Picture based on an AI-prompted image by Smiley7pixel at Deviantart

THAT NIGHT

I find myself crawling on the floor of a lapidary shop. Semiprecious stones are scattered all over. If I pick them all up, I can keep them.

As I collect the gems, I get distracted by a set of mystery books on the lowest shelf of a book cabinet. The sleuth in the series is... a housecat?

Book One shows her on the cover--not a pet, but a sexy catgirl, drawn with a large cartoon head with cat-ears, big feline Betty Boop eyes, a feline button nose, and a more human mouth. She walks upright and has human hands, but fur and a long tail, too.

She wears a mustard minidress, striking against the blue couch where she lounges. A very Sixties dress (she likes Mod styles). And very short. Very very short. Showing her, um... pussy.

Other book covers in the series feature different poses and outfits--several sub-series with related images (one set lacks her, shows a cat committee, all grumpy old tomcat heads, namecards and microphones)--but most books have her front & center--stylish, colorful, and always accidentally-on-purpose flashing us.

I half-wake. Struggle to recall the title of her first book--four words, that may have just been The House Cat Detective.

As I wake fully and reach for my dream-notebook, I think "She's really cute. I'd like to meet the real her... the model for that distorted cartoon.

But would she turn out to be a genuine catgirl? Or in the waking world would she just be an ordinary girl--or an ordinary cat?"

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Collect semi-precious stones, not treasures but beautiful: on Deviantart.com, I collected AI furry art and dream art. Fleur de Palette's deer & unicorn girls were elegant; most of Smiley7pixel's furries had huge silly breasts, but the few that didn't were good.
• House cat detective: playing on the midcentury term 'house detective' in hotels or stores, for what today we'd just call a security guard--a rentacop.
• Cartoon girl with giant head: Hilda! I just reread Hilda and the Troll, by Luke Pearsson.
• Human/cat blend:
  1. Deviantart's AI-generated pics include about a million catgirls.
  2. Peter Birkhauser painted an old, hooded catwoman with claw-hands. Carl Jung loved it--hung it in his office.
• Young, stylish, sexy and flashing: Deviantart's pinups, the exact opposite of Birkhauser's hooded, secretive Cat Crone. I like both--and don't apologize for either.
• ACTION: Draw this--but use an existing AI image as background and model. Can I improve on the machine's rendering of anatomy, shadow, perspective, proportion, light?

I did as the dream prompted--I painted atop a similar AI image prompted by Smiley7pixel at Deviantart (I think it's #6596)... changing orientation, proportions, colors and details till it looked something like my dream. Authorship gets confusing with digital work like this; how much came from the dream, how much from my waking mind, how much from Smiley7pixel's original prompt, how much from the AI--and how much did the AI steal from non-AI digital artists like me in the first place?

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