Had a dream I was at a convention of some sort. I was in my hotel room and the lady in the room next to me was looking for someone to watch over her cat and couldn’t find anyone so I finally volunteered. The cat was in my room now and I went down to eat in the hotel restaurant. I come back and find that the cat had removed the screen from the window and almost fallen out. In the gap on the outside of the screen I remembered there had been some kind of pill left there. Now I see this pill was gone, but I couldn’t quite remember. I watched the cat and he started showing symptoms, like he was passing out and I couldn’t wake him up so I go find the lady who owns him and explain the situation and she’s rather pissed and scolds me for not taking better care of her cat. Says he needs to go to the emergency vet. I can see the cat is starting to wake up now, but she’s still worried. I offer to drive them to the vet and she says “Yes! Of course!” So I go downstairs but for some reason the shop in the lobby is having a 2 for 1 sale on beanie hats and these two dudes who are with us insist they want to buy a couple hats real quick because it’s too cold outside to go out without them. So they are shopping and taking forever picking out two hats and I finally yell at them, “Guys, there’s a sick cat! we need to get to the vet”. that finally gets them moving. But then I have to get to my car. so now I’m in this lazy boy recliner on wheels and I’m in the hotel restaurant and I’m trying to get to my car, so I’m pushing the chair around the restaurant, trying to navigate as fast as I can and finally realize that I should just abandon the lazy boy. so now I’m sprinting out to the parking lot. I see the lady with her cat, but now she has her own car. But for some reason she’s waiting for me. I get close to her car and she just takes off without me. Which, I didn’t understand why she was waiting for me in the first place if she had her own car. I realize it’s the middle of summer and really hot out, so I start getting mad at the two guys cuz we didn’t need no beanie hats. That should not have been a priority. So now I decide to sprint to the vet, so I’m running in huge leaps and bounds like the gravity is really low. Then a bus shows up, so I hop on the bus thinking that will be faster, but the bus driver is having a good ol time, he’s like doing bus tricks or something. He starts backing up and weaving really fast and crosses this ditch on a tiny bridge with amazing skill. Everyone is super impressed but I’m frustrated because he was supposed to be going right past the vet. So now I realize that it’s too late to even make it to the vet, so I just go back to the hotel and try to contact the lady to find out how her cat is doing. It’s super stressful. She finally shows up and I ask and she’s like “He’s fine”, but she’s still really mad and starts lecturing me about how the cat has certain health issues that makes him react really bad to human medication. She goes into her hotel room and I’m standing outside her room now with some other people who are all really concerned about the cat and being slightly judgemental toward me, and finally I start trying to defend myself saying, how was I supposed to know the cat could remove the screen from the window, when I didn’t even know how to do that myself and how I certainly wasn’t the one who had left that medication down in between the screen and the window. So some people milling about started to see my side of it but others were still being judgy toward me and calling me an irresponsible pet sitter.
So I plugged that dream into ChatGPT and asked it to be my dream shaman and interpret it for me and it actually spit out some really interesting stuff that genuinely does reflect how I feel in real life. It’s all about an important task that I must complete to help others but I keep getting distracted. Here’s a summary it spit out:
Symbol Meaning (Archetypal / Shamanic)
The Cat: Vulnerable intuition, inner child, or someone else’s trust placed in you; a spirit companion.
The Pill: Forgotten or unconscious trauma, repressed thought, or a spiritual contaminant needing attention.
The Screen & Window: Boundary between conscious and unconscious; the veil between seen and unseen realms.
The Woman (Cat Owner): The demanding side of the psyche—could represent guilt, conscience, or the face of external judgment.
The Beanie Hat Sale: Distractions, absurd priorities, trivial concerns that derail sacred missions.
The Two Guys: Immature masculine energies; peer pressure; people-pleasing impulses.
The Lazy Boy Chair: Illusion of comfort; a warning against trying to “coast” through responsibilities.
The Bus Driver: Trickster archetype; playful chaos; cosmic interference that tests your focus and will.
The Sprinting/Leaping: Supernatural effort, divine will; you’re pushing toward growth even when blocked.
Judgy Onlookers: Internalized shame or anxiety about how others perceive your failure (real or imagined).
The Hotel: A liminal space; temporary identity or transient life phase—not your home but where the story happens.
So for me i think the cat represents peace, or my mission to speak out in the name of peace and large-scale teamwork attitudes. The pill represents the us-vs-them mentality that exists everywhere that I am trying to push back against. The cat owner and judgy onlookers would be my own psyche that judges me for not being more productive toward these goals. The Lazy Boy would be things like the video games, pointless TV, candy and eating out that brings me temporary comfort but takes me away from my real purpose.
Maybe the beanie hat sale and the two guys represent the way I actually enjoy violence, at least in fiction, specifically Terminator Resistance, the video game I’m playing through currently and other things like maybe my novel Against a Rock, where I embrace violence and hard-core us-vs-them mentality in fictional settings. The way that kind of thing is sort of in direct opposition to my goals and puts me temporarily in another world where my true goal doesn’t even exist.
The sprinting/leaping would be this experience where when I finally get to it and start working, like when I actually sit down to write or actually sit down to work on Custom Data Organizer, well I always start flying through it and it feels like I make progress in leaps and bounds and it just feels right.
And maybe this entry counts as one of these ridiculous beanie hat 2 for 1 sales that just distract from what I’m really supposed to be doing.
This entry is kind of violating my rule of always be adding value–that’s what i want to do with all my writing, it should always add value for my reader, but this one, well I’ve read more than a couple times in my self help books about communication that telling people about your dream is usually not fun or beneficial for them. Dreams just aren’t as interesting to other people as they are to the one who dreamed them–I mean, it’s better than trying to make a conversation out of re-telling the plot to some anime or super hero movie you saw. I know a couple people who do that all the time and it’s always mind-numbing.
I don’t plan on doing this often though. Dreaming is a new and novel thing to me since i quit smoking weed so I’m more focused on it than I would be otherwise.
So many distractions in my life: maintaining my pool, Jiu Jitsu, video games, TV, kink parties, my marble run, the fruit trees I just planted, my stock investments in the space industry, and sometimes even my Red Cross volunteering, yoga, and walks in the park. I mean, you always need some distractions, some things in life you do just for your own enjoyment, but when it gets to the point where what is truly important to you is coming last behind all these other things, well that’s a problem.
I think this is normal, of course. I think most people have this worse than I do, maybe most of our society is so filled with distractions that most of us don’t even realize we have a mission we are supposed to be prioritizing, and maybe that is the root of our mental health crisis in modern times.
Cuz I know that what truly brings me satisfaction and long term joy in life is not these distractions and surface pleasures but the stories and articles I write and the app I built, and the ways that I can genuinely and tangibly contribute to my community.
