I’ve had dreams of all sorts from time to time, but I don’t remember them too well. There was one dream that had a sort of philosophical content.
I dreamt I was in a place that had a cat. I came into the room where this cat was talking to another cat, making a date to meet at a certain time. I said, “There’s something wrong here. What could it be? I know what it is: Cats can’t tell time!”
I went up to this cat and said, “What do you mean by making this date? You know you can’t tell time. ”
The cat said, “Of course we cats can tell time.”
I said, “I don’t believe it. There’s a clock on the wall. Tell me the time.” The clock showed a quarter after eight.
But the cat hemmed and hawed and said, “Five after four... ten after three...”
So I said, “That proves that cats can’t tell time!”
Then I woke up laughing because the point was that in the dream, I was concerned with some trivial difficulty when a much more fundamental issue was askew. The trivial difficulty was that cats can’t tell time. The fundamental absurdity was the cat talking!
The fundamental absurdity is that this is a shaggy dog story pretending to be about a cat.
ReplyDeleteThe end of Lord Dunsany - A Shop in Go-by Street:
ReplyDelete“Tell me something,” I said, “of this strange land?”
“How much do you know?” she said. “Do you know that dreams are illusion?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “Every one knows that.”
“Oh no they don’t,” she said, “the mad don’t know it.”
“That is true,” I said.
“And do you know,” she said, “that Life is illusion?”
“Of course it is not,” I said, “Life is real, Life is earnest—.”
At that both the witch and her cat (who had not moved from her old place by the hearth) burst into laughter. I stayed some time, for there was much that I wished to ask, but when I saw that the laughter would not stop I turned and went away.