The Scaredy-Cat Photographer Lady

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The Scaredy-Cat Photographer Lady

Saturday, June 19, 2010 at 6:00am

I know this isn't technically a blog about dreams, but I had such a horribly strange and vivid nightmare this morning, I felt compelled to write it down:

I was walking with a friend (not sure who, doesn't matter) through a posh older urban residential neighborhood w/ big trees lining the street when we came across a man walking a small dog. We stopped and began talking with him casually. After a while we noticed a large and stuffy older woman approaching with a big black poodle on a leash. Her hair was pinned up under a fancy old-fashioned hat, she wore a long dark brown fur coat and had a camera around her neck. With her poodle pulling at the leash, the eccentric woman was following behind a humongous gray, brown and black tiger-striped pussycat (like, as big as a medium-sized suitcase). As she approached the cat, she would make her poodle lunge so that the cat would freak out by hissing, bristling its hair, and making an angry, frightening face. Whenever the cat did that, the woman would quickly snap a succession of pictures of the cat with her camera. We all assumed she was a famous photographer who specialized in pictures of terrified cats. When the cat finally relaxed and began to wander away, the woman would follow it with her poodle and, again, make the dog lunge at the cat. The cat would bristle and hiss again and the woman would take a bunch of pictures.

This went on for a while as we all watched, until finally the man we were talking to, the one with the small dog, addressed the woman: "Ma'am, I want you to know that I can not condone what you're doing to that cat!"—to which the stuffy woman answered haughtily, "I just love the way the mouth of the cat looks when it's frightened—the look of primal fear!"... and she made her poodle lunge once more toward the large pussycat. But this time the cat hissed, bristled, and raised its paws up and scratched down the front of the woman's right side from her shoulder to her waist. We could see that the cat had ripped four vertical stripes in the woman's brown fur coat. As the cat meandered away, the woman stood stunned for a second as we all watched her in silence. Gradually, blood began seeping through the four long rips in the woman's coat, and then the blood began squirting out in long vertical ribbons. We ran toward the woman as she was backing toward the stone steps of an old brownstone behind her, muttering to herself, "Oh my, it's been a long time since this sort of thing has happened..." As we helped her sit down and were fumbling for our cell phones to call 911, a petite dark-haired girl in her early 20s who had seen the entire episode came rushing over to give advice: "Ma'am, as a professional ventriloquist, I recommend you call Dr. Thomas O'Neal." The eccentric woman, weakening, replied faintly but firmly, "Don't call me a doctor—call the hospital. Quickly!" And then I woke up.