I'm in a creative writing class, a serious, fierce one. I'm nervous--soon I'll have to read one of my dream-tales aloud.

Break. Walk outside with our teacher Jack. He says "I'm going on a trip to the Sierra foothills." I gush about "what a great season it is there right now", when I haven't gone there in decades. A homebody playing travel guru!

I lie on the lawn with two classmates and talk. "We're both dropping out. California's resuming capital punishment, and in protest, we're boycotting college." I'm dismayed. "The most ethical students will get on this bandwagon and drop out... and I take these classes partly to meet other smart idealistic people. If it turns into a vocational school for the desperate and the apathetic... guess my days here are numbered too."

Go back in, seek our class... but the room numbers have moved! Ours is 35a, 35b? Unclear. Hear Jack's voice, peer in. Wrong! A black woman teaching poetry. Hunt till I find the class... in Jack's tiny office. Way too cramped, so we all troop down the hall, seeking an empty classroom. I carry a stack of chairs and a box of books out... put them in a pile, nest them so they're compact enough to carry easily, but... the books are a heavy burden.

I take a wrong turn, lose my classmates. I retrace my path, a zigzag beside chainlink fences. Hear a crackling radio voice from a window--says an organization protesting high crime in their neighborhood was just busted by the police for smuggling or dealing! Is it true, was their protest just a cover? Or were they framed for rocking the boat?

I cross a vacant lot; ahead see two cops or security guards--their auras say "cop"--squatting on a curb, talking idly to a beautiful young woman also squatting or kneeling by a steaming, almost red-hot pot. She just finished firing it, and it's cooling now? Or is she cooking in it? Yet there's no fire. The pot itself is hot, steaming fiercely. No one dares touch it.

She looks a bit odd, this pot-maker. I look again. Medium height, short-waisted, long-legged, smallish breasts, wearing a plush or fur jumpsuit, charcoal gray, long tail... long tail? Oh. That's not a jumpsuit. It's her. She's a cat. A big cat. A big big cat. A big big SMART cat.

I stop twenty feet away and listen quietly. They all sound like they know a lot and care a lot about... pots.

Cop, cat, hot pot, lot.

When she looks up and notices me, she jumps up and skitters back half a block. I'm not offended, as cat people are known to be shy with strangers. She'll return as soon as I've passed. As she leaps up, I see her belly has a beautiful tortoise-shell pattern of lighter fur. I want to pet her.

And if I'm patient, maybe I can. She's skittish with strangers, but she acts comfortable with these cops she knows. It just takes time to befriend her...

I hop off the curb, across the street... Hop? I jumped lightly, casually, where a human would have cautiously stepped, because I'm bounding around on three points not two: hindpaws and my long tail. A tail I hadn't noticed!

I never realized... I'm a cat person too.

And I wake.

NOTES ON WAKING UP

• The pot = in "Windhorse Woman" by Lynn Andrews, her teachers picture the self like an Anasazi pot; it can't be pieced together when full! Pot surgery can only be done when it's empty. Lynn's spiritual pot was full of fear and grief. Mine, in the dream, seems to be hot out of the kiln! Like I've woken up (spiritually, socially, sexually) so recently I'm still skittish--too hot to touch, like some teens at puberty! Maybe I don't NEED to change--just need time to cool.
• The cat = a charcoal-gray cat appeared on our back porch today. Seeing the cat stretch, I did yoga, felt catlike. Oh, and I talked with my housemate Cory a lot; she seemed very catlike and sexy today. Not skittish or shy though.
• Steaming pot = my housemate Lily cooked a huge pot of stew today. But also, the cat squatted by her steaming cauldron in a sexually suggestive way. "I'm hot!"? (Tried to catch this in the sketch)
• Two cops = I saw no cops or security guards at all today. Inhibitions, rules? But they were friendly. If the cat is sex, she doesn't fear them at all.

LATER THAT DAY

I'm early for allergy shots at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, so I go into the comix store across the street and stumble on a compilation of "Omaha", by Reed Waller and Kate Worley. It's a funny animal comic with complex, realistic characters. The heroine's drawn as a sexy cat, not identical to my dreamcat, but similar. She's a nude dancer in a Midwestern bar; her friends are all lowlife artists and musicians. So my dreamcat may mean sexual and artistic freedom.

That afternoon, I go to a free lecture on pastlife therapy in the UCSF (University of California, San Francisco) med complex, in Parnassus Heights.

The only parking space I can find is on the edge of a small empty, grassy lot with a curb, much as in the dream. And the maze around the lecture room rather disturbingly resembles the dream-maze of classrooms.

No cops or giant cats in sight, but when I return to my car, the cops have been there all right: left me a parking ticket! I misread the sign--in plain sight, right above my car. Deliberate self-sabotage.

The free lecture wasn't so free.

TEN DAYS LATER

I go to the first meeting of my creative writing course to find the classroom is in a complex much like the dream, with scrambled chairs as in the dream... and no one's there, no teacher, no note, nothing. I hunt around for the class, but...

TWO MONTHS LATER

That carelessness on our writing teacher's part not to leave even a message was typical: she did show up for subsequent classes but gave useless, indeed harmful feedback, and forgot her own assignments; I'm thinking of dropping the course in another week if it goes on like this.

On the other hand, the long dull part of HOT POT CAT LOT, before meeting the catgirl and noticing I'm a cat myself... that long dull buildup looks steadily more psychic as weeks roll by and the small coincidences between dream-class and real class mount--chairs, students, even bits of dialogue...

What a strange sort of precognition! Like a timed-release vitamin pill: unspectacular little classroom scenes fizz with deja vu, on and on for weeks. One advantage of a digital diary over paper: at least you CAN keep squeezing in notes when you hit a time-release dream like this.

Well, the dream did say I'd have to be patient to get to know that cat...

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