The immutable law of attraction: Dream, Cats, Mall

Baby Mojo is about to take his first step.  Because of that he’s been crawling fast, grabbing lots and seriously exhausting this stay at home dad.  When I’m beat down I have good dreams and lately, they’ve been great.  They’ve been so good that I’ve started writing down a couple words when I wake up so I can remember them later. 

In my dream I was in Canal City, a futuristic shopping mall in Fukuoka, Japan.    This mall is amazing, its part shopping center, movie theatre, art gallery and real life manga.  The colors look like a mash up of tourist Miami and old school Europe, while the architecture is curved, layered and has a canal running through the middle of it.

Throughout the dream there was a woman behind me.  She was always blurry and white, no features, descript clothing or anything that would’ve led me to identify her.  There were other people in the dream, lots of Japanese folks, wandering about the mall on a normal day. 

So I was in Canal City looking for our two cats.  I spotted Ripley, the white cat and was looking around for Johnny, the black one.  Ripley was about three times as big as a normal cat though, weighed 40 pounds and stretched out three feet.  In my dream their abnormal size didn’t take me back for a moment.  I spotted Johnny by the elevator, picked him up and started to go down.  Then I realized that it wasn’t Johnny, but a cat that was trying to look like him so I’d take him home.  Looking around I saw Johnny in front of some trendy clothing store, then I woke up.

It was a great dream because it brought up fabulous memories of Japan.  There were moments of panic though because, as the cats were lost, I was worried about them. 

When I woke up the dream was fresh and full of life.  I grabbed Baby Mojo, brushed his five teeth and took him downstairs to eat.  The white board was on the kitchen table so I wrote down three words to help me remember:  dream, cats and mall.  After eating we went upstairs to wake up mom.

‘Sweetie, I had the best dream’, then I started to describe it.  My thought sentinels weren’t working and I said.  “..and there was this woman with me in the dream; I don’t think it was you though”

“It wasn’t me?”, she asked.

“She was fuzzy and shapeless, kind of like an amalgam of all my loves”, I said and then immediately tried to backtrack.  Oddly enough, my wife, the love of my life, was more put off that the cats were sharp and real, but the female lead in the dream was blurred and shapeless.   

Thankfully she had to get ready for work and the rest of the conversation moved quickly.  When we got downstairs she saw the three words that I had scrawled to help me remember the dream.  Dream.  Cats.  Mall. 

“What is that?”, she asked with a perplexed look.

‘Oh, that’s the prompt I wrote down this morning to help me remember the dream’, I stated.

After a rolling of the eyes and accusations that I love the cats more than her, she left for work.  However, now, that phrase, “Dream, cats, mall” has become one of our inside jokes.  It’s a way for us to tell each other that, even though we have odd moments or eccentricities, that we both love each other and look forward to the funny stories that marriage can bring. 

We’ve got other memories that are a good barometer of our partnership.  Most of them usually start with, ‘remember when…’, ‘oh, that time’ and are always a question.  Dream cats mall is the first instance that doesn’t require a set up, is very short and is only shared by the two of us.  Every couple has their own inside joke and for now ours is Dream, cats, mall.