Cougar Dream

Ashland Cougar

I have just arrived at an old house. There are two or three other people there already. The place is a little scruffy, but habitable, kind of like a house rented out to students near a college campus. It's getting late so I go to bed. I sleep for a couple of hours but now I need to use the bathroom. (That much is realistic.) One of the other people is wearing a bathrobe and is slumped across a desk. Seems everyone is asleep. All the lights are on in the kitchen so I set about turning them off. If I turn them all off, it will be completely dark, but there is one that is blocked from shining directly into the other rooms, so I turn it on. It's like a candle lamp with a vertical glass tube about a foot tall and two inches in diameter. But it's not a candle. There are two pull chains hanging from the side of the tube, one near the bottom and another about halfway up. I pull the first one and something in the tube starts rising from the bottom. When it gets about halfway up I pull the second chain and it continues stopping a couple inches short of the top. The light is now on.

I head to the bathroom. I have to go through another room to get there. When I get there, there is what looks like a body wrapped up in a blanket propped up on the toilet. It's not a body, it's a dude who is feeling poorly. He offers to move, but I tell him not to bother. He looks miserable and I am not going to contribute to his misery. Back in the previous room I notice there is a young woman wrapped in a blanket and curled up in an overstuffed armchair. I realize this must be the couple that we were expecting. She too offers to make the toilet available, but I decline, I tell her I'll go water the shrubbery in the backyard.

I head out the backdoor. It's light enough to see, it's either a full moon or street lights, in any case nothing like my real pitch-black backyard. There isn't as much shrubbery as I expected, and the neighboring houses are maybe a couple dozen yards away, so I start walking across the yard. The house in back of ours is adjacent to an empty lot. I start walking across the lot. The lot fronts on a road and there is a slight embankment there. There is a tree by the road. I walk up to the tree and look across the road and that's when I see three cougars (mountain lions) prowling the hillside on the other side of the road. One of them notices me and starts walking in my direction. He's about as far from me as I am from my back door. I look for something I could use as a weapon and find a couple of rocks about the size of a billiard ball. Do I scream? Call 911? Throw a rock? Run? Instead of making a decision I wake up.

Note about the picture. In my dream, the cougars were in black and white. Ask Google for photos of cougars at night' and all the pics are either in full color or have glowing devil eyes.