Cat Killer

When I was 8 or 9 or so I found an adult red tabby tom cat under our deck. The cat was in bad shape, clearly a stray most - if not all - of it's life. It had been hit by a car, had lacerations galore, and a broken leg. Normally feral cats like that are quite shy of humans but perhaps at this point the cat was in so much pain it was suicidal or at least didn't care what I did to it. I wanted to adopt the cat but my dad thought it should just be put to sleep. I got my sister and mom on my side AND the vet, who was a family friend. So we had the cat patched up and got its parasites taken care of.

Photo complements of: https://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/31619675/

I named the cat "Thomas." Not Tom, he was a very formal cat. My mother decided for whatever reason he religion was "Catlick" which nearly caused me to rudely laugh at an Italian immigrant neighbor when he told me HE was "Catlick"!

The cat lived with us several more years and turned out to be quite handy. Soon after he got healthy, construction began behind house. Our house, along with all the other houses on our block, were invaded by thousands of field mice! Thomas turned out to be an amazing mouser and kept the pests out of our house. We even rented him out to the house next door! This part was real but is required to understand the devastation this dream caused me.

A few nights after I had found the cat I dreamed my dad had changed his mind about keeping the cat. He told me that it was my job to put the cat down and he gave me a huge nail (he had a large collection of nails of all sizes that fascinated me when I was little). I then had to stab the cat to death with the nail, which I did.

Photo complements of: http://www.building-improvements.com/images/nails.jpg

For YEARS (well into my 20's!), I felt a terrible guilt for the act even though it was just a dream. To me it had been quite real. The really inexplicable thing is my dad has always been kind and loving. He never drank or smoked, and he never EVER raised a hand to ANYONE in anger as far as I know. To this day (I'm 45 now so I dreamed this over 35 years ago!) I have no idea why I dreamed my dad doing such a horrible thing.


Thanks to Eric Taylor for submitting this dream!