Cats and the caldera (a story told by sleep)

I slept about nine hours last night.

Spent the last four of them, this morning, with my eye mask on.

As usual, the act of waking enough to put it on this morning -- it won't stay on if I sleep all night with it -- escorted me into a land of vivid dreaming. I always have extremely vivid dreams if I wake up long enough to know I'm awake and then go back to sleep.

In the one I had right before waking, I was visiting Mt. St. Helens. Hardly a soul was up at the observatory where you look into the yawning maw left behind when the volcano's side blew out in the big eruption (1980?). There was a long and straight line of snow dropping down between the rocky inner face of the caldera, and the color of the sky at that point so well matched the snow that it had the illusion of the mountain having been split into two, torn apart vertically in the middle.

Even though the observatory was almost deserted, I felt this strange concern about finding a parking spot and I ended up driving into an underground parking garage in search of one. (In reality, there is no garage there. And in my dream, surface parking was plentiful.) The garage was very dark.

When I got out of my car, I saw the woman who was my teacher in Career Counseling. She was kind of reprimanding a boy, telling him to return to me the pair of rain pants he had taken from my trunk. Even though I had already locked my car (and thus set the alarm), he was able to open one of the back doors without tripping the alarm, and he tossed my pants onto the seat. This gave me pause, but I decided to leave it be and walk out of the garage.

Up on the surface, in the daylight, I looked at the volcano again. The sky and snow were different colors, and rather than appearing torn in two by that strip of snow, the snow now looked like the most radical nordic ski jumping platform you've ever seen. I remarked on this to my former teacher, who was walking with me through the empty parking lot. And I also remarked on the availability of parking and wondering what had made be blind to all these open spots above ground.

My teacher ignored the parking issue and addressed the change in the volcano. "Every day, the mountain reveals to you a different aspect of herself she wants you to see. But you still have to allow your eyes to look."

We stopped walking at a little card table set up on a sidewalk, a chair facing the volcano. My teacher had been sketching whatever it was she saw there, and I looked at her work. There were colorful, squiggly lines evoking the shape of Mt. St. Helens.

I contemplated it quietly for a moment, then said I wished I could draw but cannot. She replied, "Rendering things only as they actually appear is something a cat would do."

It's not that I dislike cats, I replied. But it strikes me that they are the only pets we keep who show dismissiveness and contempt.

And then I woke up -- and stayed awake.