I am standing on a landing of an outside stairway... second floor. Looking through a window into a room with a slanting roof, I can see Fletch [my cat]. (He is on the back porch now and I can see him through the kitchen door.)

In the room are several large cats, twenty-five to thirty pounds, of a strange coloration... large blotches of red-purple color and black-purple. They don't seem to be bothering Fletch.

On the landing is a flattened, desiccated, dusty corpse of a small gray cat, so mashed into the landing, which is gray wood, that I can barely trace the fossil outlines.

TWO DAYS LATER

This dream was actually Sunday, December 22. So today is Christmas Eve. And last night I was leafing through the Audubon Book of Animals; so many beautiful creatures... the Flying Fox, exactly like Fletch, and the Black Lemur. Realize how I love animals... mammals, that is... weasels and skunks and wolverines and seals and bush babies. I am turning into a latter-day Saint Francis. This morning, rescued a rat from Ginger. It is still in the house somewhere.

Obviously, the strangely colored cats I dreamed about on Saturday night were precognitions of the animals I saw last night in the book.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Burroughs, like most long-term dreamworkers, takes it for granted here that predictive dreams exist; no point in making a big fuss or trying to prove it to skeptics.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: My Education: a book of dreams by William S. Burroughs, 1995, p.88-89. Untitled passages; title added to aid searches.

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