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Too Many Kittens

This is a very, very old dream fragment, right up there with "The Blue Room" and "Tigger, Trapped In Ice" in terms of how much dread it instilled in me. Unlike other nightmares like "The Face On The Hill" and "Dom DracuLuise," these three dreams don't really feature the same horrific images; rather it's the mundane things in them which fill me with such fear, and for some reason that makes them worse. They all give me the feeling I should be remembering something which I can't. :/

Anyway, background story...in real life long ago I had a HUGE number of little toy plastic animal figurines which I played with all the time. I called them...creative moment!..."The Animals." ^_^ There was Turtle, Kitten, Kangaroo, Mrs. Cow, Neil Diamond the panther (don't ask...), Gregory the goat, Workhorse, and all sorts of others...they were my own personal version of the Smurfs. I would sit and make up entire stories with these toys. Occasionally one--usually Turtle, for some odd reason--would go missing, and I would even make up stories to explain these absences. During this huge long absence of the character Kangaroo, the character Turtle--a little pink turtle (the paint had long ago chipped off of some of these toys, leaving them in odd pastel colors)--had befriended Kitten, a pink kitten. Kitten became Turtle's new friend while Turtle's old friend Kangaroo was "away." Later on I located Kangaroo and he made a triumphant return to the Animal village, having gone on some long adventure elsewhere...but not long after...Turtle himself went missing. And so Kitten was left without his best friend. This was quite sad for me. :( I eventually reunited the two, though not long before I stopped playing with these toys again, Turtle once more vanished...I still can't be sure what became of him...

Eventually I packed all these little toy animals into a plastic bag and stored them upstairs and have yet to ever return to them, though I still think of them often. I guess I'm too afraid of pulling them out and focusing on the missing ones, rather than having fun with the ones who are still there. Maybe that's why I stopped playing with them in the first place...I just got so sad coming up with stories to explain every time they disappeared, when even *I* had no idea if I'd ever see them again...

For a "Turtle" memory dream, see the more recent "What I've Forgotten..." Anyway, this dream is about the Kitten toy. Like I said it was more of a fragment, but it was as terrifying as any other nightmare I've had.

In the dream, I went into my bedroom, only it looked different. It was more spacious, I think, and the carpeting was darker; the other side of the room seemed to fade into shadows as well. And instead of my bed, there was a...crib. o_o Yes, a baby's crib stood there instead. That didn't bother me, it just seemed normal. As I walked into the room, I noticed...Kitten, just sitting on the floor near the crib! He looked so incredibly tiny there by himself. I think I was puzzled as to why he was sitting there, and walked toward him.

As I got closer, Kitten...suddenly multiplied, so instead of one Kitten, there was now a PILE of Kittens sitting before the crib. I froze and gawked at this in shock. Then--there was just one Kitten again. And then--a pile of them. I don't know how many times this happened, but it kept happening, and it REALLY freaked me out.

Of course it was the sight of the strangely multiplying toy that frightened me first off, but I think another element that terrified me was of me not knowing which Kitten was the real Kitten. I believe this was an old recurring dream theme of mine, though it usually featured my stuffed toy Tigger--I would find TWO Tiggers, and wouldn't know which one was the original, was MINE! This dream would always make me burst into tears of anxiety and fear, and of course, the sight of all these strange Kittens was no different. I think I screamed as the odd little pile shrank and grew, shrank and grew. Unlike in "Tigger, Trapped In Ice," however, instead of getting a feeling of fear and sadness from the toy, I got a feeling of malevolence, as if whatever was manipulating this pile was playing some eerie joke at my expense. I was actually AFRAID of the little toy Kittens--afraid of how they were doing this, of not knowing which one was the real one, and of not knowing what the intent of this joke-player was. It was very unnerving, for a little girl to face.



Early Dreams
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