Fragment on Dreaming

As a child he had believed, facing them close as a breath, that cats could sleep so deeply and their dreams be so all-consuming and real (a truth which could readily be seen in their flickering eyes and twitching bodies and the misty undulations of their unconscious noises), that waking them from such a state would risk killing them. He would look at his sleeping cats when he was a little boy, marvelling at how vulnerable they became in their stupor, when to dream was perchance to die, and wonder how cats could ever grow up, so waspish was their nightly hazard between life and death. As an only child he had never slept in a room with siblings. He had never, growing up, lain awake next to another human, staring wide-sharp through the gloam at the flickering eyelids and twitching body, convulsing perhaps with the images of unknowable dreams projected somehow onto their retinas from behind. Had he seen such things he might have guessed the story of the cats to be nothing but a myth spread in the invented certainty of the playground. More likely though as a child he would have concluded that humans too, like cats, risk their lives each time they fall asleep, their souls drifting far away, far away from their day-side oculi, far away inside the vast basemented house of the mind. Could he, a little boy, in waking them, sever the filigree ropebridge over which they travel each night into that dark continent, leaving the sleeper stranded forever on the nocturnal side, under some grudging moon, reaching out in longing for the further bank? Each time he terrified tried, the cats would flinch and start nearly before he touched them, jerked awake by a jolt experienced solely somewhere in the tiny balancing reservoirs deep inside their eardrums.