My Cat as Protagonist
I had a strange dream about my cat last night. I wouldn’t normally bother you with this kind of news except that it was vaguely writing-related.
My cat is a cute little fellow, a Tonkinese, slight, pretty and delicate. He is also the most gregarious and affectionate cat I’ve ever known. He is called Minsky, after the great pioneer of AI, Marvin Minsky. In my dream I was writing a story about him. I wrote it in my head but it was fully formed in well-turned sentences, paragraphs and sections. I was well-aware in my dream that I was writing a story and, although I knew it wasn’t real, I saw the images my words described and felt the emotions they were intended to invoke. The whole experience was uncannily like real writing.
It was a post-apocalyptic story in which all the people had inexplicably vanished but the rest of the world was unchanged. It followed Minsky as he coped with the disappearance of his people. I’m pleased to say it didn’t anthropomorphise him. His life grew harder as the days went on and first his bowl of cat biscuit ran out, then his bowl of water. But he survived since he had access to the wide world through his cat flap. At first he felt the loss of his little tribe but only in a vague way as he learned to hunt in earnest and spread his net ever wider in the search for food.
Eventually he stopped returning to the house and lived wild. In fact, he gradually wandered away from it and forgot all about it until, some years later, he came across it again by accident.
Not much of a story, really, unless you were there in my head and felt the emotions of the little fellow as he endured his loss, made his new life, and then rediscovered his old one. A coming-of-age, post-apocalyptic, animal adventure story, I suppose. You’d think I would be fired up to get it all down on paper, but I’m not. For some reason, I am convinced that I couldn’t do it justice. It’s as if I really did write it but lost the manuscript and I know I will never get back the inspiration that made the original so poignant and beautiful.
Oddly-enough, Bertie wasn’t in the story at all. Do I think of him as a person?
