I'm in the northeast corner of a square little bedroom, bundled against the cold coming through the west wall--a sliding glass door to the back garden. It's open. Cold.

So cold that I realize my bed has to be... Siberia. My toes are pushing up blankets down at the foot, forming the Ural Mountains. My pillow's Kamchatka, with its much higher peaks. Uh-oh, that means this northeast corner I'm huddling in is Yakutia or Anadyr--the coldest part of Asia! After Antarctica and Greenland, the worst weather in the world.

And one of the few parts with Siberian tigers. So I could be attacked. If I am, what to do?

Oh. Move the huge handmade plushies on my bed like Muppets. Ailura the catgirl, Fiveheart the unicorn, the Mertiger... Wood bones, foam rubber muscles, fake fur--but with their gleaming eyes, a bear or tiger will think they're facing some large, confident, weird-looking creatures.

Unless tigers read auras too--and do I have evidence they do? Maybe it's as rare in cats as in humans...

Anyway, I bet I can distract the predator with one hand moving the Foam Furs subtly, while with the other I reach for my childhood desk at the bed-foot, by the window. Because on it I see a claw hammer. If that tiger goes for me, claw it on the nose! And wave my hammer and hiss. Encourage that tiger to slink right back out the garden door.

Since even Siberian tigers don't want trouble with feisty packs of... uni-mer-cat-weirdos?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Siberia, cold, animals:
  1. It was a cold night. I got cold feet. The dream decided to have fun with that, and suddenly my bed is Siberia.
  2. On TV I saw a ranch in Siberia with big-headed, bristle-maned ponies shaggy as buffalo--and comfortable at 40 below! Clearly they had genes from Przewalski's Horse--the original wild species, a far cry from the heat-adapted Arabian horses we know.
• Weird-looking animals: I also saw The Good Place. Souls in the afterlife playing charades can materialize their clues--but one poor visualizer creates a grotesque, misshapen pony.
• Lure a creature through a sliding door: saw a video of a dog who wanted in, but wouldn't walk through a sliding glass door the dog thought was closed. Wrong! Locked out by empty air. So its pet human mimed sliding the open door open, and the dog looked relieved and stepped in. Huh! You may think the dog's sillly, but maybe for the dog it's all about manners, not glass--you wait to be invited in, or you're a Bad Dog.
• Puppets would fool a tiger: would they? I sense auras; always have. And as a result, I've naïvely assumed animals read emotions much as I do, from energy as well as voice and body language. (Not surprising that I'd project my own sensory world on other species: consider how slow naturalists were to realize animals could have any other senses--sonar, infrasound, magnetic fields. The old Christian arrogance, that humans are the apex of God's creation, seeped even into strict atheists. Osmotic Smug!) Yet many naturalists' stories make sense only if most animals aren't very intuitive, bumbling along from ordinary cues. What fits MY experience best is that intuition's quite spotty in every species, humans included. So...
• I think this dream's warning me "Quit projecting your senses on others." Most likely, some animals are VERY intuitive and the average is higher than human, since reading strange creatures' intentions has greater survival value when you lack spears, bows or guns; every fight's up close, and your body's on the line. But "better than human" is an abysmal standard! Most creatures, of any species, have poor intuition--so bluffing often works.

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