Stoned Cat & Ralph's Puzzle

  • I'm in a mountain cabin near Mount Shasta with August, Tish, Genery and Allen. We're sitting on a couch on the deck outside, overlooking the vast forest-covered valley. My black cat, Twinkie, is there with us and her personality seems more human-like than usual. We're smoking some pot and somehow Twinkie gets a lungful of smoke and very dramatically falls limp on the coffee table. I immediately rush to her aid and find she's not unconscious, just really stoned and relaxed. For the rest of the dream I carry her around with me, sending her my loving thoughts. The day goes on and the sun sets dramatically behind the mountain. We all go inside and I see that there are some older folks here: August's step-dad Jon with a friend, my own father, and Ralph Abraham, a chaos mathematician from UC Santa Cruz who was buddies with Terence McKenna. August and his dad are talking about swimming over a waterfall when Ralph asks me for some scissors. He's telling my dad that he's going to make what he calls a "Poisson Puzzle". As he cuts up a piece of cardboard into polygonal shapes, he describes it as one of those puzzles where each piece has a number written by each side and the goal is to arrange all the pieces so that all adjacent sides have matching numbers. He seems to get confused in the process of cutting. I pet my cat and look on.