was quite excited as I was going to get to see what was going on. It was also part of the spectacle of opening night that some of the cast was in the audience and people were turning to look at us. The show commenced. It was a depicting a film shoot. There was a small crew, cameraman, focus puller, director, AD, boom operator and sound guy. They were crouching around a spot and fussing as if to prepare the shot for a big star. There was dialogue the gist of which was that whomever it was was late, but that they had to be ready. I wondered how on earth this fitted together with the scene I was in. The next scene was to change to be a stage show and I wondered if the play was about an actor. I started to make up a story myself. A sort of day in the life where a well known actor is supposed to film a commercial or something during the day then go to his play in the eveing where he’s doing a fairly long running season. However he’s stuck in a terrible traffic jam in a violent storm. A bridge ahead has collapsed and other storm related calamities occur on the film set, at the theatre and around him on the road. He manages to avoid all the disasters, but ends up helping to save people around him, even though initially he stays in his limo making calls about how his day has been totally mucked up. I realise this had nothing to do with the play I’m in but I still can’t figure out how my scene fits in either.