Alcoholic Cat
Dreamed 1950/2/24 by a patient of Montague Ullman
...a forty-year-old woman patient came for her analytic session. "Perhaps there is something to ESP," she remarked quite spontaneously at the opening of the session. We had not discussed this topic before, and I inquired what prompted her remark. She stated that on Friday, February 24, she had been thinking of a doctor she hadn't seen for two years, when she received a telephone call from him. She thought it was probably just a coincidence, but still ...
She then related two dreams she had recalled on awakening the next morning:
The patient's associations with the first dream was that the alcohol-cream mixture reminded her of crême de menthe, a drink which makes her slightly sick. The label "appealing nausea" reminded her of her own revulsion in connection with sexual activity. "When I get very excited, I get sick."
- "...There was a bottle on the table containing part alcohol and part cream. It was sort of a white, foamy stuff... I looked at the label. It read 'appealing nausea.' I meant to drink it when we went to bed..."
- "I had a small leopard. It was very dangerous...."
I could scarcely refrain from making a few associations myself with her dreams. On the evening of Friday, February 24, the night of her dream, my wife and I attended a meeting at the New York Academy of Medicine to hear a presentation by Dr. Jules Masserman on animal neuroses. He showed a film on the induction of neuroses in cats. One memorable sequence showed how to make cats alcoholic. When an alcoholic cat was presented with a choice between a glass full of milk or a glass half filled with milk and half with alcohol, the alcoholic cat made straight for the milk-alcohol mixture.
One might speculate that after a few of those drinks the alcoholic cat might feel like a "small leopard," or perhaps, like its human counterparts after a few "grasshoppers" (crême de menthe and cream), it might find that the appealing mixture becomes nauseating...
The "alcoholic cat" episode was the first in a series of telepathic correspondences with my life, and seemed to open up a new avenue of communication with me.
--Montague Ullman
EDITOR'S NOTE
Skeptics can dismiss ESP as coincidence, but... really? When it's this bizarre and specific? How often have you had dreams blending cream, nausea, booze and cats?
Suspiciously useful coincidence, too. Note how the dreams advance this patient's therapy! I've read theories that ESP is real but vestigial--archaic. But affirming bonds with those who matter to you is just as vital now as it was on the savanna a million years ago.
--Chris Wayan
SOURCE: Dream Telepathy, Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner, Alan Vaughan (2nd ed., 1989), pp. 38-39
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