Early mornings seem to be my ideal time for dreaming. Shortly before my first alarm goes off to be specific, which means that I start waking up just as they are getting interesting. Gods, do I ever hate that.

What I recall of this morning’s dream had something to do with kittens–a lot of them. They had some kind of agenda going on, they were gathering en masse, and a few had some non-traditional coloring (sky blue, for instance). A few adult cats were roaming about as well and I think I carried one to its meeting place. It had good manners and said thank you, or maybe it was just happy with my service to its needs.

A part of me thinks this feline brigade might have been there as a protective unit as well, because once they were all occupied in a little cave of sorts, I was under sudden pursuit of some guy, barely recognizable to me while I’m awake, though still familiar when I close my eyes. I put up a good fight, I escaped, I ran. But damn if he wasn’t just as fast and clever. No amount of carnival or Italian market pathway dreamscape was enough to shake him. I surrendered when I was cornered in a deli, more or less up against a cold case, and he was somewhat merciful–at least, he wasn’t violent. I “shouldn’t have run. It would have been better not to have run”.  So I was caught. My bindings were lavender colored Tyvek wristbands (I seriously need to get “Staged” finished…) with a Y-shaped network of chain attached to them. For whatever reason, my captor shackled us together. I was beyond running. I had surrendered. I had no ideas left for any kind of escape at that point–he had won and the shared restraints were unnecessary, I thought.

A lot of walking followed that moment of brief respite. When we stopped somewhere out in a desert or wasteland of some kind, a man and woman were also there with another woman–their prisoner. They were ruthless. They unchained her from themselves and shoved her into a shallow pool of clear water with harmless looking sand at its bottom. It was quicksand and it sucked her in just enough to keep her head below the water. We all watched her drown. “That could be you,” my captor told me just after the other man removed the shackles and chains from his victim. He stood there, holding those newly removed chains and looked at my captor as he spoke to me instead: “That should be you.”

In retrospect, I feel like I made a challenging retort, but it’s possible that I only spoke and kept the words in my mind. We left the area with the couple heading off on their own and leaving me to wonder what was to be my fate. I don’t think I really cared, and only just as my first alarm was getting ready to go off, I felt the blunt needling of Stockholm Syndrome dancing around somewhere inside of my thoughts. I got the sense that I wasn’t the only one who was questioning the situation, but those soft lavender bands never came off.