Dream of an At-Risk Cat

Dreams make sense, even when they are making nonsense. There’s a kind of internal consistency that we can count on, and when we notice that something in a dream is out-of-sync with what we might expect, we can assume that it is out-of-sync for a reason. Noticing anomalies, and asking ourselves how those anomalies make sense in the context of the dream, can lead to some big “aha” moments. Here’s an example from one of my own dreams:

An At-Risk Cat: There’s a huge hawk nearby, clearly looking for prey. Our cat Persephone is not safe from such a large predator! I rush to get her into the house, but she is relaxing in the sun, and is reluctant to go inside. I finally manage to catch her and carry her to safety, but she escapes back out. I’m afraid the hawk will get her, so I’m desperate.

At first, I just noticed that “An At-Risk Cat” followed a common theme for me. I regularly dream of my cats—those who are alive or, like Persephone, long dead—and often these dreams include my efforts to protect them from a threat. Generally, I assume that such dreams are expressing fears for the safety of those I love, or pointing out vulnerable, at-risk parts of myself. Either way, I find these cat dreams disturbing; they leave me feeling helpless, so it has been difficult to discern how they might contribute to my learning or healing. 

On this occasion, however, I noticed an anomaly. The cat in this dream is Persephone—a cat who had great reflexes and was always alert to anything that might put her at risk. At the first sign of a hawk’s shadow, she would have rushed to the protection of the house without any urging from me. Although a kind of self-interest oriented intelligence is one of the defining qualities of cats, not all cats exhibit Persephone’s well-honed, survival instincts. So why is it Persephone in the dream, and not one of my more oblivious, easygoing cats? This dream version of Persephone behaves exactly counter to her nature. 

Of course, a dream doesn’t have to be realistic or consistent in waking life term. Hawks are not the size of eagles, and cats cannot get out through closed doors, but these sorts of things happen routinely in dreams. Still, there is an inconsistency here that seems to defy dream logic. Although Persephone always enjoyed sleeping in the sun and didn’t like to be managed by me, she would never have prioritized her habitual comforts and resisted my protection when a large predator was at hand. What’s going on here?

Suddenly, the anomaly suggested something I’d never considered before. What if Persephone is right and I am wrong? Do these recurring cat dreams confirm my belief that there are dangers everywhere and I can’t protect anyone, or do the cats in these dreams actually know better than I do what is dangerous for them and what is not? Persephone is relaxed and reluctant to be rescued, so what if the danger is not a real danger at all? Maybe I should be paying more attention to my loved ones’ strengths and resources, and less attention to what I imagine is going to hurt them. Maybe I should be asking myself what it means that I am always expecting threats to come out of the sky and snatch away everything and everyone I love. Maybe I am expecting a hawk when the shadow passing over me is only a cloud. And maybe my world will not come to an end if I relax in the sun and defy my own expectations.

There’s another clue in the fact that this particular cat not only resists rescue, but returns to the danger zone. It’s not accidental that her name is Persephone. You probably picked up on the significance of the name right away, but because my personal associations were so strong, I paid little attention to it until I started questioning my own assumptions about the dream. Demeter, the goddess of natural abundance, lost her daughter Persephone to the darkness. Now, I think of my grief when Persephone and other beloved cats died—how I couldn’t bear to let them go, and would have descended into the underworld myself to retrieve them. But the story of Persephone is bigger than a personal story of something bright and beautiful abducted by Hades (or a hawk?) and lost; it’s a larger story of the seasons, the natural process of alternating darkness and light. When the goddess grieves, the world is dark and cold, and when her daughter is with her, the world is bright and warm. The earth’s nature is neither cold nor warm, it is both, and Demeter’s daughter, although she never wanted to go into the dark, knows this. No summer without winter; no life without death. Like a cat, Persephone, the daughter of abundant Nature, can embrace life without expecting it to last forever. Can I learn to embrace life that way, too? Or maybe, like Persephone’s goddess mother, I could learn to accept that the winter of loss is as precious as summer, that grieving is one of the many ways to experience love. 

A small, repetitive, anxious dream of trying unsuccessfully to prevent loss has become a larger, loving, dream of life itself—of abundance in its wholeness, including everything. As Jeremy Taylor used to say, “A dream never comes to tell you just what you already know.” I know I am afraid of loss. The dream affirms that this is true, but it is not the whole truth. The very nature of life is contradictory, so dreams affirm the paradox. Things are not what they seem to be, or not just what they seem to be. When we sense an anomaly, we are sensing something missing that we can only find by following its trail into darkness. And when we find our way back to the surface again with a new sense of meaning, the earth breaks into bloom—at least for a season.

[This article was originally published in in the Spring, 2025 issue of DreamTime Magazine. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing to DreamTime by joining the International Association for the Study of Dreams ]