An Extinct Cougar Visits Me

No, not that kind of cougar, you perv. The kind in the picture. An actual cat.

You will not believe this story.

Last night I had a dream. I dreamed I was on my big California king bed (that’s right: I sleep like that), which was in the woods. In the trees above me I saw a creature watching me. I thought it was a big baby owl.

As it grew more curious about me, the animal started moving my way. When it came and settled onto a “V” in the branches just above my bed, I saw that it was a cougar cub.

Here’s the weirdness: the cat took exactly the position—and I mean, exactly, with the same angle of looking down and everything—as the cougar in this picture. That photograph is the precise image of the cat in my dream. Even to the color of the sky behind it. It’s like someone literally took a snapshot of a moment in my dream.

This photograph was the first thing I saw this morning when I fired up my computer. On the front page of Yahoo.com it’s being used to illustrate the news story, “Federal Researchers Declare Eastern Cougar Extinct.”

In my dream the cougar cub was insane for affection; while still up in the tree branches it began doing patty-paws, and purring real loud, and munching the side of its head into the branches by way of imagining I was petting it. I could see that its paws and claws were insanely huge–but it was so ridiculously cute! So, of course, I called it down to the bed. It leaped down to me, and immediately started collecting mondo pets via me.

I called to my wife, “Cat! Cat!” (which is short for “Catherine! Catherine!). “Come in here. You’ve got to see this! It’s a baby cougar!” Apparently our couch was also in the woods, since Cat was then asleep on it maybe seven trees away. (And after work last night Cat did crash out on our couch. So. There it is.)

Cat came walking sleepily through the woods toward my bed. “What is it?” she said. When she saw the cougar cub on our bed lying on its back while I rubbed its stomach, she totally woke up.

“A baby cougar! A baby cougar!” she said. She jumped on the bed beside me, and she and I started lavishing upon that giant baby cat all the love we could, given that it had claws so huge the looked like koala claws.

And just to be clear, we were calling it a cougar.

And then this morning I wake up, and first thing run into a picture straight from my dream, about how a cougar that looked just like the cougar in my dream has been declared extinct.