I wrote this while E2 was down and am only just now getting around to noding it.
So I just woke up from a freaky dream that turned out to be a blessing in disguise because without it startling me awake who knows how long I'd've overslept for (turns out I was way too sleepy to reset an alarm clock after I went to bed really early last night, and so not only was the sucker not on, it was advanced two hours, which made for lots of confusion when I awoke. But I digress...)
It all took place in one of those slightly bent dream versions of a real-world place you know really well, if you know what I mean. This time it was the park a few blocks away from where I grew up in New Jersey. I spent a lot of time in this park as a kid, so I know it pretty darn well, I'd say. Anyhow, it was that park, but not really that park, because I was dreaming.
And a lot of people were walking dogs in the park. I remember that part. There was a puppy with a HUUUUGE head, in particular, which was probably what got my attention about the dogs in the first place, but after that I saw the dogs that somehow I knew were that puppy's parents (and yes, there were three of them, and how the deformed mongrel that made me stop and say "that's not right" could be the bastard love child of all of them, I don't know, but that was clearly the way it was, and hurray for the unshakeable faith I have only in dreams.) There was an Afghan hound like the one our next-door neighbors used to have, Scaramouche. There was a big golden retriever. And finally there was some kind of big terrier thing. Maybe an Airedale: some friends of the family had one of those for a long time. The weird puppy had a squarish terrier head, so that was how it was clear the big terrier was involved in all this. All these dogs were walked by on leashes, and I'm not sure whether I was there, standing in the park watching dogs go by, or doing some kind of omniscient eye thing, but I suspect the former, since I saw everything from about my height's eye level, instead of the skewed from above or below angle I get when I'm in dream-spy mode.
In the second part of the dream, I was walking a cat on a leash. That's oddly perverse enough, but there's more. I called him (I know it was a male cat) Arie, which was the name of my family of origin's first cat, but it was a big orange tomcat (like our second cat, Louie, and his adopted brother, Pixel) and Arie was a smallish tabby. So I apologize to his memory for whatever my subconscious was smoking when it came up with that part of the dream.1 Anyway, we were walking, and came up by the pond in the park, and had almost passed it by when Arie starts meowing like a mad kitty and pulling on his leash towards the pond. I try to pull him along our way, but he looks back at me, making the "I'm a cat in serious pain here" noise, and so I let him run around the edge of the pond and follow. As we're running, I see the outline of a BIG (like, four or five feet long, I thought in the dream) scary newty or salamandry thing in between the plants at the edge of the pond, and next thing I know a slimy green amphibian-arm is sticking out of the pond at Arie, who's gone into catfight mode. Good lord, there's two of them! I think, and that's about when I woke up full of dream-adrenalin, soon to be replaced by "what the hell time is it?" adrenalin, and now I think most of that is out of my system thanks to writing this down. Phew. Off to work with me; I've gotten my 8 hours in.
Update, late August 2002: Recent spates of reminiscence with my parents have revealed that as a small child, I called all children and animals "Arie". So maybe I was reverting or something.
Update, late 2002, early 2003: Alternatively, I was being psychic: Jongleur and I adopted a big orange tomcat (Iggy Pop) in January.